8 August
What a presumptuous medical college! To expect all students to take two flights of stairs to the classroom in their stride! I thought that Jind was backward with its bumpy roads, cow dung cakes, and the whiplashes of the Haryanvi tongue. Wasn’t relocating to Delhi supposed to end all my woes?
A girl passed by, her slow, unsure steps signaling to me that she was a fresher too. “Batch 2021, first day?”
She winced as if I had drawn a gun on her.
“I’m Kabir,” I added quickly, unfazed by the dab of fear in her eyes. When I realized that she was not inclined to chat with me, I used my rank like Karna’s kavach, “All India Rank-25!”
“Oh!” Her cursory glance at my twisted back had placed me in another category. To cover up the rudeness, she hastily threw a “Great!” at me.
“You know class?” I was about to ask in Hindi, but her light skin and enchanting perfume marked her out as one of those elite, out-of-my-league R K Puram DPS kids. I suddenly craved to dart up on her list.
“What?”
“Where is the…?” She had moved on before I could mentally translate it into English.
“Second Floor… Anatomy.”
I started climbing with careful stumbling steps, my back twisted like a question mark. It felt like a damp towel being wrung out. A muscle knot. Chachi was so caught up in her chores that asking for a hot water bag had felt like too much of an imposition. I had quietly gulped down a tablet of baclof.
Four steps ahead, the girl turned to look at me. She watched my slow cricket-like hops, then glanced at her wrist watch with a narrow golden strap, then again looked at my neck screwed on to my back like a plastic toy. Looking at the signs of growing restlessness on her face, I told her that she should continue, adding a courteous “I insist” to my half-hearted plea.
I had hoped that she would be reluctant to leave me behind; at least ask me if I could manage on my own. Instead, she pulled a long face, like a student filling out an incorrect OMR despite knowing the right answers.
I recalled Ma’s consoling words when that boy who smelled of Nirma soap had hit me with the duster in school. The sharp edge of the duster cut my forehead, making a moon-shaped gash to the right side of my head. “You are no less than that boy. Put them in their place with your rank.”
Blood throbbed in my ears. I quickened my pace. I am no less than her, than anyone here. I’ll not let her win. I had climbed only a couple of stairs when my foot hit a wedge of cement on the cracked stair. I lost my balance and tumbled down.
Thanks to the twisted backbone, my skeleton protruded like a huge boil to my right. The scapula also jutted out on that side.
Up and down. Up and down. Up. And. Down!
How I wish they were just inflated philosophical ideas in my life too!
24 July
I was on the brink of tumbling off the bed when I woke up with a start. The realization that I wasn’t at home caved in on me.
A sinking feeling settled in my stomach. A lump lodged in my throat like a champagne cork. I tried pushing it away with sips of water, distracting my brain with daily chores, bingeing on Netflix, but nothing worked.
I closed my eyes and started inhaling deeply. I imagined my house, the carpet of grass, the fragrant Raat ki Rani bush, the seepage-stained sickly brown walls.
Monu’s face suddenly merged with Raat ki Rani leaves, green and jovial, varnished by rain.
28 July
I had set Papa’s Titan watch, with its sleek silver hands, an hour and a half ahead of the usual time, turning it into my own version of a smart watch. I wore it all the time — while bathing, going to bed, or even answering nature’s calls. Every single minute of the day. Like a second heart.
I needed this extra time to be ahead of others. To take the stairs if the lift was acting up. To walk if a rickshaw was not in sight. To pull myself up if I fell headfirst into a pothole. To meet the gaze of others defiantly. So what if I lost a bit of sleep? So what if my body writhed in exhaustion?
I couldn’t change the time on the clock in Chachi’s house. Soon after college, I will have enough money to rent a room. My room, my own room. I will cover its walls with clocks: analog, pendulum, round, square, framed like a banyan tree, ones with birds squeaking at every hour to alert me, the hours riding on the pink wings of a flamingo — one and a half hours ahead of every clock — my world cartwheeling ahead of theirs.
9 August
Sixty bright faces — the crème de la crème of the country — flock the lecture theater, either neck-deep in their books or chatting in hushed, courteous tones. The thought that I was one among them, away from the rusticity and coarseness of my hometown, fluffed me up.
Their sight brought back the memory of Monu Sangwan. Pulling on his hookah, blowing clouds of steam, and tapping his fingers to the tune of Roda Roda Tractor Chaale. How he had burst out laughing when I asked him to play Taylor Swift’s I Knew You Were Trouble: “tailor swift, a tailor’s song?”
