There are distinct sorts of beggar-units.
There are the old women who’ve suffered enough for their blessing to be worth something.
And the disabled men.
And the disabled men who are led around by their wives.
And the old men.
And those that sing.
And the children.

The children are of different sorts too.
There are children who beg, and those that make desultory swipes over the windshield of your car with a rag before they beg, and those that carry around a baby and beg.

I almost always give child-beggars some money if I can spare it.
Stupid, I know.
I’ve heard it all before.
I’m feeding the alcohol habit of their fathers, or whoever it is that have charge of them.
I’m feeding their glue-sniffing habit.
They have more money tucked away somewhere under those rags than I do.
I’m encouraging the development of begging, as an industry in central Calcutta.
And they probably rented that baby.
Yes.
Cynicism is such a comfortable state to exist in.

I was walking to the Moulali bus stop when I saw this beggar child. She was about twelve, I’d say, and she was sitting on the pavement. She had a baby on her lap. I had seen her before, with a baby at her hip.
They were looking at each other. Suddenly she raised her finger and started tickling the baby. It was laughing. Then she put her mouth to the baby’s stomach and blew. There was a loud farting sound, and the baby laughed some more. She looked up from the baby and smiled, I don’t know, at nothing in particular.

As I passed them, I gave her a tenner, before I got on my bus.
I had to walk home from the bus stop, and it was hot;
And they sniffed glue, or bought their guardian some alcohol, or even, perhaps, bought some food.
I think it was worth it.

I have officially learnt nothing today.

In the morning I bunked the first lecture, because I had an exam immediately afterwards.The exam went reasonably well, though it was rather disappointing. Even though I had, by some unforeseen miracle, managed to retain how global ischemic encephalopathy causes irreversible damage to the cells in the area of Sommer in the hippocampus, I was only asked the difference between a transudate and an exudate before I was fobbed off with an 80%.
Ah well.

I bunked the wards and after a coke or three, goofed off in the library for two hours, during which our group was admonished by no less than three seniors who were studying for their exams.

After that I went to class and slept peacefully through the lecture on rape, being nudged awake only just before the roll call by a vigilant friend.

And during the pharmacology tutorial classes, I sat at the back with a like-minded friend. Our literary output was tremendous, being no less than fifteen dirty limericks and an epic poem on something quite unmentionable.

I had, in short, a great day, having valiantly resisted all attempts at edification.
And I loved it.
So there.

This is dedicated to a girl I used to know.

Every so often, we call, for duty’s sake,
And we sit through painful conversation, and polite games.
We used to be close, you and I,
Now we are strangers who know each other’s names.

Is affection held in thrall by convenience?
Are all friendships made to die like ours?
Are relationships defined by time and space?
Can closeness be measured in minutes and hours?

We must shed the debris of our cluttered lives.
If we now laugh with others, that is no crime.
Notwithstanding the frail links of parts of a shared past,
We are only strangers who knew each other once upon a time.

I was leaving college today when I saw one of those cycle-vans that carry dead bodies. It was going towards the morgue.

It had a body wrapped in a plastic sheet. One end was tied to the front end of the van, just below the seat for the driver. Or whatever one calls the guy who operates those things.

But the other end was free, and at this end the frequent jolts had caused the sheet to come unwrapped. One could see the head, and part of her forearm, which was folded across her neck. It was, or had been, a young woman. She had those white bangles on her forearm, and a large vermilion streak on her forehead. A little to the right of that, there was a cut, a gash, which went up past her hairline.

The van dodged some beggar-children playing on the street, giving the corpse another jolt, and went past me.

The children stopped their game for a moment and gazed after the van, with incurious eyes.
They are inured to horror.

I envy them sometimes.

There is a beggar near the gate outside the hospital. He takes all his clothes off sometimes, and they say he is mad.

Madness is quiet; insidious; and fundamentally erosive.
One does not go mad in a crescendo of shrill ideas, but in silent swirls of disjointed thoughts.

I must guard against disjointed thoughts.

What is life, O Gentle Reader? What exactly is it? Is it merely a collection of chemical reactions in cells? Or is it, at the other extreme, some mystical force animating everything? I am sorry to speak in such clichés, but needs must.

We know almost all the chemical reactions in cells and have characterized almost all of the complex metabolic pathways. We have sequenced the genome. But why is it that, far from being able to synthesize a highly differentiated human cell, we have consistently failed to make something as simple as a bacterium, starting from scratch. We can modify existing cells and can even turn a hapless bacterium into a factory in microcosm, churning out molecules we need. But why do we not know what life is?

There are so many definitions of life. Life, according to some authorities is any focal region where entropy is reduced at the expense of an increase in entropy elsewhere. (Of course, then, a refrigerator is also alive!). But this much is true, if this entropy business stops, then an organism is dead. Entropy itself is a measure of the randomness or disorder of a system. Way back when, just before the big bang happened, the universe was in perfect order. This is when time did not exist, and (this is what will astound you), at this point there was no space either. And ever since then, we have been sliding for eons into chaos, from highly ordered matter into evanescent energy.

And are we merely machines programmed to sustain ourselves and replicate? Is that the purpose of life, to perpetuate itself? Or is it worse, something entirely without purpose, a cosmic accident?

A team of Russian scientists once tried to make a cell, ab initio. They made little semipermeable lipoprotein packets, and put synthesized enzymes in them. Then they put them all in another semipermeable packet, and adjusted the ionic concentrations and the voltage, put in microtubules, enzymes, and replicated, in short, the cellular environment. But the cell would not function. It lay in its fluid, an obstinate, albeit flaccid little bag. It would not live.

