Julia’s Reviews > Cutting for Stone > Status Update

"You know what's given me the greatest pleasure in my life? It's been our bungalow, the normalcy of it, the ordinariness of my waking, Almaz rattling in the kitchen, my work. My classes, my rounds with the senior students. Seeing you and Shiva at dinner, then going to sleep with my wife."

Life is full of signs. The trick is to know how to read them. Ghosh called this heuristics, a method for solving a problem for which no formula exists.

I knew Shiva‘s rituals, but not the logic behind them.

I marveled at his gift for distancing himself from what was going on by dancing, or by drawing the motorcycle, or playing with prime numbers. He had so many ways of climbing into the tree house in his head, escaping the madness below, and pulling the ladder up behind him; I was envious.

Of course, I wasn't really unhappy or lonely, but in the monsoon season it seemed necessary to think of myself that way. The unfairness of the Admiralty in London, the irony of Hom-blower's seasickness, the tragedy of his returning from a long voyage to find his children mortally ill with smallpox... I had my equivalents, trivial as they were, for all these perils.

„The best investment I‘ve ever made,“ Hema said a few days later, smacking her lips like a schoolgirl. „Corn makes all the difference.“
„Hardly a controlled experiment, given the bias you introduced for the corn,“ Ghosh said

excised a part of himself as blithely as if he were cutting for stone on the body of another

She had always assumed that she would have years to sort out the meaning of life. Now, it semed she would only have a few seconds, and in that realization came her epiphany. As she bent over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled. She was ashamed that such a simple insight should have eluded her all these years. Make something beautiful of your life.

When, as a student at Madras Medical College, Hema had found herself admiring her professor of therapeutics …, when she found herself wishing to be his understudy and found him encouraging, she deliberately chose another path. She was loath to give anyone that kind of power. She chose obstetrics and gynecology instead of his field, internal medicine.

She felt neither the obligation to join the herd nor the urge to try to stand out from it.