Transplanted Man: A Novel

Sonny Seth is a resident at a hospital in New York's Little India. One night a truly unique patient arrives: Transplanted Man, an Indian politician whose body "harbored seven organs--a heart, a pancreas, a liver, two lungs, and a pair of corneas--that had once belonged to people of differing faiths." Transplanted Man has turned his seeming disability to his advantage and has become an important minister in the Indian cabinet: "In an India coping with ethnic and religious fragmentation, no other politician could so credibly claim to represent everyone." Sanjay Nigam's Transplanted Man is like the title character's body: it contains multitudes. There's the brilliant Sonny Seth himself, unsure of where he belongs, uncomfortable in New York but doomed to find India is "too Indian" for him. Seth and his hospital coworkers are plenty eccentric, but their patients outstrip them in weirdness altogether. One engineer, for instance, changes the course of his life by sinking his teeth into his wife's buttock. Nigam (a doctor and the author of The Snake Charmer) crams his second novel with medical lore, Indian scents, and lots of comic angst. The result is a book as teeming with life as the corridors of a great metropolitan hospital. --Claire Dederer