Scalpels out at five places, Maoist undercurrents, bodies under threat in ICUs, wives under threat in parking lots. Anirban Bose’s The Death of Mitali Dotto has all the elements of a good potboiler, and a strong Robin Cook influence.
Neel Dev Roy, the braveheart doctor, decides to move back to Delhi from the US, bringing his beautiful wife Stuti with him. He is filled with US idealism, determined to plunge into surgery to save lives.
The Delhi hospital that Neel joins is run like a firm with an eye on the bottomline. Critically ill patients who cannot afford to pay are allowed to pass away by Dr Kasturi, the chairman of surgery, a man who obviously has both Mafia connections and political clout to enable him to get away scot free.
While Kasturi comes across as too villainous to be true, Neel’s wide-eyed idealism and determination not to give in to demands for bribes seems equally incredible. Bose, however, tells us that Neel’s idealism does not stem from America but from his father, a revered physician who devoted his life to looking after the tribals in Jhargram and who belonged to the Naxalite wing of the Communist Party.
Neel’s fights against corruption and greed echo those of his father. Bose takes the story to 1970’s Calcutta where the mother prays to the busts of Marx and Lenin kept on the refrigerator for the well being of her husband. Neel’s past and present run side by side, though his present is fraught with difficulty through the arrival of Mitali Dotto, a 19-year-old who has been stabbed and who may be brain dead, but who turns out to be pregnant. Kasturi is determined to switch off her ventilator, Neel is equally determined to keep the ventilator on, to the extent of paying her hospitals bills and wanting to adopt her child once it is born.
Bose’s pace keeps the reader’s interest from flagging and his medical research background gives him the edge where procedures are concerned. He is also aware of the issues that the media highlights like women’s affairs, Maoists and India vs Pakistan, and the plight of the minority communities or patients infected with HIV whom surgeons avoid like the plague, and he works them deftly into his plot. However, one could have asked for a neater tying up of loose ends — who Mitali Dotto is and why she was stabbed are never satisfactorily answered, or even the reason behind the ultimate fate of Neel’s heroic father, who obviously has shades of Dr Binayak Sen. Pulak, the unfortunate policeman is given nothing much to do barring wander desperately after Neel in the hospital corridors.
Bengalis are well to the fore in the novel, proving Bose’s fondness for his community. And Mitali Dotto ends on a severely moral note: in order to survive in India, you have to forget US rules. While doing that, it does deliver a much-needed message on the state of the medical community which has abandoned idealism for cold, hard cash.
Anjana Basu is the author of Rhythms of Darkness
