the strange tales of surgeon satwik

ambarish satwik spends a considerable amount of time in a world of his own making.

it is, in part, a world awash in human effluents — which is understandable considering his vocation as a general surgeon, and the fact that his wife is a gynaecologist. “between us,” he says, “we handle all conceivable human effluents. and we deal with the perineum on a quotidian basis.”

we’ll get to the perineum in a minute. but first -- ah, quotidian. a word you and i would choose to substitute with, simply, ‘routine’. and that’s the other part of satwik’s world; one that delights in sheer verbosity.

if his literary debut -- a collection of short stories titled perineum: nether parts of the empire (penguin india) -- isn’t proof, his replies to my queries certainly are. they yield words not exactly in common usage where i come from, and certainly not – if my interaction with them over the years is anything to go by – bandied about on a quotidian basis among the medical fraternity.

following ‘quotidian’, satwik’s words come in a rush, compelling me to read slowly and hope for meaning — allohistory, provenance, felicity, sentient, deracinated, excoriated, eldritch. and yet, despite this verbosity, he manages to surprise. through his tales entrenched in the perineum — possibly the body's most intimate part, between the genitals and anus in both sexes — satwik presents an alternative, colourful history of british india.

not for him are mundane tales of robert clive’s idiosyncrasies or bahadur shah zafar’s isolation. satwik dwells instead on the circumcision of the former, and the bowel stimulating enemas of the latter. through thirteen stories, the reader is given a lesson in india’s history radically different from the many we’ve had before. he does it all with a straight face too, compelling you to wonder about that line between fact and fiction. “all the medical conditions are indeed factual,” satwik tells me, helpfully. “the stories are about real people, but the rest is hokum. my research was more in the realm of colonial history and not medical predicaments. most of the preliminary research was carried out at the national archives in delhi.”

born in 1976 in nagpur – his mother's hometown – satwik’s grandfather came to delhi in the 1940s and stayed on. he grew up in delhi but went back to maharashtra to study medicine, returning in 2002 to work as a general surgeon for the government. i ask if there was a particular historical event that prompted him to create these stories. “the nether parts have been my stock in trade,” the doctor replies. “but the book is as much as about the nether parts as about allohistory (‘what if’ conjectures). there is a certain order of fun in rogue historical revisionism, a desire to find a worm in every apple, not just to have salacious lapses, but to have salacity as the raison d'etre for a narrative.”

he does offer one related anecdote though. “the first story drafted (baker's scrotum) was about the conflict on raisina [hill, prime area in new delhi housing india's most important government buildings]. it owes its provenance to the perineal tribulations of an hiv positive jat constable who was under my care, whose testicles were subsequently transposed to his thighs because his scrotum ‘ceased to exist’.”that satwik is passionate about his profession is obvious – it jumps across in the way he lovingly describes everything from ‘a fistula of the hinder parts’ to ‘a torsion of the testis’. in his words, “there is nothing quite like the adventure of dissecting live tissues.” he is also honest about first reactions from new readers of his stories. “first time readers tend to be comprehensively excoriated,” he says, adding that there have been a few who have conferred a kind of ‘arbitrary profundity’ on the tales. “i am flattered by such responses, but these stories are not profound by any reckoning. this is excitable hokum.”

the hokum includes issues of race surrounding the black hole of calcutta episode (mongrel), the sexual life of sir henry and his wife honoria (vaginismus), waldemar haffkine’s questionable sexual preferences (bombay bubonic) and the siege of delhi during the months of the 1857 sepoy mutiny (the beresfords). “the prose is deliberately deracinated, weird sounding, old empire style, especially in the eighteenth century stories,” satwik explains. “but i will not apologize for it. the objective was to produce subversive and deeply immoral stories: dissolute, smutty historical fiction for general consumption. they are wicked, and would qualify as historical slander, but then writers of prose fiction should not bother with rectitude. if one were to bowdlerize these stories, one wouldn't have anything left. then there is also the agenda of the perineum, the politics of the perineum: the bogey about the perineum as historical agency, the perineum as related to consequence or causation.”

i point out that my poor knowledge of human anatomy keeps me from enjoying his tales a much as i ought to have. was any of it written with a particular audience in mind -- a bit of surgeon's humour, perhaps? “on the contrary, it is for general consumption,” satwik replies. “a brief tutorial on the perineum can be found on the opening pages. one needs to have a general idea about its topography, and then it’s like going down a rabbit's hole.”

perineum compels me to wonder if the limited margin of error satwik’s work as a surgeon allows contributes in any way to the precise tone of his writing. he tells me that is an indulgent question. “i don't think idiosyncrasies of the surgical discipline can be extrapolated to writing processes, but i largely see myself as a writer of short fiction and a steadfast adherent of kurt vonnegut's cardinal rule: start as close to the finish as possible. there is a certain tartness about narrative prose that comes swiftly to its point.”

finally, i ask ambarish satwik, tongue in cheek, if he intends to focus on other areas of the body in future work. he doesn’t say.