I bring important news from the clinic.You know…The kingdom of green-walled waiting roomslined with plastic chairswhere patients wait like ticking clocksand children play with broken toystaken from a broken box,and piles of wrinkled magazinesare there to pass the time.
I join the queue and sitamong them, another birdperched on the singing wires;I have no use for the daily news,wasting away the protracted minutes,waiting for the triumph of diagnosis.
The nurse wears scrubs in playfulcolours, little umbrellaspattern her smock; her stethoscopedraped round her neck like a noose snappedfrom the gallows.
She balls my fist to extractmy blood, that crimson plasma.The redcoats gallop through the syringe,and fill a vial with secretsthat my body has cached.I’m a keg waitingto be tapped.
(I wonder whatever happened to the oldnurses in starched caps, white aprons, softsoled shoes that squeaked against the floorbeneath the crooked seams of white stockings)
I’m told to strip and swathed in paperlike a lump of meat at the butcher shop.The doctors come, looking grim;they mutter and place their heads togetheras though their collective thoughtscan summon a cure.
They offer to chip away the tumoursas though digging for gold.My body is full of those shiny nuggetsand I grow new ones every dayfor these miners to chisel out.They offer drugs that zip through meand prolong my ordeal;my body is an engine burning its oil.
I shuffle past the wheelchair-boundwho wait for their death bell to toll,holding shut the flap of my paper gown;their bald heads are like nodding eggs,their bruised arms are tethered to IVs that hanglike fat sacks of inconsistencies, filledwith fluid clear as tears.
I’m now at the mercy of the pitfalls of science.Soon I shall be one of them.
Illustration Courtesy: Vishnu Prasad © All Rights Reserved