This doctor isn’t famous.
He isn’t rich.
He works at a large hospital, where thousands of people come to die.

He has no empathy for these people any more.
They are wretched, and frightened. That is how they have always been.
And individuals do not kindle in him even a flicker of the warmth he lost in his youth.
But he is still kind. It is a virtue innate in him.

And so he sits, day after day, in his cubicle where the floor sucks light out of the air, where the windows are absurdly small, and where the plywood partitions glower like empty eye sockets.
And he sees many people, and a parade of miseries.
He is tired, and he feels empty.
And he is still kind.

And cancer patients tell him with tears in their eyes of the money they must save for their daughters’ weddings. And mothers of children with thalassaemia listen with stricken eyes as he tells them their children must die. And of the people they save many slink away, relieved and slightly ashamed.
And still he is kind, because that is all he can be.

And the poverty always wins; and the squalor; and the ignorance.
But nevertheless he sits there, trying to empty an ocean with the spoon they gave him.
And it wears him out; it chafes him threadbare.
But he is still kind.
Because compassion is his way of doing things.

I have a cousin. He is about five years younger than I am, and he is in love, I hear.

First Love.
You are smiling. I am, too.

And perhaps you are thinking about the first time you fell in love. I am.

I remember the wasted evanescence of my tissue-paper love.
I remember the feeling of pure happiness, before I had memories of another love that I never let anyone see.

I remember it still.
I shake it out sometimes and drape it around my shoulders, before I let it collapse, back into its origami folds in a box that no one must ever open.

And, for a few moments, she trips daintily along the corridors of my mind , impossibly graceful, a girl-woman with flyaway hair.

First love.
You are smiling. I am, too.

I wish him luck.

This is my tribute to S, even though he will never read this.

S came to our school in when he was thirteen; which means that we’ve been friends for almost seven years now. He joined in the middle of the term.
I went over and introduced myself that first day; I’m friendly enough when I feel like it.

He told me a couple of months later that he’d come back from boarding school at Dehradun because his mother had cancer.

He has always been very childlike.
He is from one of those old Marwari families, very conservative; He is a devout hanuman-bhakt. He quotes from Gandhiji’s ‘My Experiments with Truth.’ He is very uncomfortable talking to girls, I don’t think he has the phone number of a single girl apart from his sisters, and he says things like we should all remain celibate, and give our lives to the betterment of the nation, if any real progress is to be made. If you ask him what the connection between the two things is, he’s rather hazy on the actual details.

In school, whenever he came up with one of those sententious sayings, we used to pat him on the back, two short taps from each of us, and shake his hand, saying solemnly “you are a good boy, S, a bhery good boy.”

We’ve always babied him around.
Mo helped him with Math in class XII.
I told him about the birds and the bees.
And when he told us, one day, that he liked Juhi Chawla, I think we laughed for months.

His mother died the week before our XIIth standard board exams. It wasn’t cancer that killed her, she died of malaria.

I met him some time ago. Mo was there, too.
He still reads the Hanuman chalisa everyday.
But he works in the evenings after college in his father’s office. He gets home around 9, every night, even Sundays. It is obvious that he is a great prop to his father, and when his father goes out of town, he manages everything.
And he talked about saving for his sisters’ marriages.

I had the distinct feeling that he had changed very much. Not at the superficial level: he looks almost the same; his corny sayings; the goofy haircut; he still doesn’t shave. He used to stammer, and a hint of that still remains.
Both Mo and I, in contrast, have changed a lot since school. Mo has long hair tied back in a ponytail, and it is dyed brown. I have spectacles, longer hair, a five o’clock shadow, and I’m taller.
But at some deep place inside, he is completely different. At the place where I am still the same, a detached observer on the fringes of things, the part of me that will never change, he has changed. He works, and he is responsible for things.

I remember at the end of the evening he said that he would never marry, and that he would build a hospital and a temple, and work for the poor. Mo and I dutifully laughed, and we went through the whole ‘good boy’ ritual, for old times’ sake.

But he has grown, while we have not.