The tiny anthrax bacillus spore, something which is technically alive, can survive in soil, with the miniscule amount of food it has inside it, for 60 years, when the average time for which one bacillus exists as an individual, is about twenty minutes. That is like a human being living for, I don’t know, you do the math. And yet when it finds a collection of things I can only term hope, it burgeons into something beautiful: something alive.

So what is life? I want to know. I need to know.

What is it to be alive?

Arunava has been ill.

But that is not in itself, remarkable.

What is remarkable, is that he has been foolhardy enough to follow my medical advice, and having taken the medicines that I prescribed, is actually on the way to recovery, by some colossal freak of nature.

He is my first patient, and quite frankly, I would have been more comfortable with his therapy if he had had epilepsy. But, vastly to my own surprise, those nasty microbes plague him no more.

And Arunava has not only survived his illness, but also my medical advice.

Arunava, my friend, I salute your courage.

Another nameless relative enters my room. This is late afternoon. I sit up straight in my bed, trying unsuccessfully to look as if I was conscientiously studying, rather than reading the Dick Francis paperback, with its loud red cover.

My father enters the room behind said relative. Aimless chit-chat, my face contorted into the uncomfortable rictus that I fondly assume is a smile.

My father, while out walking Thor one morning, slipped on the wet grass and now has a hairline crack in his sacrum. He walks over to the life-size picture of a skeleton and pointing to it proceeds to show the gentleman where exactly he has a fracture. He points to a place somewhere in between the coccyx and the ischium. (My father, in spite of his voluble learnedness on the subject of the consonant shift, has an endearing lack of medical knowledge.) Aforementioned nameless relative scratches chin, and looks at the skeleton, and wonders aloud, like so many before him, how I sleep at night with that hanging over my head.

My facial muscles begin to ache.

Nameless gent continues in much the same vein, as my father watches with some amusement; he has probably endured nameless gent for as long as he could, before embroiling me.

Nameless gent having exclaimed at the number of books on my table (I never tidy up), the printed out song lyrics decorating the walls (quite avant-garde, isn’t it?), and the guitar lying dustily in its corner, finally got up and walked towards the door.

‘Think about where you want to be in ten years. That’s how one should study, with a goal, pictured in one’s head.’ Having dispensed this piece of splendid advice, which fell on the floor like meaningless aphorisms generally tend to do, he took himself off.

He left me wondering whether, in ten years, I’d have long hair in a ponytail in a desert, or close cropped hair in an air-conditioned office. I still don’t know.

Neurology.
Morning, operation theatre lights on in the distance. “Silence,” they proclaim. “operation in progress.”
Everyone walks around so briskly.

But the lights are not on in the wards. It is dark today; and clouds are pregnant with unshed rain.
The sheets are a dark antiseptic green. The steel beds are blue, and in some places, where the thin veneer of paint has been rubbed off by a thousand anxious hands, you can see the rust underneath.

K is the only other person to turn up for wards today.

Bed 46, we’re told.
Bulbar palsy. Examine very carefully.
So, we do.

The professor comes around, and we talk in great detail about his hyperreflexia, and fasciculations of his tongue, and his defective articulation.
‘Dysarthria’ I say, in response to the professor’s question, ‘probably secondary to the involvement of cranial nerve nuclei.’
And then he gives us a rather lengthy lecture.

The class is over, and we are almost done, and K is rooting through her bag for her hammer so she can test his reflexes again. I am peering at him from behind my shield of glasses, stethoscope and crossed arms.

‘Daktarbabu?’ he says. He doesn’t know we aren’t doctors yet.
‘hmmmmm?’ I ask.
He tells me that for the last few weeks he has been laughing all the time. And crying.
His speech is ever so slightly slurred.
‘Laughing?’ I ask.
Now that I am looking at him, I see that his lips are quivering. The corners are continually twitching upward. It is like he is always on the verge of a nervous smile.
I haven’t noticed it at all in my ten minutes with him. The scary thing is, neither has anyone else.
He looks happy.
I call the professor back and tell him.

After another bout of protracted questioning, the professor turns to me.
“Emotional lability. So we actually have..."
"Pseudo-bulbar palsy" I complete.
"Right. The cortex is also affected. Good. Well done. This is why one must take a detailed history.”

And over the next few days a lot of people go to him. Everyone asks him how he is feeling. Sometimes he laughs. Sometimes he even cries.
They like that. Emotional lability, they say, sententiously, to one another.

Poor little man, trapped in his happiness of trivialities, punctuated by frightening descents into despair.

I will avoid neurology till he is gone.
Or until I find a way to expiate.

Have words ever suddenly seemed unfamiliar to you, Imaginary Friends? Words that you’ve spoken, and used a million times, change abruptly to something different, and feel like cold hard smooth stones in your mouth.
They become like strangers. And it catches you unawares. And you ponder over them. And turn them around on your tongue and wonder why they seem so... altered.

It happened to me a few days ago. We were being shown a case of SLE, a rather obscure autoimmune disorder. The guy next to me was asked to explain the pathogenesis.

Pathogenesis is a word I’ve read millions of times. And spoken tens of thousands of times. Even written a few hundred times. In medical terms, it signifies the progression of disease.

But ‘Wow’, I caught myself thinking. ‘Pathogenesis? You are asking about the birth of this woman’s pathos?’
Is that just her illness?
Must human beings be diminished solely to their organic function?