The slow death of my intellect...

Gentlemen, women lead very comfortable lives. It's great to be women. Really.
Sure, we can pee standing up, and they have this glass ceiling thing, but really, can smaller lines at public toilets and greater economic freedom compare with the feel of a face after a face scrub has been used on it?

I tell you, you poor sods, it can't.

Two years ago, I was one of you- I thought aloe-vera was some kind of cheese they made from goat's milk.

But now, my friends, I have a hand sanitizer; lip balm; face scrub; and cocoa butter foot lotion. Foot lotion! (I never use it because I used it once and I fell, but I have it, none the less.)

I have three ply toilet paper to wipe my nose with when I have a cold.

I am delighting in the pleasures of a whole world I never knew existed.

This is almost entirely courtesy my girlfriend, who initiated me into the secrets of soft face-skin and uncracked lips. She bought me things, things that in my blind ignorance I left unused for months, but insidiously, one by one, these things have crept into my life and now...

Man, oh man. Women have it good.

I am the Mr. Botibol of air guitar.

Music sloshes against the walls of my mind.
Procrastination is going to kill me.

I went to the joo today to meet an old friend of mine who is leaving for another city. I always feel sad whenever any of my friends leave, even if I don’t see them very often. I think its because in the back of my mind I know I could see them when I wanted, if I went somewhere, but now, suddenly, I can't.

Anyway, while I was there, someone asked me what it was like to dissect a human body. After the longest time, I mumbled something lame, like “It was great,” and then I stopped because I had nothing to say.

How do I explain to someone that standing in front of a gutted corpse reeking of formaldehyde, my eyes and nose burning, was one of the single most wonderful experiences in my life?

Look. No one has to dissect anything in medical school. You must study anatomy, you must be able to identify structures and trace them, but you don't actually have to dissect.

I did because I wanted to. There were a few of us who did, and the four of us would get together and read up on it, and bunk classes to dissect specific parts of the body we were allotted.

The reason I liked it, apart from the academic satisfaction, was that, for me it was almost a mystical experience.

I feel vaguely foolish even as I write this. I am not a theist. Not from any philosophic sophistry, or anything, but just because I can’t make that leap of faith. I wish I could, actually. Or even that I could have the conviction that God does not exist.

I have neither. I exist in a limbo of uncertainty. I imagine having that kind of faith would be like warmth in my head, a feeling like you get when you screw your eyes closed and tilt your face up to the sun on a winter morning. Perhaps true faith needs a special arrangement of neurons or something: a faith organ. I wouldn’t know.

Your own winter sunshine in your temporal lobe. It must be nice.

But that is the only time in my life that I felt that I was something more than clay. That I was intricately made, beautifully designed; that I was special, not because I was smart, or talented or anything, but just because I existed, like I won a race just because I showed up. It was beautiful, a heady, wonderful feeling. It was magic.

All of this flashed through my mind when she asked me that question, and I couldn’t put any of it into words, and I felt so stupid.

That’s ok. It doesn’t matter. But I’m pretty sure that if, tomorrow, someone asked me the same thing again, I’d still be left winded, searching for elusive words, to frame unfamiliar feelings.

“Sometimes I think that we should move up to Vermont,

Open a bookstore, or a vegan restaurant.”

You know, sometimes I do think that. I’d love to have a bookstore. I was having this conversation with my sister yesterday.

I can just picture myself sipping coffee in a well lit bookstore reading Chuck Palahniuk, and I do love wood finish. But it probably wouldn’t work out. I’d probably pummel anyone who tried to ask me if I stocked Sweet Valley High books or something. Or refuse to sell someone who buys a Barry Manilow CD anything by Pablo Neruda. I’m finicky like that.

But I digress. The thing is, I will never have a life like you see in all the romantic comedies, the New York Life, you know, like one of those pathologically cute metrosexuals who own a bookstore in The Village and have more gay friends than straight. I won’t have that, and sometimes I really wish I could. Really.

