Recently, I suffered from a host of illnesses that landed me in the cosy confines of a hospital. Wide ranging, costly investigations ensued to assess whether my vital organs worked in mid-season form. Then, specialists came to “look”. Many attacked me; I remember three.
The first was a slip of a girl. Shedding all respect grey hair merited, she tore into my ego, in the presence of relations and friends, through a direct question in arithmetic. “What is the total of eight and seven?” Little did she know she was reckoning with a formidable character, who, in his school days, had nonplussed teachers by giving different answers to the same question, depending on the expressions of the questioner and the examinee’s moods. For reasons unclear, the gleefully insensitive crowd around me guffawed over my answer. The doctor left the scene frustrated.
The next was a bone specialist. At one glance, he declared my bones brittle (as if in others, they are made of cast iron!) With his thirty-year-old biceps, he proceeded, in an endurance test, to pulverize my seventy-five-year-old bones, but flatteringly feigned surrender. He left, prescribing eighteen tablets and three creams. With that plenitude of drugs, I felt my better half would be free from preparing breakfast for a month.
Then came the “head shrinker”, practising under the euphemism, “psychotherapist”. He also appeared keen on appraising my reasoning skills through tests of a different genre. Skipping preliminaries, he bluntly asked what I thought of him. ( A quip sprang to my mind: to the question, “what do Americans think of Indians”, the answer was, “they don’t”.) I courteously replied he was considered one of the best in his field, clarifying that I had heard he himself shared this view, taking care not to add he was known to be its chief proponent. He then carefully took out from his coat pocket a pencil sharpener, a glass paper weight, three chocolates, something that looked like a duck’s egg and two small pictures—one featuring a temple and the other, a cat drinking milk from a saucer. Stuffing everything except the pictures back into the pocket, he asked me to guess and state, in thirty seconds, his age, and instructing me to closely scrutinise the pictures the while. Easy, that! I said 52. I had a friend aged 26 and establishing the link was a child’s play. I later came to know that the specialists had classified me as an “unsatisfactory specimen”, with miles to go to earn at least “average” rating.
C Divakaran
Email: cdmenon@asianetindia.com