Nine months after he arrived at Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, Marion is walking to the operating room with Chief Resident Deepak Jesudass when a bailiff serves Deepak papers. The Chief Resident takes them without comment and the two of them continue their work. Long after midnight, they are in the locker room smoking. Deepak says anyone else would have asked about the papers, but Marion says Deepak will tell him if it concerns him.

Deepak is in his late thirties and does not look like a leader. Later, when he looks back at his surgical training, Marion knows he is indebted to Deepak for his surgical skills. In the operating room, Deepak is “patient, forceful, brilliant, creative, painstaking, and decisive.” He is a true artisan, and he teaches Marion not to waste motion and to pay more attention to where he has been than where he is going when suturing. Marion reties more knots than he ties when they work together.

That night Deepak tells Marion what he has probably told no one else at Our Lady. Deepak is from Mysore, India. When he graduated from medical school, his parents hastily arranged a marriage for him with a girl in Birmingham. She was not a willing bride but her parents were concerned about the friends she was choosing. She and her parents flew down a few days before the wedding, and she left the day after to attend college. It took Deepak six months to get his visa and join her at her parents’ home. His bride was embarrassed of him and did not want him near her in public or in private. After a few weeks he left and found an internship in Scotland. He passed the difficult exams and became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, a prestigious honor.

He could have gone back to Mysore, but he could not bear to face all those who had attended his wedding. The next level of work for him in England would have been as a surgical consultant, but those positions were limited and only became available when someone died. So he came to America. He had to start from the beginning because America does not recognize postgraduate training from any other country, and Deepak was not sure if he could do it. Here, after working as an intern for one year and four years as a resident and moving to the position of Chief Resident, a surgeon can take the exam to become a board-certified surgeon—America’s version of a consultant.

He did his internship at a prestigious school in Philadelphia, and he worked hard. When his father died, he did not tell them or ask for time off so it could not be held against him. He was on track for Chief Resident and the hospital used him well, but the position went to someone else after Deepak’s third year. It was such an injustice that one of the attending physicians who supported Deepak resigned in indignation. Deepak could have made the move to plastic surgery or urology, but he loved general surgery. The physician who resigned helped him find another position in Chicago, where the same thing happened.

Deepak laughs at Marion’s “expression of incredulity” and tells him he is thankful to have learned not to expect too much and to love surgery for its own sake. It is something Deepak loves about America—that for everyone who wants to hold someone back there is someone whose humanity compensates for the loss. A doctor in Chicago arranged for Deepak to come here, and Popsy made Deepak...