Opening
Desire surges into betrayal as adolescence ends in blood and grief. From a first kiss to a catastrophic rupture, the lives of Marion Praise Stone and Genet twist toward adulthood’s harsh terms, while medicine—its compassion and its failures—frames every turn.
What Happens
Chapter 31: The Dominion of the Flesh
Nearing fourteen, Marion Praise Stone misses Genet, away in Asmara. On rounds with Dr. Abhi Ghosh, he watches Ghosh sit with a despondent diplomat devastated by a new colostomy. Ghosh speaks plainly and gently, recasting the surgery not as a humiliation but as a life-saver, a future he can live into—an embodiment of Medicine as a Calling and a Metaphor.
Caught in a sudden storm, Marion slips through the nurses’ quarters and hears American rock and roll pulsing from the room that belonged to Sister Mary Joseph Praise. Inside, the shy Staff Probationer dances with reckless abandon, then pulls him in. They move together, breathless, until a kiss ignites his first true awakening. It collapses when she confesses her guilt over Sister Mary’s death and failing to resuscitate the twins. Overwhelmed, she offers herself to Marion; shaken by her grief and his desire, he flees, resolving to save himself for Genet and to marry her someday. Quietly, he accepts that Thomas Stone remains a permanent absence, his place filled by his adoptive family’s love.
Chapter 32: A Time to Sow
Genet returns with Rosina, taller, self-possessed, and newly worldly. Shiva Praise Stone bluntly notes her changed body, underscoring how different the twins have become. Marion confides his near-encounter with the probationer as proof of fidelity to Genet; she smiles at his romanticism more than she’s moved by it. That night, the family—Marion, Shiva, Genet, Ghosh, and Dr. Kalpana Hemlatha (Hema)—dances to Chuck Berry, a joyous flare of Family, Identity, and Belonging.
At an expatriate gala, Marion feels estranged from the insulated foreign community and slips home early. He finds Shiva alone, studying his reflection, practicing dance moves. Shiva’s new reserve—a hoarse, unfamiliar voice and a private world Marion can’t access—marks the quiet spread of Brotherhood and Rivalry.
Chapter 33: A Form of Madness
At sixteen, the twins encounter Tsige, once a grieving mother, now the magnetic owner of the bar across from Missing Hospital. She thanks Marion for past kindness. Shiva jokes crudely that she would have slept with them, angering Marion, who counters by revealing his chaste night with the probationer. Weeks later, the probationer thanks “Marion” for a passionate night. He realizes with horror that Shiva visited her, letting her believe he was Marion.
When confronted, Shiva shrugs; he admits it wasn’t his first time, tallying twenty-one prostitutes without shame. Marion reels—disgusted, envious, and suddenly small. Meanwhile Genet begins taking rides from Rudy, a wealthy classmate. Cornered by jealousy, Marion spins a fantasy of marrying her in India. Genet, urgent and impatient, declares she wants to lose her virginity now—and will ask Shiva if he won’t. Rosina bursts in on a charged moment and rages. Marion deflects with a playful promise to marry Genet, masking the fuse that’s already burning.
Chapter 34: A Time to Reap
While studying, Genet presses Shiva for the clinical details of his first time with a prostitute. His dispassionate description and her visible arousal thicken the room with heat; Marion bolts. On his return, Rosina ambushes him, accusing him of sex with Genet in the toolshed. She hurls bloody panties in his face. The scent—Genet, blood, semen—lands like a verdict. He knows it is “his” scent only because it is Shiva’s. The familial fabric tears along Betrayal and Forgiveness.
Marion moves out. The next day, Genet collapses with fever and kidney failure. At the hospital, Hema uncovers the cause: in a desperate bid to control her daughter, Rosina hired a village woman to perform a brutal circumcision. During a vigil, Genet confesses she initiated sex with Shiva and bargained with her mother—she would submit to the cut if Rosina kept Marion’s name out of it. Genet survives and returns home. Rosina, shunned and destroyed by shame, hangs herself. Childhood ends in the wreckage, where Love, Passion, and Sacrifice twist into horror.
