God Falleth From the Skies

There’s not a single decision I’ve regretted right from the day my parents asked- Biology or Math? “Biology”, I said, and I never looked back. As far as my parents are concerned, there aren’t other things to do in the world. I was fifteen then. So one thing led to another, and I’m a doctor today. Well, sort- of. I have a few years to settle before I marry someone my parents like and approve of. She’ll have to be the same religion as me, for my parents to even consider her an eligible candidate. And I’m not gonna tell you what religion I belong to. Because that’s none of your fucking business, that’s all. You people are shit and intolerant. I have my reasons, and I have my reasons for not telling them.

I can say that. What can you do... Kill me and prove my point? But my name’s Lateef, so you’ve guessed already. It’s kind of a well-known joke here that if I do die, they’ll call me- Late Lateef.

I think about that night, almost a year ago. It was nearly the middle of the night. I was driving the scooter on that dusty road (this city is cursed with huge amounts of dust just as it is blessed with an abundance of large rocks). I remember the huge lights of an oncoming heavy vehicle. I was so sure I’d be crushed. I woke up the next morning in my bed as usual. I’m starting to wonder if I died that night and this government hospital is the hell I’ve earned for it. So much had been different before that night. All I ever thought about was my girlfriend and my parents and the exam and how there was heaven at the end of it. How did I end up here? I’m on a desk and there’s a small man at the door telling someone to send for something. Everyone is doing something. They’re connecting fluids, checking vitals, writing case-sheets, mixing drugs and what not. There are two sick guys groaning on the two beds. It’s two AM. One sick guy is lying perfectly still. Even the maid is here, carelessly dousing the place with phenyl or something ghastly like that. It’s all over my shoes. I think I’m done with my shift and I’m waiting for someone to come and relieve me. But I still have something to give, a story, and some stories are best told backwards. Because I cannot promise a happy ending, and the beginning was the most beautiful part of it all. I don’t know how you can believe me, though.

Nowadays, I can’t stand the sound of my own voice in my head. The hospital has seeped into me so deep. The properties of dirt are different here. There is no sanitizer in the world that can rid you of its stench. I keep bathing. Patients here have stern suffering facies. The staff, obviously, has had to lean back on humor for self- preservation. I don’t know where to put myself between them. How much closer am I to the patients, though I’m a House-surgeon myself. The faces. They’re the first thing in the morning and the last thing in the night. And everything in between. I’m scared that one of these days I’ll do something that’ll surprise myself. The day I set foot in this place, was the day my guardian angel shot himself.

Sometimes, there’s so much to say that everything seems equally insignificant. I didn’t think that love was a thing outside of movies when I was a child. I thought I was too gross for girls. I thought I was keeping up an act when the first girl pursued me. And then slowly, insidiously, I came to the state where the only the thing that came naturally to me anymore was walking up to her door. I had imagined that should love happen, it would take me all of a sudden in its grips, like dengue fever, but it grew so slowly and certainly, like a cancer, and I didn’t find out till it was too late.

As a boy, I thought it was totally impossible for me to be with a girl. I was taught that it was forbidden, and I never thought about it again. There were things like, models on FTV, late night shows. Videos with other guys. We used to get hard and stuff. But I swear, I didn’t masturbate till I was sixteen. Don’t ask what I did with my boner. I just felt happy and went to sleep with it. And then there was that girl. I didn’t fall in love; I was in control the whole time. I was ‘just going with it’. And then, all of a sudden, I wasn’t in control anymore. Just like that. I don’t know what that kind of love is. All I know is that I was restless in her absence, and cautious in her presence. Only her touch could bring some relief. Why, I don’t know. But I accept that God has made us how we are for our own good. And that He can overlook our small mistakes. I know, I’m a sinner. But I was so scared. She left me, of course. And from then on, I’ve been more mindful. I should’ve known. Some people are like that; you can love them, but you can’t have them.

