Cutting for Stone

by Abraham Verghese

Surgery was the most difficult thing I could imagine. And so I became a surgeon.

Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that you see the corpse caught under your wheel.

As she bent over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled.

Wasn’t that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted?

Matron wondered if it scared my mother that she might die in Africa, a continent away from her birthplace. Perhaps deep in her—perhaps deep in every being—there lingers a desire to bring the circle of life back to its starting point, which in her case was Cochin.