Arriving in sweltering Madras, Digby is taken by rickshaw to a bungalow near Longmere Hospital. He meets Muthusamy, his gentle cook and housekeeper, who welcomes him with a jasmine garland and a spicy chicken korma that overwhelms Digby’s palate. Exhausted, Digby sleeps through the night.

The next morning he reports to Longmere and waits hours for Senior Civil Surgeon Claude Arnold, drinking “degree coffee” amid an office ritual maintained by an Anglo-Indian secretary, an office manager, and a peon. Arnold arrives immaculate and aloof, assessing Digby with condescension before offering a perfunctory orientation.

Arnold assigns Digby two surgical wards for native patients while keeping the Anglo-Indian and British wards for himself, voicing disdain for LMPs. Touring the hospital, Digby sees overcrowded male and female native wards spilling onto a porch, contrasted with a nearly empty Anglo-Indian ward and unused British private rooms, underscoring stark segregation and neglect.

In the operating theaters, Digby finds a long list of cases—amputations, hydroceles, hernias, abscesses—but no major surgeries posted. Arnold, smelling faintly medicinal and suddenly genial, declares Digby a surgeon and urges boldness, then disappears, leaving Digby to manage the day’s operations.

Scrubbed and gowned, Digby confronts an enormous hydrocele far beyond his experience, while a calm Tamil scrub nurse labels it “big only” and notes it is “above the knee.” Sweating and uncertain, Digby hesitates as the theater orderly mops his brow, realizing his trial by fire has begun in a system indifferent to the patients he now serves.