by Anirban Bose
‘Thighs…I mean, legs…I mean, the lower limbs,’ replied Sam.
By now, Adi’s appreciation of anything comical had vanished. His mouth felt dry and the perspiration on his palms made it difficult for him to hold on to his pen.
Dr Gomke was not amused. ‘So where is the disturbance coming from? Or am I imagining things?’ she yelled, spewing anger liberally with her salivary fireworks.
Sam stared ahead with the same look of incorruptible righteousness.
Dr Gomke pointed at the guy sitting next to Sam. ‘You, there…yes, you, Sardarji…stand up. What is your name?’
Adi felt relieved that Dr Gomke had chosen to pursue her inquisition on Sam’s wrong side. However, his heart sank upon seeing the studious looking Sikh guy stand up slowly, bewilderment and fear written all over his face. He looked around uncertainly, and then said softly, ‘Jagdeep Singh, ma’am.’
‘Where was all the noise coming from?’ demanded Dr Gomke.
Jagdeep looked unsure for a few seconds. He glanced at Adi, as though expecting him to own up to his culpability. Adi caught his stare but looked away, his guilt finding refuge in his fear. When Adi didn’t respond, Jagdeep looked down at the floor and said, ‘I…I don’t know, ma’am.’
Dr Gomke was not amused. ‘So, none of you know what happened, even though it was loud enough to disrupt my lecture?’
Nobody said anything. In the pin-drop silence of the huge hall, Adi could almost hear himself perspire.
Dr Gomke stared at them for a few minutes, her eyes narrowed, her jaws clenched. Then she declared, ‘Fine…since you were paying attention, you should know what I have taught so far. If you can answer my question, I will let you stay here. Otherwise neither of you will come to my lectures…for the rest of the year!’
The class broke into a shocked murmur at the severity of the punishment. Two careers in medicine were about to be nipped in the bud.
‘Silence!’ yelled Dr Gomke, and two hundred voices went mute.
Jagdeep looked horrified. He opened his mouth to speak, but stopped. Sam took a deep breath and clenched his jaws tightly.
‘So, do you know what happened?’ asked Dr Gomke, testing their resolve one last time. No one spoke.
‘I see…Okay…Are you ready to answer this question?’
Sam nodded. He straightened up, as though preparing for the guilty verdict and the subsequent martyrdom of being falsely accused.
‘In the thigh, what is the relation of the femoral artery to the femoral vein?’ asked Dr Gomke.
An eerie silence descended on the class as two hundred pairs of eyes focused their attention on Sam.
The question was not a random pick. In fact, it was specially chosen to prove Sam’s guilt. For, not only did Sam not know the answer, he didn’t even know that Dr Gomke had not yet taught that part. Dr Gomke was killing two birds with one stone – making sure that Sam got booted out of her class while confirming her suspicion that he was the source of the disturbance.
By some heavenly coincidence, Adi had glanced at a diagram of the femoral vessels in his anatomy book just before class had begun. The book had fallen open on that page and, for some unknown reason, he had spent a few seconds studying the diagram of the two blood vessels lying next to each other. His mind raced to recall the details, and within seconds he knew that the answer was ‘lateral’.
Sam was lost. His expression inspired a faint smirk of satisfaction on Dr Gomke’s face. The redness on her face receded rapidly. As she turned to go down the steps, contemplating her next move, Adi quickly scribbled ‘lateral’ on a piece of paper and pushed it towards Sam. He read it; then crumpling the paper into a miniscule ball, swallowed it.
Just as Dr Gomke turned to look at him, eyebrows raised, ready for the kill, Sam said in a loud clear voice, ‘Lateral, ma’am.’
In the uneasy silence that followed, two hundred pairs of eyes turned to focus on Dr Gomke, nervously awaiting her reaction. She went red in the face again. Her fingers bit into the chalk in her hand, turning them pale and sickly. Her lips hardened and her breathing became uneven as she scanned the faces for potential suspects who could have helped Sam. Finally, after a few anxiety-ridden moments, she growled, ‘Sit down!’
Sam sat down with a satisfied smile and shot Adi an appreciative glance. Adi could hear the entire class of two hundred let go of the breath they had been holding for the last fifteen minutes.
