The portrait of a middle-aged man without his lab-coat
I. A problem that could have been solved by hiring a philosopher-interior-decorator
I am from Kerala and I will be the first one to admit Kerala is a strange place. One of the strangest things to have happened in the state was when one day, which was no different from any other day as far as I could tell, my grandfather hung a picture of Che Guevara right next to Jesus Christ on our living room wall. I know it sounds a bit too much but that’s mainly because you didn’t know my grandpa. Given the rifles he had been collecting for the uprising of the workers, I would say he had shown remarkable restraint in not hanging his double-barrels right below Jesus Christ’s portrait. So one night, while my parents snored peacefully, after having downed a sizeable amount of Old Monk rum, my grandfather caught the twelve year old me staring at Che Guevara’s mug mounted on the wall.
“He was great man.”
“What did he do?”
“He fought for the cheriya alkar.(little people)”
You can’t blame me for imagining a Che Guevara keeping a nation of midgets from being annexed by an army of Goliaths.
“What did he do?” I asked again.
“He was a freedom fighter.”
That was the short answer. But twitter had not been invented in that time, and as such the communists still swore by long-form as the medium to radicalize twelve year old insomniacs. So he sat me down and thus I heard for the first time the whole story of Che. The prophesy of revolution, the toppling of democracy in his country, the clarity of purpose, the motorcycle diaries, the donning of the uniform, the military victories, liberation, the UN speech, and cowardly execution.
“But what did he really do?”
He finally caved. “He was a doctor.”
“What about the other guy?”
“Who?”
I pointed to the bleeding heart person on the wall.
“Jesus?”
As the moon slowly traversed the night sky, grandpa launched again into biography mode, this time about Jesus. The prophesy of the wise men, the problem of his citizenship, the virgin birth, the sign in the skies, the twelve illiterate disciples, the miracles, the raising of the dead, the hatred of the clerics, his betrayal at the hands of the men he had come to deliver.
“What did he do?”
“Jesus Christ,” my grandfather sighed.
“Yes. But what did he do?”
“He was a doctor too.”
In the years that followed, my grandfather would try again, unsuccessfully, to recruit me into into the struggle for worker solidarity. And though I would never sing The Internationale and could never remember Faiz’s poems, almost a decade later I had committed to memory the lines of the Hippocratic oath. Call it the influence of the two accomplished foreign doctors staring down at me from my living room wall.
II. Proposing the final solution for the Haryanvi Question
I hurried for the informal orientation program that the HOD of the Pulmonology department had called for the new students. I had been preparing for the entrance exams when my grandfather passed in his sleep. I didn’t cry but I couldn’t sleep for two weeks after that. One of my relatives even suggested that I should use all the extra time that I had freed up by not sleeping to prepare for the exam. In the coming months, I put on twenty kilos and had to be prescribed anti-anxiety medication. But to the relief of my parents, I cracked the entrance test. My parents were immensely happy. I had convinced the world that I was not an idiot. That was important to my parents. That I give constant proof of my worth to the world. As I waved at them one last time before boarding my flight to Haryana, I began to believe that my worst days were behind me.
You should have seen me that day, brimming with confidence, pockets flush with cash the government was paying me to finish my education. Sure, Haryana wasn’t the ideal place to be. But I had made a deal with fate. Three years in this agrarian vegetarian shithole and then I fly economy class premium to wherever ideal places to be were. The HOD asked everyone’s names and then shook their hands and patted them on the shoulders. With me, after hearing my name, he did a genial namaste and then put his hands in his pockets. This, as I was to realize later, had to do with caste which was something my grandfather had forgotten to teach me about.
They served tea in paper cups and our HOD, that great man, pointed at the isolation ward and told us we had a case of XDR Tuberculosis. He also told us that the Pulmonology department had an impeccable reputation to maintain. It was the only department in the whole country where not a single doctor had ever contracted XDR TB from a patient.
“So,” he said, “stay away from the patient in the isolation ward. Once she is gone, I will assign someone to handle the paperwork.”
A few minutes later, I was on phone calling my home. My father picked up.
“Put grandpa on. I want to talk to him.”
There was silence on the other end.
“Where are you, son?” my father asked finally.
“Yeah. I just remembered. Sorry.”
“I asked you where you are.”
“I am at the hospital. Nothing’s wrong. It is alright. Everything is OK. Don’t tell mom.”
“I won’t.”
I took a half day and went out to the nearest town which was thirty kilometer ride on a beatdown bike, and the less we speak about the roads the better. It took sometime before I found what I was looking for. The sellers had taken up their spots and spread their wares on the streets, framed pictures of Gods and Goddesses. They bawled the names of their produce Ganesha, and Shiva, and Kaali, and Parvathi. Best prices. The absolute best. I was at the end of my patience when one of the sellers appeared next to me and asked me if I wanted to buy something.
“Where do you keep the Che Guevara photos?” I shouted.
“Who?”
I showed him the picture on the phone.
“We don’t have this guy.”
I began to laugh. It was a manic laughter and I knew it. I had no control. The seller suffered it all patiently and then asked, “What is there to laugh, sir?”
“Nothing,” I said and turned to leave.
“If you send the link, sir, we can make him.”
That caught me by surprise.
“Can you really make him?”
It was his turn to laugh now.
“What are you saying, sir, I can draw Bruce Lee fighting Jackie Chan in ten minutes.”
So I waited as he sat down on his chair, setting the paper on his small table and began sketching Che’s outline. His brows were furrowed and his hands moved masterfully over the paper.
“What did he do?” he asked, without warning, his head still buried in his work.
“Huh?”
“What did this man do, sir?”
“He,” I said slowly, measuring each word, “was a doctor.”
