To call Vikram Paralkar an author and a researcher-doctor is correct but inaccurate. It is true that he is all those things, but it is imprecise to treat them as separate identities. Each feeds the other in such a unified way that they are inseparable. This is just as true in Paralkar’s second book, Night Theater, as it was in his first, The Afflictions, as it is within the man himself. Paralkar’s penchant for the mash-up extends into his writing, and indeed into the heart and bones of Night Theater. He blends realistic medical treatments with a surreal fable-like plot when a surgeon must, almost single-handedly, bring a dead family back to life one night in a rural clinic in India. Kirkus Reviews calls Night Theater a “beguiling and unforgettable fable” in a starred review and Time recommended it as one of the 12 new books to read in January 2020.

PLEASE SEE ME: An interview with The Hindu describes an interesting childhood for you. One filled with microscopes and slides, patients and medical jargon, not to mention observing surgeries. Was watching your doctor parents work what inspired you to become a physician-scientist?

VIKRAM PARALKAR: Both my parents are doctors, and I have no doubt that being surrounded by medical conversations and texts sparked an early fascination for medicine in me. But my parents are not scientists, and I can’t quite trace the origin of my desire to become a researcher. What I can say is that I was always very curious about the world and its workings. I would spend my school summers mixing chemicals, making batteries made out of lemons, fishing water out of drains to find bacteria under a microscope. By my teenage years, it was clear to me that I wanted to become both a doctor and a scientist.

PSM: You mentioned in an interview with Penn Political Review that you became interested in literature in your late teens and that you began writing essays and participating in literary activities (like becoming the editor of your college magazine). What was it that drew you to the literature? Why pursue writing while also balancing the rigorous study of medicine?

VP: It was late in my teens that I began (out of sheer curiosity) to search out and read works that I had seen listed in “the literary canon,” but about which I had never been taught in the rather middling state-issue English textbooks we had in India. It was only when I became introduced to Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, García Márquez, Borges, Calvino, Woolf, Saramago, I began to sense the possibilities of language, the ways in which everyday words could be spun into something unexpected and wondrous. After a few years of literary self-education, I began to feel that I too had something worth saying, and perhaps some degree of skill that would allow me to say it.

PSM: Curiosity seems to be the element that draws you both to science and the arts. I am wondering if you find that they are symbiotic? Does one help or hinder the other? Are they as divided as they seem or is there a common ground?

VP: Both science and art seem to tap into the same need in my mind—a desire to understand this wondrous and complex and perplexing and upsetting world in which we all find ourselves. My scientific work attempts to better understand how genes function in bone marrow cells, and how mutations in them cause blood cancers. My literary work attempts to understand human beings and their frailties, and their struggle to fit into families, societies, the cosmos. I see them as two different but unified aspects of my life.

PSM: Speaking of your writing, I found it interesting that in both Afflictions and Night Theater, you used fantastical elements—like the dead coming back to life or an unborn baby regressing back into the womb, back to its original state—intertwined with realistic medicine to tell your stories. What inspired this connection?

VP: I’ve always been fascinated by myth and legend, and am drawn to stories that incorporate unreal or surreal or fabulist elements in their flow. I find that they provide the author a unique set of tools to explore aspects of humanity that every author hopes to depict—lives, conflicts, needs, desires. For me, there’s also the added dimension of my medical perspective. We are such strange creatures, with bodies composed of cells and organs held together in fragile equilibrium and yet capable of language and imagination and yearning. Medicine, which is essentially the study of how the human body functions and fails, constantly rubs up against this strangeness, and provides a particularly good substrate for fantastical exploration.

PSM: One of the more realistic elements that you talked about in Night Theater was doctor burnout, which feels particularly relevant during the COVID-19 crisis. In fact, we meet your protagonist, the surgeon, at the height of this phenomenon. He is a doctor in a rural clinic in India, with no support. No trained medical staff (the pharmacist is not actually a pharmacist), no supplies, there are corrupt officials, and a never-ending bureaucracy to deal with. You capture this well in these two lines:

Just when he’d started to wonder if the pharmacist had fallen down a well, she returned to help him with bandage the forearm.

These menial chores—draining abscesses, treating coughs and diarrhea, extracting rotten teeth, and now, another great feat, squashing cockroaches. All for what? To live in this hovel?

 Why did you feel it was important to discuss this in Night Theater?