Mala is different one; I think what was between us was love. At least some time ago. When exactly that changed to this distinct sense of unease is a mystery to me. When you know someone in your nakedness and they know you in their sickness, part of your souls are inevitably unified forever. And yet, it has been a whole week that we looked into each other’s eyes and spoke comfortably like we always did. Something’s amiss. She’s not the girl I will marry and I’m not her last love affair; and all of a sudden, in the sullen atmosphere of this hell themed hospital, pulling twenty-nine hours shifts what we’ve had all this time is not enough anymore. Loss is universal. But now, it’s also personal. Is everyone else here thinking about the same thing? That the patient they’re monitoring could just as easily have been their own mother, father or girlfriend? I’m checking his blood pressure, pulse rate, respiratory rate, urine output and oxygen saturation every thirty minutes. I bust his arteries twice today to make sure his blood doesn’t turn too acidic. I put him on bicarbonate and buggered the nephrologist to personally come down and see him. Now it’s only a matter of time before he stabilizes and his body can do all that monitoring for itself. I’m making sure he’s conscious because his creatinine levels are so high. There are seventeen other patients here in the traumatology ward, but I’m fanatic about his recovery. His son has started to look at me with hope-filled eyes. We barely speak but I have all his trust. Maybe some part of my mind has irrationally decided that the life of my relationship with Mala depends on Bheerappa’s survival.

No one could have told me anything that would prepare me for this. Misery is what misery is. We try to call each other and talk for no more than two minutes at a time. She could have comforted me; I could have, too. But there’s a large knowing between us, and I cannot wrap my large arms around it. Mala was a complete stranger to hesitancy. Now, it heralds every word she says. Now, each time we speak, I’m scared I’ll spill the beans and tell her how much I need her. My own emotions don’t repel me. But I’m terrified of not mirroring hers anymore. I know what it’s like to have to “declare death”. The way the sons and daughters fail to register anything in the first moment, the way their faces crumble in the next. The way the parents quickly tell themselves it can be fixed, and the way break down again when their hopes are smashed to the ground. The way language fails me, because there is no way to apologize without giving away guilt. And because we’re doctors second, and humans first, we told them before that it was not all in our hands. Part of me is permanently aware that Mala is here, in this eight-storied complex, delivering a baby or monitoring a newly-delivered one. Informing someone that their baby died before it was born, perhaps? More fear- what if she doesn’t feel the way I do at all?

The telephone rings. Everyone else is busy. The girl who came to relieve me got herself caught up with a feisty drunkard needing a CT before even stepping into the room. I take the call. It’s from two floors above.

“Doctor, can you send someone to the AMC? We have three dressings to do,” a familiar voice says, desperately. I wonder why.

“Ma,am… Are there no other house surgeons there?”

“Every house surgeon here is new… They haven’t been to Surgery postings yet. These are a little complicated. Two cases are in ketoacidosis. They’re not stable enough to go to the Septic OT.”

“Are there any dressing kits available?” This is my last excuse.

“Every. Thing. Is. Ready.”

“I’ll send someone.” I’ll come myself.

As much as I love myself, I have to admit that somedays I wish I was lighter than my ninety-kilos cop-figure. I’m a pretty big guy in this country, standing almost six feet tall. Perhaps my large beard, rectangular face, small eyes, sallow color and broad shoulders only add to the heaviness of my looks. I feel like a ton at three AM in the morning, when I’m supposed to be at my break and have to lift myself from the backless iron benches and then run two floors heaven-wards, to do a job I would never be held responsible for. I keep reminding myself that this is not about what others think. The two diabetic dressings are as bad as promised. From several meters away, my colleagues hail me as a hero when I undo the old dressings, thus releasing the unearthly stink of putrefied, necrotic, gangrenous tissue. Without a mask, of course, because I’m a professional now. I squeeze the foot into a tub, a lake of cheesy pus appears. Several minutes later, I realize that even though I’m singularly insensitive to foul odors, this is not something my nose (my brain) can get used to. It seems that I was subconsciously holding my breath intermittently only for the stench to hit me will its full force each time I breathed again. A kind postgrad braves the stench herself and ties a mask around my big face since my own hands are useless for all purposes besides this dressing for now. I get back to working on the dead tissue, debriding, cutting and sometimes comfortably pulling out dead tissue that will eventually detach itself completely anyway, but not without landing the patient in a septic shock first.

An eternity later, I reach the last dressing. This time, I’m glad I sent no one else, because most of the co-interns with me downstairs are underweight girls.

“Will this pain?” says the inebriated, large, unshaven gentleman in English.

“Only a little,” I try to make him comfortable with me. Two large gashes on his neck, superficial, well- approximated, make me think that whether it was a suicide attempt or a murder attempt, the inflictor was definitely piss-drunk to have missed so many vital structures. I start cleaning the wound with cotton and betadine, pressing as gently as I can.