When the class got over, a crowd gathered around Sam, eager to hear his version of the story. Sam enjoyed being the centre of attention as he repeated the story over and over, regaling the audience with a liberal sprinkling of his own masala. His audacity landed him the cape of the champion-of-the-wrongly-accused-and-threatened-junta, with Adi as his genius sidekick.
Smiling to himself, Adi headed outside. He stopped at the display case and studied the expression of the dissected face again. The bewildered eyes stared back at him; the confrontation seemed to have transformed the grimace into a wince. Adi felt an inexplicable sadness and curled his own mouth a few times, as if to coax the dead muscles to contract by imitation. Studying the face for any signs of compliance, he started to back towards the door, bumped into somebody and fell.
‘Keep your eyes where you are supposed to…that includes in the class too!’
Adi looked up to see a girl staring at him with annoyance. She stood a foot away, one slender arm holding a notepad with a few loose sheets of paper, while the other one dangled an oversized leather bag. She wore a sleeveless light-green top that disappeared around her narrow waist into a tight-fitting black skirt. The skirt ended just above her knees, revealing smooth and shapely legs protruding elegantly beyond the hemline. She ran her fingers through her wavy hair, coaxing them back into place. Even though Adi had a worm’s eye view, her glamorous good looks were very striking.
‘Oh! Sorry!’ he exclaimed, quickly scrambling to his feet.
‘Are you going to say that to Sheetal too?’ she asked, smiling mischievously as she bent down to help him pick up the books that lay scattered on the floor.
‘Say what to Sheetal?’ Adi asked.
‘Oh, come on!’ she smiled naughtily. ‘I know what you and Sam were doing. I was sitting just behind.’
‘Oh, I see…well…um…what…no, we were not doing anything,’ stammered Adi, struggling to regain what was left of his composure.
She looked at his face closely, smiling at his efforts to keep the guilt from showing.
‘You look so guilty,’ she laughed. ‘By the way, I’m Renuka.’
‘Oh, yeah. Hi, I’m Adi…Adityaman Bhatt,’ he replied.
‘So where are you from…Adityaman Bhatt?’
‘I’m from Ranchi, in Bihar. How about you? Where are you from, Renuka…? What is your last name?’
‘I’m from Bombay. And why do you want to know my last name?’
‘Just…I guess…for general knowledge…in case they ask me on Quiz Time.’
She laughed. ‘You’re funny…and cute, too.’
‘Th…thanks,’ mumbled Adi.
Renuka looked at him intently, probing his reaction to her compliment. Adi didn’t disappoint. She could see the blood rushing to his face. The bemused smile never left her lips.
Being from a small town and having studied in a boys’ school, this was the longest conversation Adi had ever had with a girl not related to him. He decided to get away quickly before he made a fool of himself.
‘I guess we are late for the next class,’ he said. ‘We’d better be going.’
‘What? Aren’t you going to say something?’
Adi stared at her blankly.
‘You know, one good turn deserves another,’ she said. ‘I said you were cute and so…’
Adi tapped his forehead lightly and said with a sheepish smile, ‘Oh, yeah…you too.’
‘You too, what?’
‘You know…the same…’
‘No, I don’t know, Adityaman Bhatt. Perhaps you could be a little more spec
ific?’
She raised her eyebrows expectantly. The smile continued to play at the corner of her lips.
Adi’s mind went blank. He tried desperately to say something smart. However, it seemed unimaginative and lazy to repeat ‘cute’ and yet, no other description seemed apt. He struggled with his vocabulary, trying hard to be complimentary without being overtly flirtatious.
‘Yes, yes…you look…nice…too…very much…’ he mumbled, kicking himself for his verbal constipation. He had heard of writer’s block, but what was this, flirter’s block?
She started to laugh. ‘I didn’t mean to corner you, Adityaman Bhatt. Why is it so hard for you to say I look good?’
‘I…I don’t know.’
‘So you do think I look good but cannot say it, is that right?’
‘Well, no…I mean…I guess I don’t know you well enough,’ he said, weakly. ‘I don’t even know your last name.’
‘So you do think I am good-looking, but cannot say it because you don’t know my last name? Is that right?’ Adi nodded. ‘But if you do get to know me better, you will tell me that I’m good-looking. Sounds fair?’ she said. He nodded again. ‘Well then, I will have to let you know me better, won’t I?’ she said, grinning coquettishly. ‘Anyway, I think it’s time for the next lecture now. And by the way, my last name is Seth. Renuka Seth.’