VP: One of the themes at the core of Night Theater is the oath of the physician and its moral consequences. The physician is obligated to help the patient, but this obligation does not (and cannot) exist in a vacuum. The physician is human, his (or her) body and mind are subject to stress and fatigue, his capacity to provide care may be limited by circumstance, and he may be battling his own internal flaws and imperfections. A burned-out physician can, over time, lose the capacity to be empathetic and to appreciate the humanity of his patients. It was important to my novel to depict the very real limitations under which doctors sometimes have to labor, and the toll it can take on their psyche. The trajectory of the surgeon in Night Theater is that of a doctor who has reached the end of his rope, but who, through the extraordinary challenge placed before him (the task of healing the dead), reaches a deeper understanding of the wonders of life. It was important to me that the trajectory feel real, feel earned.

PSM: I loved that Night Theater covered other aspects of being a doctor, like the fear that accompanies the responsibility of the position. I thought this moment captured that sentiment best:

The surgeon knew that something was required of him, consoling words perhaps, but all he could do was grip his kneecaps. It was the only way he could still the shaking of his hands. There would be no one to console him—it was best he accepted that first.

It is often said that writers have an intended audience when they write, which makes me wonder who were you writing those lines for and what you hoped they would gain from it? 

VP: The surgeon in my novel is a difficult and sometimes unpleasant man, but has a strong moral compass and an internal humanity that persists despite the circumstances that have beaten him down. The events of his past have made him unsure of his skills, and he is stuck in a dilapidated clinic that doesn’t even allow him to provide normal care, let alone the extraordinary care that the dead, who beseech him to return them to life, require. And yet he steps up and performs the task that is placed before him, in as imperfect a way as he can. I suppose the lines you quote were for readers who aren’t doctors, who don’t know what it’s like to feel the burden of another’s life placed in one’s hands. I hoped to capture some of that complex responsibility in my writing.

PSM: You mentioned in your interview with The Rumpus that it is “[t]he intersection of medicine and morality: that’s the node to which my literary interests keep returning.”  The two seem forever entangled, because the purpose of one is to prevent the other and in Night Theater, hope is an integral part of this equation. “In a place that people visited for fear of death, there needed to be some source of hope.” And in discussing hope, one inevitably must discuss faith and trust. How did you go about tackling these big concepts in a novel that was so constrained in timeline, setting, and cast?

VP: An obvious technical challenge in writing Night Theater was confronting (and utilizing) the constraints of space and time in the narrative. The events of the novel unfold in a tiny clinic over the course of a single night, during which the protagonist has to perform surgeries on the dead while confronting the metaphysical/existential/religious/moral conundrums that the appearance of the dead raises in his mind. The plot of Night Theater provided ample opportunity to me (as the author) to explore these ideas, but the tight restrictions also required me to balance these explorations with the momentum and forward motion that the story required. This needed a combination of detailed plotting (I wrote out an hour-by-hour calendar of events!) and a fair amount of trial and error. At every point, the most important thing for me was to understand how these strange events were affecting the worldview of the protagonist, affecting his sense of himself and his obligations, affecting his opinions about life and its meaning. Balancing this with the motion of the story eventually came down to authorial intuition.

PSM: In other interviews, you said that The Afflictions was your love letter to Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino and that in Night Theater your version of the afterlife was inspired by Franz Kafka. I know you are working on a new novel about “an eyemaker who makes prosthetic eyes for clients who have lost an eye.” Can your readers expect to see more of Borges, Calvino, and Kafka’s influence or is there perhaps someone else waiting in the wings?

VP: Interesting question, and I can’t quite say that the new novel I’m writing particularly touches on the works or ideas of these three authors. Perhaps it’s influenced by (the great Portuguese author) José Saramago, but who can tell? Influences are often difficult to identify until the work has been written and the author can then stand back and assess it from the outside. Ask me again in a year or two!

PSM: You are quite the reader. Is there anything in particular of interest that you are reading now?

VP: I’m currently in the middle of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s extraordinary Pulitzer-winning novel The Sympathizer. Next in line are Wayétu Moore’s memoir The Dragons, the Giant, the Women, and then Hanya Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life. And a ton of others—like every self-respecting reader, I’m constantly purchasing books and then failing to catch up with them!

PSM: You write in various forms: nonfiction and both short and long fiction. How do you find the right form for the story you want to tell? What does each form do that the others do not?

VP: All the writing that I do for work (grants, scientific manuscripts) is nonfiction, and so I have to confess that I don’t feel a particular drive to focus my creative energies in my free time on nonfiction. Fiction is what really drives me during those hours, and I find myself most drawn to long-form fiction because of the scope and scale that it provides, and the ability that it grants me to have a sustained dialogue with a core set of ideas that go on to form the themes of the book. One thing is for certain: I have to pick my projects wisely, because the time spent as a doctor and a scientist leaves me only slivers to devote to writing, and I have to think carefully about the precise nature of a project before embarking on it.

A. M. Larks is the fiction editor of Please See Me.