People who come to our hospital, come there because they are too poor to go anywhere else. They come from far-off villages, from hamlets you couldn’t locate on a map, and from slums in which you couldn’t believe people lived.

One day in the orthopedics wards, we were given a child to examine. She was 6 years old, and she had come with her mother. Wide-eyed and quiet, she let her mother answer all our questions.
Her mother said that she had fallen down and broken her arm at school one day. They lived in a village that didn’t have a qualified doctor, so they took her to a quack who dressed her arm with leaves to reduce the inflammation, and then put a plaster cast on it.
When they took the cast off, a month later, her hand was curled up, and it wouldn’t straighten.
It was a fairly straightforward case. She had Volkmann’s Ischemic Necrosis. Blood supply had been partially occluded to her forearm, by the cast, as well as possibly a tear in the artery.
They took her to the local health center. They were referred to the block hospital; I don’t remember the name of the place. From there they referred her to our hospital. They had come, the entire family, to Calcutta. The father waited nervously outside.

I don’t know what happened to her, we never saw her after that first day. As a matter of fact, she will never get back full use of her hand.
Poverty and ignorance- that is what this little girl lost her hand to. As will many other little girls, and boys.
But this post is not about that. That is neither good, nor bad; it is what it is.

What struck me was their hope. It didn’t matter that the doctors at all the other hospitals had told them that it could not be cured. They had come to Calcutta. All their problems would be solved here.
Hope glittered in their eyes, and quickened their speech.
Even the apathetic little girl, whose arm lay limply and uncomplainingly in the grasp of whomever cared to examine it, even she was touched with hope.

They had come to the city of miracles.

Hope is like that. I see it everywhere, in so many people.
They cure cancers in Vellore. They save people with heart surgery in Bombay. They will heal blindness in Chennai, and they will transplant livers in Boston, and forcing a live fish down your throat will cure asthma.

Blind, unrestrained hope.
A fresh start, a new existence, and my ulcers shall be healed, my limbs shall be made whole, and the scales shall fall from my eyes.



I wish I could find this place of wonder.
Somewhere I could be healed.

Apocalypse isn’t something that is handed to you on a platter. You have to achieve it.
Also, de-worming is good for you.

There are so many things that I didn’t know before I wrote my book and came to the big city.
Like the fact that Lennon isn’t dead. He just went undercover. He lives in the big city in an underground room. Or a turret, I don’t know, he wouldn’t tell me. He is ashamed of where he lives.
Or the fact that Hitler wasn’t just killing Jews. He was trying to exterminate everyone except the worm people.
Or that the Incas only sacrificed worm people to appease their hungry gods.

Or the fact that worm people are everywhere. To recognize them, Lennon says, you must look at their eyes. They are blank. Vacant.

Now I see them all. They are at all these book parties that I am invited to, all these talks I must give, all the plays I am invited to see. Vacant people, with nothing to say, though they talk all the time. They never listen to what you say; I think they have an inner monologue going all the time.
In a conversation, instead of the appropriate response, if you say something quite different, they still make their appropriate response. It doesn’t matter to them, a conversation is a dance and they are fixated on their own moves, only their own moves.
They are beautiful to watch. I feel like a rock slab in a forest of rich, golden willowy reeds, I stay in one place and scuff my feet, and I watch them furtively, jealously, I watch their rich smiles and the darkness they hide inside their halos of sunshine.

It is terrifying. Sometimes I feel like we are the only persons left alive, Lennon and I, and I am drowning in a sea of billowing clouds and sophistry.
I become claustrophobic, I gasp for breath while the worm people do their polite dances, and sip their wine.
And it is such wonderful wine. Tart, and subtle, like ancient poetry.

And they don’t know that I know about them.

Like the girl whose name I have forgotten. Olive skin, with eyes shaped like olives. Only there is a hungry nothingness in those eyes. There were shadows on the walls, and she had no heartbeat, and a voice like low chimes that said nothing at all, and her perfume that was soft and cloying, like exotic spices touched with the faint tang of madness.
They are such graceful dancers, even when the dance means nothing at all.

That was the night I first met Lennon.
There were a lot of firsts that night.

Lennon told me that thing about the apocalypse. He always comes up with things like that. Blood is sterile, he said, when I hurt my thumb and I put it in my mouth. I asked him what he meant, why he said it. ‘Just like that,’ he said. ‘No reason. Because it is true.’

That is why we are on my motorbike now. I’m in front and Lennon is behind me. We’re speeding, but there is no one on the streets, its one of their holidays, they are all at their worm-people parties. Every so often, Lennon stoops and places something heavy on the road, and we speed up, and from behind us streams a conflagration, a wall of sound and fire that hits us and yet flows through us. And we scream with delight, and raise our arms and speed through the empty streets, the wind making our eyes water.

De worming, Lennon shouts.

My computer is still not fixed.

I have been spending way too much time at cyber-cafes.

I have loads of studies to do. Loads.

If there had not been one thing I am happy about, I would have cracked.

Chaos.

And Darkness.

And a plague on everything.

And a cancer for the cure.

Except for that one other thing, that is.

It is October again.
This is my favorite time of year.
For me the year ends, and begins here.


It’s the light.
It attaches to every surface, rich, and brown and thick like honey.


Everything smells different.
It is the death in the air, imminent, urgent, flapping its wings like a hovering bird.


This is how the year should die, after the rain in September and before the cold in November.
In stately October, where there is no petulant rain, nor singing heat, nor is the year hoary with cold.


I hope I die like this.
Strong, at the height of my powers, my mind keen, and my blood singing through my veins.
I want to be full of life, I want to feel it bleeding away as I die.
I will not die stupid with age, or wasted with disease, sickened by life.
I have seen too many deaths like that.


It is not in my hands, of course.
My death will not be suicide, and euthanasia is an abomination.
But I hope for this.
Perhaps I even pray for it.
To what? I do not know.


So I celebrate the death of the year.
Not the beginning.


Every birth is much the same.
Every death is unique.