PANGS

Day One of my Paediatrics posting. The lady sits beside me in a share-rickshaw. Her son sits in her lap. She looks fiftyish. He isn’t more than five.

His eyes are strange. His head sways with every bump. His arms flail. His legs are limp.

His mother hugs him closer. When his tiny fist accidentally punches me, she smiles in apology.

Is it Down’s? Delayed development? Polio? Or is the child just sleepy?

Should I meet them in a clinic instead of a rickshaw, will I have an answer?

*

The Gynaecology OPD is packed. A Psychiatry resident brings a young girl to be examined by my Head of Unit.

She was married off as a child. Her husband is an alcoholic. Her mother-in-law forced her into prostitution. She conceived once – and delivered. She is pregnant again, and wants to abort.

My unit doesn’t perform abortions.

She is nineteen. Her furtive eyes settle on my textbook, which she examines with interest.

‘Aap yahaan seekhte ho kya?’  

She looks at me eagerly. I don’t know where to look.

*

It started with leukaemia. When bladder cancer followed, he went to Urology. But Anaesthesia pronounced him unfit for surgery. And Medicine diagnosed tuberculosis. Then he fractured his leg.

He aged twenty years in two. Whenever we met, he’d complain about how doctors make him run around without explaining what is wrong with him. I never knew what to say.

Recently, I spot him again in the corridors. I duck into the nearest doorway and hope he hasn’t seen me.

*

The houseman scrubs her back with antiseptic. A ward-boy holds her still. When the lumbar puncture needle pierces her spine, she begins to scream.

She is one-and-a-half years old.

The first attempt draws blood. So does the second. And third. With the fourth, fluid emerges. The houseman sighs with relief.

Why couldn’t he get it right the first time? Why didn’t a registrar perform the procedure?

How could he avoid it if the baby wriggled? How will he learn?

*

A train arrives at and departs from the opposite platform. Five minutes later, I notice them.

A little old man and a little old woman have alighted. She totters ahead with a cane. He follows, with his hand on her shoulder. Neither of them can see.

Where from? Where to? At their age, why commute? At that hour, how will they get home?

By the time they cover the length of the platform, the next train arrives.

*

The conductor starts issuing tickets on my last bus home.

At the first stop, a youth gets in. The conductor rushes down the aisle and sits next to him. He puts his arm around him and speaks affectionately, and loudly. The boy squirms, but smiles shyly and nods from time to time.

The conductor wears a hearing aid. The boy never utters a word.

I haven’t gotten my ticket. But at my stop, I rise and silently slip off the bus.

No one notices. The conversation goes on.

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

LESSONS FROM MY FIRST DELIVERY

Not one that I underwent (impossible), or one that I conducted (impractical), but the one I witnessed. Here’s what I learned:

Tum do, tumhaara ek. Minus one, if you’re ambivalent about the whole no-sleep-no-life-potty-all-over-the-place routine.

All men desirous of a second child deserve a penectomy. And their very own vaginas.

Wives murdering spouses who pressurise them into bearing more children, should be let off by courts, citing extenuating circumstances.

Instead of Mumtaz Mahal after her fourteenth child, it is Shah Jahan who should have died. Look at the cheek of that man – he built her a monument boxed in by four giant phalluses.

When aggrieved women who are mothers several times over, unite to protest the lack of male uteruses – now that’s a labour union.

Medical caution aside, I fully sympathise with pregnant women who demand epidural anaesthesia and C-sections. Those who aphorise about ‘no pain, no gain’ can go have a baby, just for fun.

Episiotomies without adequate anaesthesia merit the intervention of Human Rights International and the UN Peacekeeping Force.

For a woman about to pass out of exhaustion become a mother, delivery and deliverance is the same thing.

No medical specialty requires humane doctors more than OBGY.

Soon-to-be fathers stationed in the waiting room while squirming at the cries of their wives, should be made to sit in front of a large angry sign saying – ‘see what you did!’

The only way that men can possibly bond with their wives during delivery is by self-inducing constipation, then straining to relieve themselves. Not that they’d even come close to the real thing.

Roving playboys who abandon unwed mothers need to be sniffed out, tracked down and devoured alive by rabid dogs.

Male schoolteachers spouting Moral Science have no business talking about the Dignity of Labour.

Surrogate mothers are misguidedly altruistic, heedlessly mercenary, mindlessly masochistic or the most heroic human beings alive.

Women who want to birth twins should have their heads examined.

Condoms are singularly the most important inventions since the discovery of rubber.

The most effective family planning measure is to drag the loving husband into the labour ward and force him to watch his wife pop out a two-and-a-half kilo un-streamlined mass through an aperture that is normally just a few centimetres wide.

I understand all the hoo-ha about compulsory sterilisation. Now let’s give Sanjay Gandhi a Bharat Ratna.

Despite teddy bears, Justin Bieber and a pregnant Schwarzenegger in Junior, there is nothing cuter than a newborn baby.

No muscle in the entire male or female body is stronger than the vagina.

Women are indubitably the stronger sex.

I now understand why, every year on my birthday, my mother relives her own eighteen-hour labour in odious and obstetric detail. Thank you, Aayee.

My great-grandmother gave birth to twelve (living) children. I’m going to try and get my road named after her.

 * * *

WHAT I LEARNT FROM PIGEONS

I have but recently become a parent.

I woke up one morning to find an empty nest atop the cupboard in my study. The next day saw two small eggs in it. A week later, they hatched, and I became an adoptive father to a pair of baby pigeons.

They were furry little cretins. All they’d do was eat the food their parents would forage for them, create a racket when they spotted a stranger and huddle behind the adults when he came too close.

Then they grew up.

I remember how they’d practice flying. One of the adolescents would flap its wings for all it was worth while the other would refuse to leave the sanctuary of its twig-lined perch. Both, however, shared the burden of messing up the area and would swell like bullfrogs if anyone tried to prod them into learning faster.

There is no sound quite as maddening as the rapid flutter of a pigeon learning to fly. My study was littered generously on a daily basis and my home invaded by restless parents loath to leave their offspring alone. I couldn’t even approach my study table and was disbarred from a part of my own house.

A month later, my patience was finally exhausted when I found two more eggs in the nest. My dad displaced the faint-hearted sibling from its sanctuary and carefully carried the wreath of twigs downstairs to set it down outside.

Five minutes later, the eggs were no longer in it. The younger pigeons were suddenly homeless while the parents had lost two of their children to a passing hungry crow.

I hope my story will be different from theirs.

You see, I too will have to leave my home some day. But like the pigeons, I haven’t yet finished learning how to survive on my own. Even I make occasionally successful attempts to do things well and often create similar messes for myself and my home in the process. Some of my dreams are still unborn and I’d like to leave home at a time of my own choosing.

My worst nightmare, however, is not having a home to go back to. I flutter, I fly, I fail, and I seek the refuge of my home every day.

I think the pigeons deserved that as much as I do.

But the nest itself has disappeared. The parents keep flying back, looking for their lost abode, mourning the loss of their family. I do not have the heart to drive them away again.

Their children, I fear, are lost to me forever.

* * *