The best I can hope for is a medical drama life. That’s not fun. House is miserable, and Angelina Jolie dies at the end of Beyond Borders.

Crap.

Ok, too many TV parallels.

The thing is, I’m not hippie material. I always knew that. Sitting naked on the grass singing Kumbaya is not my idea of fun, and I’m a firm believer in periodic haircuts.

I know I’m not a hippie, but what I’m asking is did I have to be a yuppie? And it’s no use telling me that I’m not.

Young. Upwardly mobile. Well I’m young now. And upwardly mobile? I frigging hope so!

All the books, and all the music I like, and my image of myself, it always made me feel like I was an individual. Not someone in the common herd.

Not me.

Do you ever feel dislocated? Ever feel like you are not you?

After two years of driving surreptitiously through blind-spots-of-traffic-policemen sort of places I finally have a license.

In my driving test, which took roughly 20 seconds to complete, I was asked to demonstrate the left turn signal. Period. The rest of the time I was there, all several hours of it, I was queuing for the test itself, or for a picture, and once in front of a stall to buy some water.

Oh, and yes, I paid my bribe to the sergeant (or 'surgeon', as everybody else seemed to refer to him). That is, I paid the money to the tout, who then passed it on discreetly. Very open sort of thing: pay bribe, get license.

No wonder the roads are all going to hell.

But I'm not complaining. I'm a bit shaky on the parking the car bit.

This is Aquilus. See Aquilus sit. Sit, Aquilus, sit.

I’m standing next to Shaky in the Ob/Gyn Out Patient Department. The OPD is crowded, as always. There are pregnant women, women in pain, and women with cancer; sometimes all at once. I’m never happy to be in the gynae wards. It’s crowded, and loud, but you always feel on edge, like there is a breathless, expectant hush underneath all that noise. Too many people are desperately unhappy here.

Meet Aquilus, uneasy amidst disease.

A young girl comes in, she is fourteen. Not the nubile fourteen of Humbert Humbert’s dreams, she is a thin, sullen, sad fourteen. There is a distinct smell, an unwashed smell, which hovers on the verge of offensive. She is wearing some sort of caftan, in bright blue, of some sort of synthetic material. This is obviously her best dress, but there is blood on it around her crotch.

This is Aquilus, wrinkling his nose.

So we take the short history we’re supposed to. She started bleeding the day before yesterday. No, she hadn’t menstruated ever before. No, she doesn’t live at home, but on the Sealdah platform. Yes, her abba knows, she lives with her abba. She has two abbas, one in the village and one on the platform. Yes, she ran away from home, she didn’t like her stepmother.

Meet Aquilus, king of the two minute interview, monarch of talk show hosts everywhere.

The professor comes toward us. “Taken the history? What is your case?”

We’re all mystified. “Ma’am, she’s having her menarche,” Someone ventured.

The professor takes a quick look inside her vagina with a speculum. “Hm,” she says. “Did you ask if she is married?”

No one had. It wasn’t relevant, she was fourteen. “No, no, she isn’t,” someone mutters. We ask her if she is married as she sits up, almost jocularly. She doesn’t say anything. The professor cups her chin and lifts her face.

Tears spill from the angles of her eyes. Yes, she is married. She is married; her abba married her off a month ago. Her husband is a rickshaw-puller, like her abba.

“She has had a missed abortion. There is a product of conception hanging out of her uterus through the cervix. Do you notice the smell? The dead tissue is infected. This girl has conceived with her first ovulation.”

She is pregnant before she has had her first period.

Cut to Aquilus, sickened and appalled.

***

After the girl has left, we have a small lecture on missed abortions. The professor asks me to go and fetch the girl again so she can be admitted, and to see if her husband is here.

“Are we going to inform the police, ma’am?” I ask.

The professor makes a face.

“Statutory rape, ma’am,” I prompt. “The marriage, if indeed it exists, is illegal. We must inform the police.”

