Dev Mehra has four hundred surgeries behind him and not one death, and the steel frame in the hospital lobby says so. What it does not say is how the record was built: by never touching a patient he might lose. Across the river, in a worn hospital with a wall of photographs, another surgeon has been taking the ones Dev sends away. When a schoolteacher collapses in her classroom and her name reaches both hospitals on the same afternoon, twenty years of arrangement begin to come apart, one transfer form at a time.