While I was shaking his hand, I wanted to tell him that he is a good man.
But old habits die hard.

He comes in a chauffeur driven car. Nothing ostentatious, a black car, it goes into the hospital, and drops him off just in front of the hospital building.

He gets off, with a briefcase in his right hand. For a split second you can see the newspaper he has been reading folded neatly on the seat he has vacated, before he pushes the door shut, a fluid movement, as he exits, and he walks up the shallow steps, one at a time. He is dressed conservatively, quietly elegant, and he wears a tie. No one else in the hospital wears a tie every day except him.
He goes past the security guard, with a nod, and walks toward the six elevators that stand, faintly humming. The security guard watches him walk away, his clothes are crisp, he looks fresh, and one knows instinctively that his hands will always be slightly cold.

In front of the elevators there is a huddled group of students who wait respectfully for him to enter the elevator first. He nods pleasantly as one of them manages a diffident ‘Good Morning’ and goes in.

The elevator stops at the proper floor, the operator knows which, and the gate is opened for him. He exits and walks off down the corridor.

He has done this almost everyday for the past twenty years.

He is very famous.
He has a large practice.
A very good clinical teacher, an excellent diagnostician, the students say to one another, and his infrequent classes are very well attended.

All the while he is walking to his floor, he never talks to anyone; it is one of his well known idiosyncrasies. He never returns a greeting at this time, only that faint impersonal smile, and a nod.

He is probably thinking about his cases, someone says. Or perhaps the paper he has been invited to present in London; he is a fellow of the Royal College, did you know?

But they are wrong. What he thinks about, everyday, as he walks into the hospital wards is not any of these things.

He is thinking that he cannot believe that he has managed to take them all in again. He cannot believe that no one can see that he doesn’t really know anything more about being a doctor than he did on his first day of medical school, apart from a lot of information. He cannot believe that in twenty years, no one has exposed him as a fraud, and that no one understands that he still doesn’t know what it is to feel like a doctor.

It is funny what things you overhear on buses. I was in a bus today, sitting right at the back on the left.
There were two guys in the seat for handicapped people just in front of mine, and I wasn’t really listening to what they were saying, but I couldn’t help overhearing.
This guy (tall, no spectacles), was telling his friend, (taller, spectacles, oiled hair) about what he’d done with his girlfriend the evening before. Apparently, she had been wearing a black salwar, which looked byapok, man, and no one had been home and they had danced to music, which was romantic, man.

And what had they been dancing to?
“Quit playing games with my heart”, by the Backstreet Boys.

What a waste of a perfect moment.

But I was thinking about this: I have a soundtrack to my life.
I mean, like you see in the movies, where they play music in the background, to suit the moment, whatever. Something is almost always playing in the background, when I am not paying attention; it’s like my own personal audio screensaver.

For example, if I were that guy, I know what song I’d have had playing, I wouldn’t even have had to think: David Gray’s “This Year’s Love”, or Third Eye Blind’s “Deep Inside of You.”. Or if I were feeling especially soppy, Teitur’s “One and Only”.

At college today, Fountains of Wayne’s “Mexican Wine” was playing, and later, when I was leaving, “Too Cool for School.”

But, for most of today, I’ve been playing “Creep”, by Radiohead. I love that song.
I always have that playing when I feel everything around me is reduced to incoherent fragments of images that I can see beyond a pane of glass beaded with raindrops.

Have you ever played raindrop races?

Have you ever been delayed just before the light changes at a busy intersection? While incredibly pompous looking bald men driving cars of a most unpleasant shade of gangrene green make U-turns?

Have you ever been stuck behind an automobile that a discerning slug would scorn to own (if slugs could own automobiles)?

Has your car ever been clipped and its rear lights destroyed by moronic taxi drivers?
Have said taxi drivers chortled apologetically while you are dealing with a fit of apoplectic rage?

All of these things have happened to me.