“Do you have any grudge against me, buddy?” the English strikes again.

Do I? “No,” I say quietly.

I’m back at the traumatology ward. I look at my watch. It was an hour ago that I’d left. Bheerappa is dead. I now realize that I’d told no one to take over his monitoring. No one else realizes anything in connection with him. Six other patients will die tonight. We’re doctors, we only concern ourselves with the living. He was found in a state of depressed breathing by a passing-by intern (Was it too much bicarbonate?). Before they could intubate him, he went into arrest and all of a sudden, two interns, two nurses and a large tray were all over him, trying to salvage something. But death came unusually quickly for him. Five minutes later, all that anyone could think of was getting the guy with the ECG machine, and finding some sitting-duck to write the Death Certificate. Even death, after all, is somebody’s job.

I feel my phone ringing in my pocket. I pick it up and see Mala’s name glide over the screen. My heart flutters. Then I see the name ‘Nair’ follow. My heart sinks again.

“Lateef!” says the chirpy voice. She definitely woke up over an hour ago. I can almost see her lean, short-statured emaciated-athletic figure, her gaunt, tanned face covered in sweat from early morning workout, stooping over a bug on a blade of grass. She’s a morning person, just like I used to be when nights and mornings existed separately for me.

“Nair!”

“Busy?”

“Getting done with my shift… What’s up?”

“Needed some advice. Couple of friends had unprotected sex. Told her to take Levo. That was a week ago. Now she’s passing clots, I think. Should I be worried?”

Ah, the classical case. “Was she anywhere close to her period when she took Levo?”

“Yeah,” said Mala Nair, the textbook-level meticulous history-taker.

“No issues, known side effect… It’s just a delayed period. The blood is gonna be darker than usual, and more like spotting, lesser quantity. You don’t have to worry.”

“Okay, I’ll tell her.” She pauses, definitely, before saying the next thing. “Have you spoken to Mala recently?”

I gulp. Nair is possibly my closest friend, and yet I need to hold on to something from the days when everything was okay.

“I have, why?” I try to sound as casual as I can. It’s her turn to speak. She pauses again.

“She’s… really stressed. It’s the labor room. She’s posted there, right?” I knew from that tone that she was trying to give me information and trying to make it less obvious. I took the hint and said, “Yes, I know. She is… She barely has the time to call these days.” Yes, that must be it. Labor Room. In the ground floor, much like hell.

“Look, I know you’re pretty busy yourself. But, can you make the time to drop by the labor room? There’s a strike going on. Half the doctors aren’t even showing up. They’re extremely overworked. I mean, I don’t know what exactly the work is, but they’re so busy they aren’t able to do shifts. Mala has been there for over thirty hours straight. They’re getting an hour of sleep once in a while, that’s all. If I could be useful in any way, I’d go myself.” It’s true. She would. But Nair was only a final-year student. The strike was just beginning to take shape when I’d dismissed it. It had begun in a flash, when a patient died, and his son walked in with a couple of goons and beat up a few doctors. Ordinarily, it wouldn’t raise such a stir in an emergency unit like the labor room. Perhaps the fact that a doctor’s nose was broken and another suffered a stab injury has something to do with this one. But all that bothers me is that Mala decided to tell Nair first.

For the second time, I refuse to take a break. “Don’t worry, I’ll go to the labor room right now.”

My eyes had started to fog up. I hadn’t slept for a whole day. The strike was depressing. They often picked up freshmen who felt little connection with the consequences of the laws. All of them dressed in ironed formal shirts and trousers, with leather shoes. Washed, combed hair parted to a side. Just like me, four years ago. I had protested the law that made rural service mandatory after the under-graduate course, blocked the roads demanding the formation of a new state and held banners demanding the rolling back of a new law that increased the age of retirement. It dawned on me, all of a sudden, that each time, I had no idea what I was doing. I picture Mala, plump, doe-eyed with short silky brown hair and a kind oval face. Eyes that used to sparkle. I felt a wave of horror clamp my guts as the reality of all those lives I’ve affected rained on me. The death certificates I signed, the treatments I wrote, the medicines I handed out... With a rock in my stomach, I took to the stairs, and tried to remember how Mala and I got here.