"Heart. Recipient is a sixty-year-old woman. The Singhvis. Pharmaceuticals. She has requested authentic. The donor is twenty-eight."
Twenty-eight years old, giving a heart. You could not donate a heart and live.
"Deceased donor?" she said.
"Of course. All our donors are documented as deceased. You'll have the full file by eight tomorrow morning. Everything will be in order." He smiled. A perfectly ordinary smile. "I'll see you in pre-op at nine."
She left his office and stood in the lift with her mind moving very fast through everything she knew and everything she had allowed herself not to examine and everything that was suddenly rearranging itself into a shape she could not un-see.
Everything in order. A forty-year-old liver with no trauma markers. A twenty-eight-year-old heart donor. Procurement relationships. A hospital that paid forty percent above market. A flat in Worli with a sea view.
She walked through the marble lobby of Kalyani and out into the Mumbai evening and thought: I have been doing this for three months.
She had been noticing. She had been choosing, every day, to go back into the OR and use her exceptional hands on organs that had been exceptionally obtained. She had to know for certain. She needed evidence before she could decide what to do with the knowledge assembling itself like a diagnosis she had been refusing to give.
She went home to the Worli flat and looked at the sea for a long time. Then she made a list of the things she needed to find.
