By Abraham Verghese

Abraham Verghese was born and raised in Addis Ababa to Indian parents who worked as teachers. He began his medical training in Addis Ababa and he completed his training at Madras Medical College, the year Emperor Haile Selassie was deposed. He then went to the United States for his residency and has lived there, working as physician in various cities there.

Verghese has written two memoirs, “Soundings: A Doctor’s Life in the Age of Aids and “The Tennis Partner” but his best-known work is “Cutting for Stone”, a novel set in Ethiopia beginning in the 1950s. The book chronicles the story of identical twins, born of a secret affair between a beautiful Indian nun and a British surgeon, as they grow up amid the perils of a volatile country on the verge of revolution.

The following less-known memoir, “A Child’s Book of Death and Dying”, was published by Granta Magazine in 1994. Excerpts.

A fine morning mist had rolled down over Addis Ababa from the Entoto mountains, leaving a sheen on the lawn between the apartment buildings. I was six years old, my brother Reji was eight; for some reason we were being kept home from school. Excited by this unexpected reprieve, we gobbled down breakfast, grabbed our soccer ball and ran outside.

The lawn was the centre of our out-of-school existence. It gave off the scent of earthworms and snails, and was bordered by tall rose bushes, their horns shaped like the sharp teeth of Koochooloo, the communal bitch.Reji and I balled up our sweaters and planted them as goalposts. We kicked the soccer ball back and forth, and soon I had a deep green stripe on my shorts from sliding along on my rear in my efforts to keep the ball within bounds. We were shortly joined by other kids from the apartments who had been kept home from the French School, the German School, the American School, the English School and the Italian School. All our parents worked as expatriate teachers at Haile Selassie The First University.

After a while, my father’s black Volkswagen pulled up alongside the lawn. The gardener, who also functioned as a kind of guard, ran over to the car. He was wearing shit-coloured jodhpurs and his feet, with their horny, opaque toenails, were bare. He fawned over my mother as he helped her select a yellow rosebud to put in her hair. But no sooner had my parents driven off than the gardener-guard started shouting at us in Amharic: Had we seen how he decapitated the chickens for the cook every morning? (We had: the headless chicken would take to the air, spraying blood from its neck stump until it collapsed in a heap some way off.) Well, he said, that was what would happen to us should we dare even to touch his roses. And if we were thinking of running to our parents…He stuck out his tongue and chopped the air in front of his mouth with the sickle he had been using to cut the grass.

Our game was barely underway when we spotted the first plane. We froze, letting the ball smash into a rosebush, which then showered petals. There were distant thuds. There was, I think, some smoke.

Within minutes a car was at the compound gate: someone had rushed home from work. But the gardener-guard, instead of standing by to open the gate, had run off down the road, the soles of his bare feet flashing. We were left to man the heavy metal gates, saluting, playing at soldiers, as our parents returned home and one by one shepherded us indoors. Rubin’s father, an Israeli physics teacher, emerged from his house, rifle in hand. He was carrying a heavy chain and padlock and proceeded to lock the gate.

The hallway had no windows and offered the best shelter. We helped drag the mattresses out of the bedrooms. My father, who has never been near a tent in his life, made us believe we were camping. We huddled around the radio as though it were a Kangri stove, listening to the BBC, waiting for the sound of the Big Ben and that calm voice which would tell us what was really happening. My mother made quick forays into the kitchen for bread and jam and milk.

She explained to Reji and me that the shooting outside was a ‘coup d’etat’. We repeated this new word. It sounded like the staccato firing: coo-dey-ta, coo-dey-ta. ‘The Emperor is out of the country on a state visit,’ my mother said. ‘And now that he is gone, the Bodyguard has taken over the government.’

The Bodyguard was a special wing of the armed forces, barracked a few blocks from us, near the airport. We had seen them on Coronation Day, sitting astride their horses in their white and red parade uniforms, their pitch helmets sitting low over their eyes. The Bodyguard was, to us, the epitome of bravery and loyalty to the crown. It was unthinkable that the Bodyguard should be behind this mutiny. “Why, Mummy? Why are the Bodyguard doing this?’

‘They want a new Emperor.’ There was a great sadness in my mother’s voice. ‘Or, rather, a new government.’

My brother and I were silent. We had seen the Emperor only two weeks later. As we were driving out of town, the sentinel Land-Rover came at us, sirens blaring, blue lights flashing. The men inside- the Bodyguard- stuck their hands out of the window and gestured to us to pull over: the Emperor was coming. My father stopped the car; we piled out and stood respectfully at the roadside. Soon a phalanx of Bugati motorcycles came chugging into view, followed by the Emperor’s favorite maroon Rolls-Royce. The yellow, green and red tricolor fluttered on the hood. We saw the Emperor distinctly behind the tinted glass. He was short man but had had the seat built up so that he appeared much taller and he could see better.

There we stood beside our Beetle: my father in a dark suit, my mother in a sari, my brother and I in shorts. My father bowed. My brother and I saluted. My mother brought her hands together in a namaste. We saw the bearded face smile at us. We saw him bring his hands together in a namaste and incline his head. My mother has talked about that namaste ever since; although she denies it, the incident sealed her loyalty to the Emperor. Twenty years later, during the famines of the early seventies, it made her blind to his shortcomings, just as the Emperor himself was blind to the destruction around him.

