Dragonfly In The Sky

Where are you. Get over here fast. The whole batch is waiting outside the exam hall. You are the only one who is not. The Head of the Department has been calling your name out for the last ten minutes.

Insanity. I am not supposed to be there, the Forensic Medicine HoD told me in no uncertain terms yesterday evening that I cant take that practical exam today at any cost whether or not I have the valid medical documents to validate my absence for the last two weeks.

I haven’t studied. . . a word! I am not even at home, I am in the middle of my lunch. It will take me atleast twenty minutes to reach home and get ready even if I get up right away and leave my lunch midway. The exam was supposed to start at 2:00, its 2:10 already. It will be 2:30-2:40 by the time I get there.

Hey don’t worry. Nothing will happen. You better get over here asap for your own good. I will teach you whatever I can (cuts the line)

I got up and paid for the meal I never had, dived on my bike. The rest of my journey to the apartment is urban legend. It was a red bullet, not a mobike, shooting through the peaceful streets looking for an obstacle or pig to ricochet on.

The computer was on, Atlantis- The Lost Empire paused at its climax. I laughed to myself as I wore my white coat and combed my hair neatly because when I stared at the mirror the guy looked totally alien to the situation. Sure he looked like any bloody doctor, like it was his birthright to stare back at me and smile like there was no crisis happening even in the hour of doom. This, is not abnormal, unnatural or fake. In medicine this is what you do, quite naturally.

In human physiology, there is a component that protects us during emergency, a neuro- endocrine reflex that triggers the brain to brace your mind and body for impact. But that is after all theory. I had to pray at the dressing table, it was an appeal for a miracle in an absurd situation.

I feel no hypocrisy in protecting my faith despite diving into a scientific environment. Nor do I belong to the rigid Brahmin family that forces religion down your gut, my parents have allowed me to explore and derive my own faith and inspirations from life and experience. They are flexible enough, to let me convert to a different religion tomorrow if I want.

The ride to the exam would have provoked death even in his most euphoric trance. I didn’t die but an accident happened on the way. My tires screamed near the stationery shop because even they couldn’t believe that in the mad rush to reach an exam that started twenty minutes ago, I had left the most basic tools to pass an exam on my study table.

I reached the exam hall at 2:35. Thirty Five minutes after scheduled commencement. My batchmates were still in the corridor. Unbelievable.

Instead of giving me the usual screw you stare, Rangarajan smirked at me and told me to go back home because he had told the HoD that I was in Bangalore, that I wont be sitting for the internal. I didn’t care to believe him, I laughed at him, when I walked into the exam hall and met the HoD. I believed him.

My father’s letter was lying on the table, next to the Chief. The seal was open “Baa Baa Rajakumara (Come Come Prince) Time yenu? Pardon, neevella dod dod schoolinda barthiralla? English medium. Tell me what shall we do with people like you? We have to wait? . . Make special trunk call to Bangalore to get appointment to make you to come and write exam?”

“Sorry sir. Yesterday when I showed you the medical certificates you. . .”

“Idiot fellows. Maathadbeda (Don’t talk). . . This will be your last and final warning okay? Eeginda classella bunk aagbaardu. Get Out.”

During our friendly chat I was contemplating telling him that I didn’t know anything. But that would have been a terribly wrong move. All the bones we were supposed to analyze had been neatly arranged on the granite ledge that bordered around the exam hall against cards with our roll numbers, two bones per number. My number was not far from where he was sitting. I had no choice. I took a peek at my bones while he was busy lecturing me. Skull and Sacrum.

The voice, that had summoned me to this hellhole experience was Mahi's. Sushen and he came over, we shook hands, he gave me a reassuring smile.

“We still have time, the attender told me it will start at 3:00. We have almost 20 minutes. I’ll teach you everything you’ll need to know.”