The professor looks at me. “Well,” she says. “See, if we scare her husband off, the girl is not going to be treated. So let’s just play along and admit her. After that, I’ll talk to the Head and see what he says, okay? Go fetch her, but don’t scare off her husband. Who knows if he is her husband or her pimp?”

I go to fetch her, and there is a middle aged man sitting next to her, grey in his hair, betel stained teeth, stringy and rawboned. I ask her to come back with me. The man looks at me. I am thinking, what should I do if he bolts? So I look back at him and smile. He sits back.

Here is Aquilus, smiling at a fourteen year old’s rapist.

***

The girl is shuffling out of the consulting room, her prescription and admission papers clutched in her hand, when the ayah calls to her, and hands her a ball of cotton soaked in antiseptic solution. She motions to the table. There’s a dark drop of blood glistening on the table. The ayah won’t wipe up the blood of a girl who lives on the Sealdah platform, she’s scared of HIV. The girl shuffles back to the table.

Fade out on Aquilus, stepping out of her way.

First day in the obstetrics wards. It’s both sunnier and smellier than you’d expect. The smell never fails to disturb me. It’s a smell compounded of that of the lochia, the secretion from the uterus of a woman who has just given birth, and the clean, new baby smell. It’s fishy and metallic, blunt and sharp, female but not feminine.

There’s a girl from Switzerland with us, doing part of her internship in our hospital. She’s doing the class with us. We have a case, Mrs. Ratna Something or the other. They insist that we say the ‘Mrs.’ She’s got thin arms, a small oval face and a startlingly big abdomen.
Nobody wanted to take the history, so I started. She just turned twenty. I’m surprised. Shaky, and A and S and I all look years younger than her, and we’re at least two-three years older. Next to her is a battered cell phone. It beeps, flashing ‘Low battery.’ She doesn’t react. She probably can’t read it.
But she’s done everything right. Smart girl. Went to the Health centre at twelve weeks, and after that went every month. She’s had all the medicines she was given. She doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink. Has no complication. This is her first pregnancy, she’s 9 months pregnant.
The professor comes. She is a small woman with hunched shoulders. She looks like the most civil vulture you’re ever likely to see. She is the kind who talks a lot about the idyllic village life. “Have you ever seen a newborn calf?’ she asked us once. I felt like saying I’ve seen newborn elephants, newborn alligators and newborn spiders on National Geographic. That’s life plus, man, there’s no dung, no mud, no frightened mother, no amniotic fluid.
Mrs. Ratna was referred to our hospital when the doctor from the primary health centre thought her baby was too small. She says they told her that her water dried up, and her baby’s too small.
The professor asks, “What is that?”
I say, “Oligohydramnios, with Intra-uterine Growth Retardation.”
“No.” She says. “You?” she asks Shaky.
“Oligohydramnios, with Intra Uterine Growth Restriction.”
“That’s right,” she says. “That’s the new term,” she says to me. “It was changed.”
“I didn’t get the memo,” I feel like saying.
All this time, we’re grouped at the head of the bed, and Mrs. Ratna sits in the middle, with her back arched forward, like she’s protecting her abdomen from us. Silly girl. As if she could.
“She has been having iron, and calcium, but she hasn’t had any folate,” The professor tells us. “And what could that cause, Sarah?” Sarah from Switzerland doesn’t know. Neither does Basabi from Budge-budge, or Sourav from Some Suburb of Calcutta.
“Neural tube defects like anencephaly and spina bifida, with associated polyhydramnios.” I say, when she asks me.
“Right. But there is also a statistical association with oligohydramnios, and obviously, Intra-uterine Growth restriction and fetal death.”
And she starts in on the etiology of oligohydramnios. I doodle on my pad and look at the top of Mrs. Ratna’s head, and hum.
At the end she says, “It’s strange that the doctor from the PHC prescribed Iron and Calcium, but not the folic acid. He must have forgotten.”
The phone beeps again in counterpoint to her voice. ‘Low Battery’ it says.
Mrs. Ratna is crying when we leave. Her husband was supposed to come in the morning, but he still isn’t here. I hope he hasn’t forgotten.