The background chatter of gunfire that sounded like nails rattling in a tin can carried on for the whole day and into the evening. Every now and then, my father opened the door to the dining-room and looked out. Reji and I peered between his legs. The sky through the window was lit by fireworks, but they never blossomed into starbursts at the end of their trajectory. Nor did they change colour. As we lay on our mattresses, the thuds were soothing. Snuggled between my parents, I went to sleep.

In the morning, my mother told us that the Emperor had returned and, with the help of the Army and Air Force, had put down the coup. Later, we heard the Emperor speak on the radio, assuring his citizens that he was still in charge.

My mother was ecstatic. She wanted to go to St. Geroge’s Church, to give thanks. Our maids had not returned, and as my parents didnot feel safe leaving us at home, we were taken along.

My brother and I knelt up on the back seat, looking out through the little port-hole of a back window. There were cars on the road, people on the street, garis– horse-drawn taxis-plying their trade. Everything was back to normal. But, as we approached the square outside St George’s, we saw that a huge crowd had gathered. People were spilling off the sidewalks into the streets. There were more cars than I had ever seen in my life.

And then, on the crest of the hill, I saw why: three bodies hanging from a large scaffold, swaying slightly, although there was no breeze. Beneath the dead men, directly under their feet, was a dancing horde, leaping into the air in unison, chanting and ululating. My parents said nothing; they had seen the bodies before we had. This was the reason we had come here.

‘But where are their shoes?’ I asked. The men were dressed in their olive-green uniforms, with epaulettes and ribbons, but their feet were bare. Their cocked heads looked down quizzically. The sad, sloping shoulders, the resignation in the hands fastened behind the back, the gentle, pendular, swaying-it was as if they had discovered a greater peace than the mob would ever know. The only element of violation-of savagery-was in the naked feet, stripped of their precious leather shoes.

By the age of nine, I had finally become aware that I was of a different race from the people around me. I had little idea of where exactly I did belong, but the taunt ferengi, foreigner, made it clear that it was not here. The geographical explanation my parents offered-that we were Christian Indians from the south of India-still didn’t answer the question of where home was. I lacked the inclination, the size and the courage to retaliate when insults were hurled at me: ferengi, go home! and by now I had an acute and exaggerated fear of death or dismemberment.

Fighting at school was dangerous. The first time my brother got into an altercation, even before he was aware that he was in one, the other kid’s head had come at him like a hammer, striking him on the bridge of his nose, temporarily blinding him. This manoeuvre was known as a testa: perhaps it was an Italian legacy a vestige of Mussolini’s brief occupation of Abyssinia. On the battlefields of school and street, at least once a year I would see combatants laid out cold, their testas having been so timed as to have brought the two crania together with concussive force.We onlookers hung around, waiting to see who would regain consciousness first and claim victory.

And if, as a combatant, you were out of testa range-arm’s length- when the fight erupted, the next step was to find a rock. The prospect of a testa or a rock rendered any fight potentially lethal; it was dangerous even to watch. Years later, as a medical student in the casualty room of an Ethiopian hospital, I became accustomed to wounds inflicted by rocks: a raised, robin’s egg swelling, or else an almost surgical linear incision with puffed-up margins. That is, if the patient was not brought in with a broken nose from a testa. Or brought it dead.

My family used to spend summers in a lake-side town called Debre Zeit, about fifty kilometres from Addis Ababa. As a bored and surly teenager, I used to hang out in a little Arab souk, drinking Coke and killing time. I would chat with the shopkeeper, nibble on the leaves of chath he offered me (which produced a speed-like high), sometimes smoke a cigarette. It was the highlight of my day.

One afternoon, on my way down the dusty rural road to the souk, I sensed the approach of what felt like a herd of cattle, their hooves thudding on the brown earth. I turned: a bearded, barefoot young man came into view, running slowly, his shirt torn and hanging out of his trousers. He must have been about twenty. I had never seen anyone so exhausted, so terrified, so determined to escape-or so malevolent. He was being chased by an old man, bald, shirtless, with a grey beard. Blood was running from a linear wound across the bridge of the old man’s nose; he looked just as tired as his quarry. But age and fatigue were subsumed by the furnace of his rage and his evident desire for revenge. Both men seemed to be running in slow motion; the chase must have been going on for a mile or more. And behind the old man were others, fresher, stronger, younger, who had joined in.

The air was filled with cries from the old man and his friends: ‘Leba! Leba!-‘Thief! Thief!’ The alleged thief was bearing down on me, running so slowly that it would have been easy for me to stick out a foot and trip him up.

When he ran past, he bent down without breaking his stride and scooped up a stone. As he did, the old man, fifty yards behind, also bent over for a stone. The mob was gaining now, and as they thundred past they all reached for stones. The thief rounded a corner, followed by the old man and the rest; the tail end of the crowd was made up of young children and even some women who had tagged along to see how this would end.

I turned and ran the other way, back to our cottage, abandoning my trip to the souk. I had witnessed no violence, only the prospect of it. Judging by the number of stones that had been gathered, I had little doubt that when the mob caught up with the thief, he would be stoned, perhaps stoned to death. I felt as if I lacked some inner resolve when it came to violence and brutality, even though I had seen so much of it. To this day, when I am in the hospital, I have no qualms about examining the grisliest gunshot or knife wound -the results of violence. But should I inadvertently witness a violent act, I am affected viscerally. It is as if I am the victim; as if in the throes of my physical pain I am asking my attacker, ‘How can you possibly do this to me?’

Main image: Troops, loyal to the Emperor, guard Haile Selassie’s palace in Addis Ababa after the failed coup d’etat in December 1960. Jim Pringle.