What Mahi and Sushen did with that time was paranormal. 35 logical explanation points for the skull in a systematic visual order, highlighting the presence/absence of these features in their own skulls. They proceeded in a systematic spatial sequence that I will never forget. First they started from above and traversed downwards - the parietal and frontal eminences, forehead, globella, orbits, orbital fissures, frontonasal curvatures, nasal apertures.etc proceeding downwards unto the mental foramen. Then from the midline laterally, from the cheekbones, zygomatic process to the mastoid and finally to the base of the skull, which contain many foramina and eminences. I glanced through a couple of diagrams. The skull was the more complicated bone so we gave it more time. The sacrum was smaller, easier to deal with so we gave it barely 5 minutes. Time was very tight. I didn’t even have time to contemplate the extent or repercussions of a possible failure. I walked into the exam hall still digesting features of the sacrum. I stepped to my seat, before they even announced the instructions I started vomiting everything I had stuffed down my throat, carefully in sequence, in the prettiest handwriting possible. I wrote all the features of my skull with side headings underlined in black against the blue writing. Each bone was for 5 marks, we had to write 10 points with diagrams. Unaware of the instructions initially, I had populated three pages with 25 points, when they finally announced the instructions it was too late, so I decided to further overkill with 3 diagrams of the bone, in different views, anterior, lateral and basal that I had studied in anatomy last year.

The Sacrum is a much simpler bone, easier to analyze than the skull. I wrote whatever I could remember from 15 minutes back. Drew some diagrams and faced the mouth of the Dragon.

The ‘mouth of the Dragon’ is the person who took my viva. He belches fire while asking a question. A clever façade, a defense mechanism to being taken for granted by students and staff – He will give you marks if he feels you have written your answers well and answered his questions satisfactorily, confidently yet humbly. Otherwise he will mercilessly fail you with disgraceful marks, no matter what. Many brilliant students unwittingly carry auras of arrogance in his eyes and fail miserably.

He leafed through the first two pages of my skull answer and shut the answer booklet. He didn’t even bother to look at the rest of it. I might as well have not written anything about the sacrum. He asked me 5 questions, 2 of them pertained to Forensic Medicine, 3 to anatomy . From first year and 25 minutes ago I presented everything I knew pertaining to his questions. It was all over before I knew it. He asked me where I was from, asked me how many marks he should award me, marked me and let me go.

I Passed!

I couldn’t believe it. Neither did Vishwamohan: What kind of luddite attends a forensic exam without studying?

But the wiser crowd reasoned and I agree with them in that, in medicine having a deep knowledge of a minority of the ocean doesn’t count as much as having a sound, superficial knowledge of a majority of it. Nor does the quantum of your knowledge beyond the compulsory requirement count as much as your ability in convincing the other person, to get them to trust in you, no matter how hopeless the situation is.

This, is the story of how I passed a Forensic Medicine exam I didn’t know I was attending till 10 minutes after it should have actually started, with first class marks when I was still pretty non-recovered from an illness. An exam with a 40% failure rate that I attended half an hour after the scheduled start without studying a word. All complex theories apart, If, I hadn’t exercised blind faith in a moment of insanity, I wouldn't have had the strength to let things fall into place. Things would have fallen out of place. Circumstances would have turned me the other way. You wouldn't be reading this because I wouldn't be a dragonfly in the sky. I would be swept away by the ocean.

Mountains in the Clouds

We had internal exams in a week, tons to read, so I forced a late nighter followed by some precious sleep, followed by… BANG, BANG, BANG!!! “OPEN THE DOOR!!!” BANG BANG BANG BANG….

“KRISHNA WAS KILLED LATE LAST NIGHT!”

His face was smashed. The shape of the pole he had crashed into had made its neat oblique complement on his face. The left side of his face….. well there was no left side left, just the skin on his forehead that had escaped the scrape, pulped flesh, clotted blood and crushed bone. The right side of his face was worse, Though the right side was absolutely untouched from the accident it will remain permanently etched in my memory. It was horrible. That paralysed expression of excruciating pain will haunt me for many years. Eyes so tightly shut that even hours after dying they have not relaxed, his teeth were clenched and tense. All his facial muscles were contracted to the maximum. Even the big hole in his skull behind his left ear hasn’t traumatized me as much as the permanency of the pain on his face.

Afooah tells me that it seems like only yesterday when she had first met Krishna, and he had told her that he was from the Bahamas and life was so good there, he was just waiting for these five years to run away so that he could get back there and practice with his father, in his hospital.

Mistakes can seem so harmless when we are unaware, till things start going wrong, till it becomes uncompensable.