She turned around and began to walk away.
Adi stared at her shapely figure disappearing through the graceful archway. He smiled to himself, an inexplicable happiness buoying his spirits. He began to head for the next lecture hall. Suddenly, his eyes fell on the display case once more.
The face in the formalin…it was smiling…yes, it was smiling.
FOUR
Far from all forms of familial restriction, Adi’s days in medicine began to pass rather quickly. Armed with a new found emancipation from accountability, he, along with Toshi, Rajeev, Harsha and Sam, began to explore the glitzy allure of downtown Bombay, magically drawn to its charms like moths to a flame. Every evening, as soon as classes were over, they would clamber aboard the bright red BEST buses, choosing the double-deckers for the bird’s eye view they provided. Their ride along the crowded roads, with the wind in their hair and the sun on their faces, readily justified the two rupees the conductor charged for the trip. Their pace would peter to a crawl at Kalbadevi, the chaotic marketplace, where the earth appeared blanketed with a quilt of bobbing human heads. The bus would inch ahead in fits and starts, honking angrily at anyone who dared to dart across its path. The harried honking rarely dissuaded anyone, be it the sweat-stained, sunburned handcart pullers anxious not to break the momentum of their efforts, or the impassive neighbourhood cows ambling over to check out a green leafy tidbit in the middle of the road.
The rides usually ended at Flora Fountain. They would alight amidst the hundreds of makeshift stalls, sprouting on the sidewalks like mushrooms after a summer rain. They would loiter around rudderless, captivated by the histrionic chants of the thela-wallas or the electronic crackle of newfangled gizmos. They would ogle at college girls in miniskirts hunting for bargains on Fashion Street; sip nimbu-pani while watching cricket matches at Cross Maidan; gulp down tangy pani-puris outside Churchgate station; or admire the Mercs racing down Marine Drive, over a warm packet of seng. Occasionally they’d stumble onto the sets of a movie, where watching the celebrities up close and personal would inevitably generate an excitement-filled phone call home that evening. When tired of all the activity, they would rest on the rocks overlooking the sea at Nariman Point, admire its vertiginous skyline and smell the moisture-laden winds blowing inland.
In the midst of discovering the city’s nuances, they talked, joked, argued and chatted, slowly getting to know one another during these never-ending sessions of idle banter. Adi enjoyed these times immensely, hanging on to the smallest details of their conversation, as his image of the others began to get coloured by their opinions. He learned of Toshi’s love of music, Harsha’s love for his mother, Sam’s love of jokes and Rajeev’s love of himself.
This routine kept repeating itself with amazing monotony, even though Adi’s life was anything but monotonous.
‘What is the use of all this studying?’ pondered Rajeev solemnly one day when they were sitting in the driveway of the hostel, lazily sipping tea. The bittersweet warmth of the brew was particularly effective in stimulating thoughtful discussion. They had just returned from Marine Drive where the sight of a bunch of voluptuous models entering a discotheque in tight skirts and halter-tops had struck a particularly resonant chord with Rajeev. ‘Saala, we’ll slog for the next twelve years and still earn less than what a model earns in one year,’ he concluded.
‘Yeah, poor Rajeev,’ smiled Sam. ‘Any more “slogging” and he may actually have to buy Gray’s Anatomy.’
‘That’s not the point, Sam!’ replied Rajeev. ‘I mean, we worked our butts off to get into medical college and we’re supposed to be the bright ones, right? Yet some idiot with a half-brain will smile with some soap in one hand, then carry off a paycheck in bloody crores along with a bunch of babes willing to spread their legs for him every night.’
‘Idiot with a half-brain…hmm,’ reflected Sam. ‘Rajeev, you have a great future in modelling.’
Amidst the laughter Rajeev shook his head in frustration. ‘You’re useless, Sam! Everything is a joke for you. You’ll realize later.’
‘So why are you joining medicine? Do modelling, na?’ asked Harsha.
Rajeev shot him an appreciative look. ‘It’s not that easy, man. I had a few offers but I’d be in the background in those ads for sanitary napkins and…’
‘Hey guys…how do you define women’s periods?’ interrupted Sam. After a brief pause, he said, ‘It’s a bloody waste of fucking time.’