I walked up to the front seat. The boy on the bench made space for me. His smile was far warmer and more inviting than the formal smile of acknowledgement.
“Name?” I asked him as I inflated the air cushion to support my back.
“Raghav,” he answered absentmindedly.
“And your rank?”
“1567.”
“Oh, your full name?” My eyes gleamed with vindictive curiosity.
“Raghav Singh.”
I wanted to continue to assert my superiority over him, but I had grown tired. He didn’t ask me anything either, as if doing so would hurt his macho male ego.
“In case you might be wondering if I’m from the disability quota…”
“Oh, come on, don’t be silly!” He yawned.
***
Everyone introduced themselves in the unofficial group with their names, hometowns, and hobbies.
Kabir Jha; Jind; writing, reading, watching movies; I used a semicolon instead of a comma, breaking my message into different lines to stand out.
My message was buried in a deluge of texts. Except for the unusual surnames — Jodhka, Khetarpal, and Ranga — there was nothing worth remembering. Most of them were from Delhi and had similar hobbies. (What more do you expect from nerdy couch-potato medical students?)
I posted my poem to attract eyeballs. “Prufrock, rest in the wilderness of my heart.”
I kept waiting, but no comments came from anyone, not even an emoji.
I was about to go to bed when a message popped up in my DM: Great! A nice poem!
My lips stretched into a big smile. Who was it? There was no name. Just a tilde. The DP showed a bunch of curls.
25 August
A shrill whistle interrupted Professor Rinita’s class. She was drawing the prostate, dividing it into three lobes, when the entire class cracked up. She turned towards us, eyebrows arched, her big, round eyes wide with surprise.
It took me a while to realize that it was my pillow whistling away. The air was gushing out of the pinhole, making an obscene sound.
I plugged the hole with both my thumbs. Prof. Rinita turned back to complete the diagram when the boy sitting behind me snatched it from my hand and spanked it with all his might. It shrieked like a bitch in heat.
“Kabir…” Prof. Rinita flung a chalk at me.
Why didn’t Monu Sangwan play such pranks on me?
2 September
Chachi asked me to check the boiling milk kept on the stove as she left for her bath. This meant that I was no longer invisible to her. Good news!
I stood in the kitchen for a long while. The relentless heat assaulted me from all directions — sweat streamed off my body in parallel tributaries, making my armpits and thighs feel sticky. The temperatures were at their highest in 129 years. I could raise the flame, but it would leave a burnt taste in the milk. Turning on the fan in the lobby meant not only wasting electricity but also chacha-chachi’s hard-earned money.
A drop of sweat slid into my right eye just when the milk was about to boil. It stung. I rubbed the eye vigorously. The milk began hissing out of the pan. I leapt towards the stove. My waist twisted. My foot slipped. I managed to grab the knob, but before I could turn it off, the milk had boiled over and scalded my palm.
Drying her hair on a towel, Chachi came into the kitchen and screamed hysterically, “Milk, milk… All of it has been wasted.”
The milk slathered on the sides of the aluminum bhagona in abstract patterns. My hand was still stuck to the knob. Chachi kept standing at the entrance, gritting her teeth, her palms clenched into fists.
The blister on my hand grew in size, its reddish rim pulsing with blood.
12 August
It’s Monu’s birthday. The image of his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down flashed in my head like an invisible code at the touch of a flame — scratching his golis or flexing his biceps whenever he spotted a hot, eligible girl.
But why suddenly after three years? The last time I saw him was after 10th grade boards. It was the last exam of mathematics, a subject that I tried hard to like but could never come close to. My wandering mind would miss a minus sign here or misread the number of zeros after the decimal there, forsaking all chances of a perfect score.
I was wondering if I had considered all the possible outcomes in the penultimate probability question when I saw Monu approaching me. Holi was around the corner, and he was holding a glossy gulal packet with a cock printed on it.
“I’m sure you will top again, chhokre.” He took a pinch of red gulal and smeared it on my forehead in the shape of a tilak.
“How dare you apply it without asking?” I dusted it off with my handkerchief.
He shouted with a toothy smile, “Bura na Mano Holi Hai!”
“Chal achcha. Gale toh lag jaa pata nahi phir kab milen.”
The school bus had started honking by that time. I smiled faintly at Monu before moving in its direction. From the window seat, I saw Monu retreat. Even after the bus had started moving, I kept staring at the spot, imagining him there, the left half of his body tilted, one arm half-flung in the air, as if trying to hug somebody.
I suddenly felt abandoned by God.
