Second Suns : Two Doctors and Their Amazing Quest to Restore Sight and Save Lives (9780679603566) by Relin David Oliver

Author:Relin, David Oliver [Relin, David Oliver]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780679603566
Publisher: Random House Digital
Published: 2013-06-18T04:00:00+00:00

“Fourteen–seven, Geoff, isn’t it?”

“If you say so,” Tabin said, hands on his knees, laboring to draw a full breath.

This pre-breakfast match was played, mercifully, without spectators, except for the wall of stuffed and mounted animal heads the British had hung when this had been a colonial social club. Tabin was still losing badly, but he knew that his badminton, like his surgical technique, was steadily improving. He’d moved Ruit around the court enough this time that a small patch of sweat darkened the center of his sky-blue polo shirt.

Like most of the colonial relics in the hill stations, the club building sagged somewhat, under the weight of moisture, overgrown vegetation, and time. Its stuffy rooms were hung with fading framed black-and-white group portraits of British officers in tennis whites, but the clay courts outside had reverted to mud, and the furnishings stank of mold.

“Have you thought about what I told to you, about finding a suitable woman?”

“I’m trying not to think about anything right now,” Tabin said, “except beating you at this ridiculous game.”

“Never!” Ruit said, giggling happily as he served a final ace for match point. As they zipped their racquets back into their cases and set out toward a day of surgeries, a silent gallery of dusty glass eyes—of musk deer, ibex, mountain goats, and Marco Polo sheep—looked on, without apparent judgment.

During most of his days in Kalimpong, Tabin was too busy to ruminate about his romantic life. At Tenzeng Dorjee’s invitation, they were holding one of the few cataract camps the area had ever seen. Tea plantation workers, exposed to the sun all day, had extraordinarily high rates of cataract disease. So did the Lepcha people, who lived in the forest between the hill stations and worked as woodcutters and stone breakers, providing basic heating and building materials for the more affluent residents of Darjeeling and Kalimpong. Nuns of Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity, wearing the traditional white saris bordered with blue, scoured the valleys between the hill towns ahead of Ruit and Tabin’s arrival, urging Lepcha families to bring their blind up to Kalimpong.

Thinlay Ngodup, a lay Buddhist with a scraggly goatee, windblown hair, and a wild cackling laugh, whom Dorjee had chosen to direct the Jamgon Kongtrul the Third Memorial Home, says finding patients for the dozens of eye camps the HCP has since held in Kalimpong has rarely been a problem. “For years, we could throw out a net from our perch on top of this hill and catch two or three hundred blind people,” he told me.

Ruit and Tabin operated for a week in a school where the orphans ordinarily studied; formerly a storehouse for Tibetan trade goods owned by the Third Jamgon Kongtrul’s father, it was a half-hour walk uphill from the memorial home. Dorjee, well aware of the thousands more in the surrounding hills who needed surgery, suggested to Ruit over dinner one evening that the Jamgon Kongtrul’s trust fund the construction of an eye hospital in Kalimpong, based on the Tilganga model.

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