It does not help that G, who drives us, is the meekest soul alive. The most fiendish of drivers draw, at most, a chuckle from him. This is while the seat belt is beginning to feel too tight to me, blood vessels are cording up at my temple, I am making various inarticulate noises, and words that I shall not sully any maidenly eyes that might be reading this with are rising unbidden to my lips.

I don’t think I can drive in this city. The stress would kill me.

The police are no help. Inexplicably, their sole desire seems to be the re-establishment of smooth traffic flow, and they simply refuse to let angry young men with disordered hair harangue catatonically stupid taxi drivers for any reasonable length of time.
I simply cannot understand this. I am put back in the car, kicking and gesticulating wildly, by the united efforts of tubby traffic constable and G.

I need a weapon. A thing of awesome power, something that would do the talking for me and would make even the most obtuse traffic cop look the other way as I flayed the skin off of offending drivers.

Excuse me while I experiment with attaching this meat cleaver to the end of this hockey stick.

The smell assailed us as we entered the morgue. All the while we had been outside it had come to us in vague wisps. Now that we were inside, we could tell the smell was different from what we were used to. The smell at the anatomy building had been the smell of rancid flesh, coated with the civilizing veneer of formalin. But this was the smell of putrefaction, pure and undisguised.
I borrowed T's bottle of cheap perfume, and doused my handkerchief. It didn't really help, but I clutched it like a talisman.

The post mortem room, into which we entered from a short passage, was a rectangular room, with four concrete slabs perched on iron legs. At one end, a gallery rose, in tiers, for students to view post mortems, and an adjacent side had a shallow drain and a brace of sinks. The other end had a rack filled with bottles of congealed specimens taken from bodies. There were four corpses on each of the slabs, and another five on the floor between the tables. The bare-chested dom who ushered us inside flitted casually from corpse to corpse, talking volubly. This was a hanging, and that was probably a poisoning case. This one, he said, indicating a body with part of the skull caved in, was that of a youth who'd hit it on a pillar while swinging from a train-door. He trod carelessly on the forearm of a corpse as he walked across the room. It made a tiny rubbery sound.
His associates spilt some perfumed phenol on the floor. The smell receded a little.

The gentleman, who conducted the post mortem, an assistant professor of Forensic Medicine, was a dapper little man who spoke in staccato bursts. Magnus, Shaky, and I went up on the second tier of the gallery. We looked around while the little man told us about the documents it was necessary to have before a medico-legal autopsy could be performed.
The dom who was about to perform the post mortem (I don't know his name and will call him X) was a young man wearing a dirty yellow vest, and a pair of shorts. He had a scalpel, and something that looked like a chisel. He had a glove on one hand. A pair of ankle-boots completed his ensemble. He continually sharpened his instruments against one another as he waited for the professor's signal to begin. I saw Shaky's throat working, and Magnus had his handkerchief pressed to his face, his expression was exactly how I felt.

First up was a young woman, twenty three years old. She had hung herself, the report said. There was froth around her nostrils, and a rope pattern (the ligature mark) around her neck. She had long black hair, and she was dressed in a bright red salwar-kameez; the kameez had flowers embroidered in dirty gold down her front. X took a wooden ruler and measured her 'length'. Then he untied the knot at her waist and pulled the salwar off. Then he walked over to the other end of the table, and pulled her kameez off. She was left splayed on the table wearing an incongruously pink pair of panties. X hooked his fingers around the waistband and pulled them off.
This was the only time in the entire proceeding that I felt a rather surprising twinge, of something I can't quite describe. A sense of violation, perhaps.
I leaned forward to catch what the professor was saying.
"...and we must check for the presence of a sanitary pad or tampon, premenstrual syndrome is something that may be advanced as a cause of temporary instability..."

After we had checked the external surface of the body for marks, or any injuries, or evidence of sexual assault (there were none), X used his scalpel to cut her open. He gutted her, slashing unceremoniously from her throat to her pubis. Her intestines rose outward as she gaped open. He sawed through the soft connections of her ribs to her sternum with a grating sound. He flicked her sternum away, and it landed between her obscenely spread thighs, leaving a glistening smear against her genitals. X cut her flesh from her ribs, and her breasts sagged against the sides of her body, like flaccid bags.
They took her stomach out. It had also been cut open, and it spilled the remnants of her last meal. They put in a plastic bottle, for analysis. X cupped his bare hand and scooped some blood from the thoracic cavity into the bottle, before he shut it.
They also cut her uterus out and opened it.