***
For-ward-back-ward-for-ward-back-ward-for-ward-back-ward
I started repeating in the evening when my eyes turned sore after a close line-by-line reading of Guyton and Grey’s over the entire afternoon. I sped up. The words began blending into one another. Soon, they whittled down to mere alphabets.
11 August
“Have you read Proust?” I saw Raghav in a new light, a human, with his curly hair, crooked nose, and the mole on his right lip.
Proust’s name sounded so familiar to Prufrock that it felt like a prank to me. With a hint of arrogance, I replied, “Oh yes, who wouldn’t have?”
“Not many here would have heard their names.” Raghav’s eyes were deep pools of wonder.
“What have you read of him?”
I could have easily confessed that I have only read Hindi novels, but that would make me sound like a dehati. “Oh, that book… I’m forgetting its name now… I had read it long back.”
“Swann’s Way, you mean?” His voice was mischievous, as if he’d caught my white lie.
I nodded, avoiding his gaze. A new thought invaded my head: Is rank enough to put someone in place?
His smile was twisted into a question mark.
14 August
I heard snatches of Monu’s regal, deep-throated voice in my dream. A voice smooth like a dollop of butter skidding on the skillet. Many hands were trying to catch hold of his supple, clean-shaven throat, in which Adam’s apple bobbed in and out.
One was mine too.
The thought of Monu feels right, feels wrong.
Was Monu not that bad after all? I was jolted awake. Eek. He was the embodiment of all the stupidity and shallowness I associated with that small town. He would sit on the last bench with his hooligan friends who thought classes were extended Tinder sessions. Half the time he would frolic in the ground; the rest would be wasted in becoming a murga in front of the principal’s office. How could I even think about someone who had a dumbbell for his DP?
18 August
Undressing for a bath, I gazed at my body in the oblong mirror at the sink splattered with toothpaste specks and soap suds.
Oval face, mrignayani eyes, a sharp nose. Like a Hollywood model. My heart began to pound as I looked at the rest of my body. I clamped my eyes shut.
My chest and waist — the wreckage of a car smashed in a head-on collision.
Monu was right: it was the body that mattered.
What would Raghav think of my body?
And Monu?
7 September
What a great day today! Raghav took me to his favorite Chaat Corner in Shankar Market. He liked the atta golgappas. He said they were bigger, crisper than the sooji ones.
Raghav would devour the entire golgappa in one gulp, contorting his face when the green, tangy water assaulted his palate. He would then chew it leisurely, making satisfying crunching sounds.
All this time he kept looking at me. Something about the way his luscious lips moved, the way his eyes blazed with an unspent desire, sent shivers down my spine.
The dull throb in my spine seemed to intensify with each passing moment. He sensed my discomfort with a cursory glance, but today he seemed lost in his own world.
20 August
Chacha sent me a note in his broken English: If you don’t have study, will you come to the wedding?
Pakka se, I replied, topping it up with a smiley. I didn’t feel up to it, but refusing chacha about anything feels criminal.
A picture of the bride and groom was displayed on a flexiboard at the entrance. Their eyes were locked in such an intent gaze that it seemed they had known each other from past lives.
“Forever,” said the legend scrawled beneath.
Not love, just a fleeting fever that would go down with the world’s bitter medicine. I chuckled.
I walked up to the hostess when Chacha called. She was decked in a sparkling golden lehenga, and her face was coated with gaudy makeup, a pretentious smile, and layers of fat.
She responded with an uncertain smile to my namaste. As Chacha and I moved towards the banquet hall, she told Chachi in an undertone, “Don’t you feel happy about not having children? What a pain if your child turns out to be defective like this!”
Chachi added quickly: “He studies at AIIMS.”
30 August
Raghav took me to the Lodi Gardens. A bone-dry, blustery loo greeted us. The grass was singed at the edges. Flowers drooped like the skin of starving infants. The dry yellow-and-brown leaves snapped under our feet.
“Aren’t you considering surgical correction?” He asked, his voice filled with hesitation.
“That’s why I’m here,” I said, plucking a tuft of grass.
“What?”
“My parents don’t have the money. When I become a doctor, I’ll get myself treated first.” I began laughing, adding, “Becoming a doctor to become a patient.”
A dreadful silence surrounded us. I began speaking out of fear. “When I was a child, I’d try to look up at the sky. I’d always fall down.”
“Not this time,” Raghav said with a twinkle in his eyes.
“Let me be.”
“Come on, try it.”
He held my neck and back as I began to bend backwards.
I took an unhurried look at the sky. Its vast blue expanse, curdled clouds, a black bird that looked like a piece of flying coal. I could look at it as much as I wanted to, without the fear of falling.