Everyone laughed. Smiling to himself, Adi swirled the tea around a few times, preparing for a final swig of the sludge at the bottom of the cup, when his eyes fell on the noticeboard next to the hostel’s main entrance. He was surprised to see an official looking notice stuck to the tattered green cloth. The only message the mutilated board had ever conveyed in the past was its state of neglect, a plight emblematic of the generally run down state of affairs in the hostel. Consequently, hostelers usually just walked past the board without giving it a second glance.
Adi walked over to read the notice. ‘Have you guys read this?’ he called out to the others. ‘It says that the rules of room distribution in the hostel may be changed, to be based on marks in the exams!’
‘It’s probably a joke,’ suggested Sam.
‘A joke?’ said Adi. ‘It’s signed by the warden!’
Suddenly rattled out of their sense of complacency, they quickly walked over to read the notice.
‘How can that be?’ asked Rajeev. ‘If they decide based on marks and not by the distance from Bombay, then the locals might get rooms before us.’
‘This is crazy,’ said Toshi. ‘Mokokchung is 3000 kilometres from here. I’m screwed if I don’t get a room… We can’t live in dorms forever. We should do something about it.’
‘What can we do?’ fretted Harsha.
‘We have to do something!’ said Sam. ‘Maybe we can talk to the warden!’
‘It’s not a rule yet,’ said Adi. ‘The notice says that this is one of the proposed changes that will be voted on by the hostel committee, after the next election for the Hostel Secretary. But I think we should talk to the warden right now.’
‘Talk? What will talking do?’ asked Rajeev. ‘This is more serious, man. This calls for action!’
Suddenly one of the windows above their heads opened and someone said, ‘Freshies! Up to my room! Now!’
Their discussion abruptly halted, they looked up to see Pheru scowling down at them from the window of his second-floor room. They looked at each other uncertainly, reluctant to obey Pheru, yet undecided about the ramifications of ignoring an order from a senior of his reputation. After a few seconds of silent wrangling, the
y acquiesced to their fears and trooped up to his room, trying to find consolation in the fact that, in the normal scheme of things, freshers were subjected to Pheru’s torture only once. They filed into the big room slowly, lining up against the wall like prisoners about to be executed.
‘Close the door,’ instructed Pheru. Harsha, closest to the door, complied.
Although it was a double room, Pheru remained its sole occupant, no one else in the hostel willing to brave the bogeyman’s company. His prolonged occupancy had turned that section of the hostel into the eerie tower of the abominable beast in the castle, only to be crossed under duress, swiftly and silently.
Adi, however, was pleasantly surprised as he studied the room. Instead of instruments of torture, books of all shapes and sizes lined shelves on two sides. A neatly organized table stood next to a tidy bed, the walls around it decorated with a few posters of Eric Clapton. The sun streamed in from the generous windows, lighting up the room with its orange brilliance.
Silence reigned for the next few minutes. Then Pheru addressed Sam. ‘You’ve become famous. I heard about the incident with Dr Gomke.’
They sighed in unison, suddenly able to breathe easier now that their apprehension about renewed persecution appeared unfounded.
‘You know, you should stand for Class Representative,’ said Pheru. ‘Everyone knows you in your class now, and it will be really easy for you.’
Sam’s eyes sifted uncomfortably. ‘Why?’ he asked finally.
Pheru shrugged and said, ‘Don’t you want to be CR? If you are CR, you can be anything after that…you can stand for College Representative, or General Secretary or Hostel Secretary…’
Sam chuckled nervously, hoping he was right in identifying some cryptic humour in Pheru’s advice. When Pheru didn’t reciprocate, Sam shifted hesitantly, afraid to antagonize him, yet unable to generate enough enthusiasm for the idea.
‘Really? You think I can be one?’ he asked.
‘Of course,’ said Pheru enthusiastically. ‘You’d be perfect. Lots of guys, even from other classes, admire your guts in standing up to Gomke. It does take guts to stand up to her, man. Besides, you’re smart, you’re quick, and you have a great smile. You’ll easily become CR. If you get to become CR, you’ll be known throughout campus and then you can stand for Hostel Secretary…’