Krishna , the first class-representative (C.R) of his batch was my immediate senior and was the son of the most sought-after Indian Orthopedic Surgeon in the Bahamas. On a late Saturday night, he and his friends decided to go out for a joy ride after a strenuous week of work on his new bike. Krishna’s father who had come down to Davangere two weeks back, had bought him a new bike. A Dark Blue Bajaj Pulsar 220, The most powerful of the Pulsar series. Dr. Murthy would never buy his son anything less than the best. Little did he know that two weeks later his son would, in his quest to put his ultimate bike to the ultimate test on Davangere’s roads, crash into a pole sticking its neck out into the road at 124 kmph. The boy was thrown off the bike and into the air to land on his face, on the left side, the same side that had taken the full insult of the blow with the electric pole to scrape on the road for several metres before coming to his mortal halt. All this happened in a flash, Krishna had only a few seconds to experience the horror and pain, and before he knew it, it was all over. The bike meanwhile continued to ride itself, riderless, like it was being driven by a Spirit of Death.

The next day, A large crowd had congregated outside City Central Hospital at 11.30 am - Half the Medical fraternity… Minutes later a well-dressed woman and a young girl appear from an auto. The woman walks towards the hospital, then slows down, then stops. She looks around unassumingly for a minute.
“Where is my son?” (silence) “Why are so many people standing here??” (silence) “Where is my son??”

Her face morphs into anxiety… Then, suddenly she goes hysterical

“WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO MY SON!!!!!! WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO HIM??? WHERE IS HE??”

5-6 Doctors approach her. One of them says something to her.

“(blood-curdling scream) NOOOO! NOOOO!! YOU ARE LYING!!!!! YOU ARE ALL LYING TO ME!!!!”

His sister is speechless. A silent tear rolls down her cheek. She looks like a part of her has died. The doctor then tries to pacify his mother and calm her down. But in vain.

“(earth-splitting scream) STOP LYING TO ME!!! BRING ME MY SON!!!!! BRING MY SON!!!!!!! BRING MY SON TO ME NOW!!!!”

His mother's mind cannot digest her son's death. She cannot accept the truth. She will not. Her mind doesn't want her to. It knows she wont be able to survive it.

“(tears gushing down her cheeks)LIARS!!! MY SON!! HE WAS THE ONE WHO CALLED ME HERE TODAY MORNING ON THE TELEPHONE…HE SPOKE TO ME…. HE WAS THE ONE WHO ASKED ME TO C-C-C-O-M-E H-H-E-R-E. HE WAS THE ONE....IT WAS HIM (breaks down uncontrollably)”.

For a moment it seems like her legs cant bear the burden of the situation anymore, she sits down on the hospital floor, then faints, collapses.

I was riding back home from Padma Condiments when I saw Moose, I waved to him. What surprised me was, he didn’t wave back like he usually does, I rode next to him to meet him. His face was pale and his eyes were red and glassy. I had never seen Moose in this state, he is one of the most rugged men I have met and nothing usually bothers him or shakes him, But when he said what he said, I was so shocked that I stalled my bike.

Vishaka, Krishna’s close friend is kept in the dark for most part of the morning following the crash. But later on, one of her book-smart but not so mature batch-mates informs her- and these are the words in her sms “Hey Vsaka, hrd Krshna died in a bike crsh… Rly sry ok?”. She first doesn’t believe it because… well because that’s the amount of credibility that the informant has, but when she asks her roommate and receives a reply of silence, she gets her doubts. She asks her roommate to tell her everything, fast, after being threatened with murder her roomie ultimately spills the beans to her.

Vishaka went nuts…She really did. She ran crying from the girls hostel barefooted to City Central, to find everybody crying. Everyone was crying….His Mom, His sister, His father (who was still in India), Nurses, Doctors, Friends, Batch-mates, Ambulance driver, even strangers cried after seeing the body. Vishaka stopped talking. Her family was called and her brother came to pick her up and take her home, to Bangalore, he had his engineering sem exam the next day.

Vishaka, a brilliant student, a talented dancer and orator… She was the other first class-representative of Afooah’s batch. She and Krishna were bold politicians, No one could stand in the way of their killer attitude. Vishaka hung herself,

Vishaka’s Parents were in Chennai. Their flight was delayed by half an hour, they arrived fifteen minutes after she killed herself. She wrote a 45 page suicide booklet to explain her decision, with individual sections dedicted to each of the important people in her life. Her brother came home from his exam to find his sister hanging from the fan. Hanging, eyes and mouth wide open, in a final desparate but failed attempt to breathe one last time.

There is much praise and sympathy for Vishaka’s martyrdom in Davangere, A true love story. She had died for a true cause, she had died for love. But, During the fourth minute of asphyxia, Vishaka realised that she had made the biggest mistake of her life, and there wasn't anything she could do about it.

Afooah is shattered. Minutes before killing herself Vishaka had called her to wish her a happy birthday.