“I can see God from here,” I shouted.
“How does it look?” Raghav’s clasp loosened around my waist.
16 September
The results of the first physiology class test came in.
I wrote succinct, “to-the-point” answers, just as Prof. Rinita had instructed. Even then, I got only ten marks out of twenty. Fifty percent. Just passing marks.
Only 34 students passed, with the best score being only fourteen marks. I still felt wretched. Why didn’t I get the highest score?
The inner voice cautioned again: You can’t fall behind anyone. People will trample upon you to get ahead.
Raghav scored only nine marks. Why did he look relaxed despite having failed the test?
Are high ranks and high scores not enough achievements to make someone happy?
***
I invited Raghav to Chachi’s home in the evening. I locked my room, but Chachi kept knocking at the door incessantly, first asking about the tea, then bringing it, then taking away the used cups. When reasons ran out, she concocted them.
If it had been my home, I’d have shouted at Ma.
Here, only a glare, that too, a timid one.
4 October
“I can’t do it anymore,” I heard Chachi say as I neared their room to get a comb. They were whispering to one another. I stopped at the door.
“I miss the bus at least twice every week. And you know how expensive it is to drive a car.”
“Why do you have to pack his lunch?”
“Will you pay twenty grand for the canteen? It wouldn’t have mattered for a month or two. Just because both of us earn, everyone thinks we are rolling in money. Nobody realizes how expensive Delhi is. On top of that, there are EMIs on the flat, the car, everything.”
“Listen, I can’t say no to my brother. Before our marriage, Bhabhi let me live with them.”
“So, why aren’t you doing everything for him? I can’t roll out so many rotis early in the morning. You don’t even get out of bed till all is done.”
“It’ll be very difficult for Kabir to manage in the hostel.”
“I know, I do. It will be equally tough if my fuse blows all the time.”
30 September
Nobody remembered my birthday except Raghav.
He gave me a print of Frida Kahlo’s “The Broken Column”. Frida stood alone in a barren landscape, the ground flaking like snake skin all around her. Her body was split into two perfect halves that resembled DIY blocks held together with a thick metal rod and corset.
“Why don’t you accept yourself?” The words in cursive at the bottom said.
***
Differently abled, not disabled, they’d teach us at school while everybody looked at me with pity.
The government changed it to Divyang. Divinely-abled? Blessed? Bullshit.
The disability pension remains a pittance. Two-and-a-half thousand, that too only if you are forty percent disabled on a certificate.
Changes and more changes. Gurgaon to Gurugram; Allahabad to Prayagraj. Something should keep changing in a democracy. Even if it is only the name.
What is in a name? A lot, Mr. Shakespeare!
19 September
Today marked the beginning of our first clinical rounds, our inaugural visit to the hospital. We donned white coats, tucked little hammers into their side pockets, and draped stethoscopes around our necks. We had started together in the lecture theater, so my secret trick of an extra one-and-a-half-hour didn’t work. The rest of the batch was ahead of me, chatting and joking in their comfortable circles while I struggled to keep up, panting and constantly being pushed to the sidelines.
We were dispatched to the medicine ward to examine a case of ascites. An unpleasant odor, a mix of blood, sweat, and rust, assaulted our nostrils. It was a rundown building, with no air or natural light and sickly green mold creeping on the walls. The sporadic groans of patients gave it a ghostly aura.
We were divided into groups of 10. Our patient was a twenty-five-year-old young man, his abdomen the size of four footballs. I had rote-learned the history-taking, examination, and investigation of the clinical case from Davidson last night. I asked for his name with a confident smile.
The boy scanned me from head to toe, grinned with his spittle-smeared teeth, and asked, “Are you a doctor?”
Kamlesh, right next to me, let out a giggle with his cracked lips and pushed me away. Tears welled up in my throat. I couldn’t ask anything further.
I felt like Philoctetus. Like him, I had earned a handful of arrows of my rank, but suddenly lost all of them.
Now I’m just a pus-filled blister.
4 September
Kabir: Raghav: Monu = unfree: free: overfree
11 September
When I told Raghav I wanted to talk to him alone about Monu, he suggested his house. I readily agreed.
A human-size Buddha statue welcomed me at the entrance. Everything in his house was a shade of white, each surface shining like a mirror. Large paintings with gothic characters adorned the walls, painted in maroon and royal blue. I felt like a black sheep in the middle of such opulence.
The servant asked me to wait. The walls of Raghav’s room were adorned with portraits of writers, their skin taut, expressions mysterious, and solemn eyes filled with a fear of an impending doom.
