 Random House Audio presents Cutting for Stone by Abraham Vergays Read for You by Sunil Malhotra And because I love this life, I know I shall love death as well. The child cries out when from the right breast the mother takes it away in the very next moment to find in the left one its consolation. Rabindranath Tagore from Gitanjali Prologue The Coming After eight months spent in the obscurity of our mother's womb, my brother, Shiva, and I came into the world in the late afternoon of the 20th of September in the year of Grace 1954. We took our first breaths at an elevation of 8,000 feet in the thin air of Addis Ababa, capital city of Ethiopia. The miracle of our birth took place in missing hospitals operating Theatre 3. The very room where our mother, Sister Mary Joseph Praise, spent most of her working hours and in which she had been most fulfilled. When our mother, a nun of the diocesan Carmelite Order of Madras, unexpectedly went into labor that September morning, the big rain in Ethiopia had ended. Its rattle on the corrugated tin roofs of missing ceasing abruptly like a chatterbox cut off in mid-sentence. Overnight, in that hushed silence, the mescal flowers bloomed, turning the hillsides of Addis Ababa into gold. In the meadows around missing, the sedge worn its battle over mud and a brilliant carpet now swept right up to the paved threshold of the hospital, holding forth the promise of something more substantial than cricket, croquet, or shuttlecock. Missing sat on a verdant rise, the irregular cluster of white-washed one-and-two-story buildings looking as if they were pushed up from the ground in the same geologic rumble that created the Antoto Mountains. Troph-like flowerbeds, fed by the runoff from the roof-cutters, surrounded the squat buildings like a moat. Matron Hurst's roses overtook the walls, the crimson blooms framing every window and reaching to the roof. So fertile was that loamy soil that Matron, missing hospital's wise and sensible leader, cautioned us against stepping into it barefoot lest we sprout new toes. Five trails flanked by shoulder-high bushes and away from the main hospital buildings like spokes of a wheel, leading to five thatched-roof bungalows that were all but hidden by cops, by hedge-rows, by wild eucalyptus and pine. It was Matron's intent that missing resemble an arboretum, or a corner of Kensington Gardens where, before she came to Africa, she used to walk as a young nun or Eden before the fall. Missing was really Mission Hospital, a word that on the Ethiopian tongue came out with a hiss so it sounded like missing. Sample complete. Ready to continue?