She had had children.
After they had looked through the rest of her abdominal viscera, and placed them in a little pile between her thighs, X cut across her scalp down to the bone. He then proceeded to pull her face down, everting the skin, stripping it from the bone like a mask so the forehead touched the chin. He sluiced her skull with water, as the professor pointed out a bruise on her scalp.
They next took off the top of her skull, with a hammer and a chisel, and took out the brain. Chips of bone had flown everywhere. After we had examined it, he threw it casually inside her belly. It came to rest, nestled amongst her intestines.
This was where it hit me: these bodies come in as remains of human beings. They leave as desecrated sacs of viscera.
Behind her, at the other tables the post mortems proceeded at greater speed. Four had already been done as ours continued.
Outside, there was a flash of lightning, followed by a burst of loud thunder. I remember remarking to Magnus that the atmosphere was positively Frankenstein-ish.

Another woman had died of acid poisoning. They took her stomach out and showed us the corroded lining inside.

***

Shaky and I both wanted to leave, and Magnus followed us out.
We had to wait in the ante room before we could finally leave because it was raining so hard.

I met Ri on a bus the other day. It was a mini-bus, and I was on my way home.
I sat next to the guy for a whole year in school. He doesn’t live in Calcutta now, and we hadn’t spoken for months.
In general, I find it rather difficult to describe people without exaggerating something about them, but for Ri, there is really no need. He is pretty much the most handsome guy I know. He is about one-and-a-half inches shorter than I am, which would put him at a bit over five-six, but he has a profile that would not look out of place on a Grecian urn. And he is great company. He knows all the gossip, and will have you in splits within about a minute. Needless to say, girls love him.
In spite of us being so very different, we were pretty good friends. I remember he once said to me that I don’t have his looks, and he doesn’t have my brains. Funny guy, and oddly forthright.
So we were talking, and as the bus stopped outside Lady Brabourne’s, two girls got on. The bus was fairly crowded, and they were standing behind us.
One of the girls was absolutely beautiful: Slender, flawless skin, the works. The other one was a little plump, and had frizzy hair.
Just then, the gentleman in the seat near the window in front of Ri got up and left. So Ri turned to the pretty girl, and asked her to take his seat. She said ‘thank you,’ and sat down.
Pretty soon, the other guy in the seat got up. The other girl was standing right behind Ri. But Ri didn’t ask her to sit. He took the seat himself, and sat next to the pretty girl. Ri being who he is, they were soon talking, of course. He really is very smooth, you’ve got to give him credit for that.

The reason I started writing this whole piece is because this girl had an expression on her face that is all too familiar.
It was like she was saying to herself, “Well, what were you expecting?”
So when the guy in the seat in front of me left, I asked her if she would like to sit. She sat down, and I got another seat after a while.
If this was the movies, then I could probably have told you that we got to talking and I found that she was a lovely person, and that she volunteered for the SPCA, and liked talking about crazy conspiracy theories, and thought that Artemis Fowl was much better than Harry Potter. But this wasn’t, and we didn’t speak to one another, and then Ri and I got off the bus.

I gave that girl my seat because I recognized that look. I know what that feels like.

Now, I’m not going to say that I am blindingly ugly, or that I have no female friends. I am not, I am average looking, I suppose, and I do. It is just that if they do like me, and value my friendship, it is because I’m smart, and usually nice to talk to, and many other such nondescript reasons. No one ever thinks I’m hot and that’s alright with me. My self esteem doesn't hinge on my looks.
But, once, just once, I would like to have some absolutely superficial, yet very attractive girl look at me and think, “I wish I knew that guy.”

You probably have no idea what I’m talking about. But that’s alright, too.