Postcards with photos of bare-chested men with chevron moustaches, their hands wrapped around each other’s shoulders, posing in a garden with bushes of yellow and red flowers, lay scattered on the study table.
I took a closer look. My fingers began to move over their naked bodies involuntarily. My lips stretched into a clandestine smile. What would these men think of me? My body? Would they ever touch me?
Raghav came and held me from behind. “Aren’t they handsome?”
I felt like I had been caught red-handed. My body began to shiver violently.
I wanted to tear those pictures into so many tiny pieces that nobody could join together.
12 October
I told Ma that I wanted to shift to the college hostel.
“Did Chachi say something?” Her voice was sharp like a glass shard.
“I don’t feel like staying here.”
“Why?”
“It’s too far from the college. Travelling up and down every day eats into my time and energy.”
“Sure, there is nothing else?”
“Yes.”
“Pakka?”
I broke down and started sobbing. She got a chance to vent her frustration. “If we had as much money as they do, we would’ve taken so many children in. Three years… three whole years, I fed your chacha and washed his underwear. Didn’t complain even once.”
She sucked in a deep breath and started again, “They can’t do even this much for their real nephew. Damn them, damn! No wonder God left them childless.”
Where am I in all of this?
***
I suddenly remembered Ajneya’s quote: “Sorrow scrubs everyone, and perhaps it might not know the art of liberating itself, but those scrubbed by it learn the lesson of keeping everybody free.”
Had sorrow scrubbed me so hard that it had dented me forever?
17 September
We were sitting on an iron bench in the college park next to the library. A gentle draft brought a slight relief to the humid evening.
“Do you believe in love?”
“Is there any other option?” He contorted his face in a smirk.
“But aren’t there many kinds of love?”
“Haha. Bullshit! A distraction of the highest order. Humans have confused it with all kinds of pleasant emotions.”
“What do you mean?”
“Most who talk about the grand gestures of love haven’t got it themselves—not even once.”
“Do you mean that love can only happen through the body?”
“Why do you have to butt in with your body all the time?” He sounded irritated.
“Because I’m not able-bodied like you.”
“Exactly my point. People think of the negation of the lack as love. For you, the body is the window to look at the world. But it is also the only crack through which you can let love enter. After it has entered, the rest would feel an excess, and you would never think of it as love. Only what feeds into our self becomes love for us.”
“But this is where we began, no? That love is different for different people.”
“No, no, what I’m saying is that we only have half-baked ideas about love. Love is love; it happens to you. Like a snake bites you. Like a car with an inebriated driver that crashes into yours. These are random events happening without any logical sequence. The words and definitions and books are there to tell you that what you’re doing is right and willed by God—and most of all is love!”
“Right…meaning what?”
“So, for example, if I do this,” he began to trail his fingers across my thighs, “would you think of it as love?”
His fingers felt like a black, ugly-looking insect that had come darting from the rolled-down car window.
All I wanted to do was push them away.
***
Raghav’s touch on my thighs reminded me of when I had collapsed on the hot, grainy sand after running almost half of the oval ground.
Monu was sitting on his haunches when I regained consciousness. He propped me up with an arm under my back.
When I began to limp, Monu offered to help, but I refused. When I kept limping, he looped his arm around my neck without caring about my silent protests. I felt uneasy at first, but then a tingling sensation took over, as if my body was a stack of bottlebrushes, and it felt perfectly normal to go to any extreme to safeguard that feeling.
When we entered the class, I looked at everybody with such pride that I had never experienced before.
Then a boy from his hooligan gang shouted, “Mian ji has brought his pregnant wife for a maternity checkup.”
I had thought that Monu wouldn’t be affected and instead accompany me to my desk, but he got rid of me like pubic hair.
Monu can never like me like Raghav does.
23 September
I want Raghav’s generous, caring, full-hearted touch.
And Monu’s lithe, pliant neck: his sharp Adam’s apple bobbing in and out.
I want a customized human.
28 September
I dialed Monu. When it began to ring, I cut the call.
I called again, but my heart began pounding with such force that it threatened to burst out of my rib cage. I cut the call again.
The third time also, I cut the call.
My mobile began vibrating. Monu’s name flashed on the screen. I wanted to talk to him, but I didn’t know what to talk about.
“Hello…Hello Monu,” he was speaking from the other side.
His voice was gruff and authoritative. I wanted it to last; I wanted it to stop. Was this Monu? How could he? He couldn’t be Monu, my Monu?
Raghav was wrong. The presence of absence also meant something. Perhaps love?
Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash
