Whose Present is this Anyway?

Frank Eloff, a white doctor at the hospital, is resigned to the fact that the hospital will never actually have patients. So are the head of the hospital and two other doctors. All of them are resigned and almost happy in this inertia. Until the ‘‘good’’ doctor arrives.

An intern, Lawrence Waters chooses the hospital for his compulsory rural posting — and, in his feverish idealism, is bent upon changing things there.

Since the patients won’t come there, he decides to take the hospital to the people in a sort of mobile clinic approach, which is at first resented and then accepted by the other doctors. Frank continues to be skeptical and feels that a clinic here or there with no medicines and mere words can mean nothing.

This despondent situation is reflected in the dishevelled personal lives of the two protagonists Frank and Lawrence. Frank’s brutal realism and cynicism are shaped by a broken marriage, of a friend who ran off with his wife, and of guilt at having spent a brief spell with the army and having been part of the racist regime. He is torn within and he seeks no escape from the glare of his truth. Even idealism for him is false.

‘‘Mike had been my friend until he ran off with my wife. Since then I hadn’t made any friends. I didn’t want anyone getting too close to me,’’ he says at one point, annoyed by the fact that Lawrence referred to him as a friend.

Lawrence, on the other hand, walks along blindfolded with a band of idealism which conceals his arrogance as well as a certain dishonesty in accepting reality as it is.

However, his enthusiasm is infectious and it does stir up the drowsy hospital into a vague desire to do something.

The tension between the unrealistic goals of an idealist and the despondency of Frank who is grappling with the redundancy of all action, alongwith mesmerising prose, give the plot momentum.

The past returns now and then, once in a brief encounter between Frank and the former dictator of the homeland who has been assumed dead. But it is the timeless despair of being caught between the past and present that pervades the book.