Chapter 35: One Fever from Another
Years pass. Genet, now at Empress Menen boarding school, turns inward; Marion visits faithfully across an unbridgeable silence. In 1974 they enter medical school together, still distant echoes of who they were.
Ghosh’s work finally receives its due. He becomes Professor of Medicine at the new school, famed for expertise in relapsing fever. Marion recalls “Adam’s sign,” discovered by Missing’s one-eyed compounder, Adam. Ghosh battles a journal editor to ensure Adam’s name stays on the eponym, honoring practical brilliance over pedigree. In a family shaken by rupture, Ghosh’s integrity is ballast.
Key Events
- Marion’s first kiss and awakening with the Staff Probationer, shadowed by her confession about Sister Mary’s death
- The family’s shared dance to Chuck Berry, briefly restoring joy and belonging
- Shiva’s deception with the probationer and revelation of his sexual history
- Genet’s ultimatum and the toolshed encounter with Shiva
- Rosina’s violent decision to have Genet circumcised, leading to sepsis and renal failure
- Genet’s confession at the bedside and Rosina’s suicide
- Ghosh’s professorship and the defense of Adam’s sign as a model of moral clarity
Character Development
The section jolts each character into adulthood’s stark terms, recasting love, loyalty, and responsibility.
- Marion: From romantic idealist to wounded caregiver. He channels desire into vows for Genet, then confronts betrayal, grief, and the limits of his control. He stays steadfast beside Genet’s bed, even as his bond with Shiva fractures.
- Shiva: Brilliant, literal, and emotionally opaque. He pursues sex pragmatically, acts without malice, and seems baffled by fallout. His indifference to names, rules, and ownership widens the gulf with Marion.
- Genet: From confident girl to haunted survivor. Impulse and provocation invite consequences she cannot undo; the cut and her mother’s death shadow her every movement.
- Rosina: Fierce maternal protector warped by fear. Her terror of Genet’s fate as “a maid like me” drives an unforgivable act, ending in despair.
- Ghosh: Quiet anchor. He models medicine as conscience and craft, honoring Adam and elevating the overlooked—a father’s steadiness amid chaos.
Themes & Symbols
Brotherhood and Rivalry fractures the twins’ once-symbiotic bond. Sexual experience becomes the fault line: Marion imagines love as promise and future; Shiva treats sex as data and present-tense action. Their shared face becomes a mask for misrecognition—the probationer’s mistake literalizes how easily one twin can overwrite the other, with lasting damage.
The Weight of the Past and Secrets presses on the present. The probationer’s guilt over Sister Mary’s death resurfaces in the very room where Marion awakens to desire. Secrets—Shiva’s night with the probationer, the toolshed encounter, the bargain between Genet and Rosina—migrate from whispers to public catastrophe, proving that hidden acts demand a reckoning.
Love, Passion, and Sacrifice run hot and ruinous. Marion’s vows read like devotion; Genet’s urgency and Shiva’s detachment turn the same bodily terrain into danger. Genet’s “sacrifice” is coerced, revealing how culture and fear can commandeer the body in the name of protection, leaving scars that structure a life.
Symbols
- The Toolshed: Once a hideout for childhood schemes, it becomes the stage of adult transgression—the site where innocence is traded for knowledge, and loyalty snaps.
- The Bloody Panties: A visceral proof object. For Rosina, confirmation of worst fears; for Marion, incontrovertible evidence of betrayal. It freezes an unseen act into undeniable fact.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
These chapters are the novel’s hinge. The idyll of Missing gives way to a world where choices scar, secrets detonate, and love is not enough to save anyone. The twins diverge for good; Marion’s bond with Genet becomes a vigil rather than a romance; Rosina’s death seals the cost of fear colliding with desire. Against this wreckage, medicine—through Ghosh’s compassion, rigor, and insistence on honoring Adam—offers a moral countercurrent. The personal cataclysm mirrors Ethiopia’s looming convulsions, foreshadowing a broader unmooring where old orders collapse and survival demands new forms of courage.