Bombay Rains, Bombay Girls

by Anirban Bose

  Toshi would clearly sail through.

  Sam, however, was another story. He found the going tough, especially when it came to Anatomy, for Dr Gomke made sure that his life was no bed of roses. But he stood up to her torture without regret or remorse. Sam just didn’t care – he treated the upcoming exams with as much seriousness as the dandruff in his hair. So while he accumulated more white specks on his head and Adi shuddered with what should have been Sam’s worry, Sam’s inscrutable optimism offered him an imaginary immunity, making him oblivious to the dangers of repeating another six months with Dr Gomke.

  Two days before the exam, Rajeev walked into Adi’s room. ‘Hey Adi, do you have the class notes for Glycogen Metabolism?’ he asked, looking harried.

  ‘I do,’ Adi replied, not looking up from his books. ‘I’m using them now. I have to finish them in the next thirty minutes.’

  ‘I think somebody swiped mine from the library yesterday…fuck, this place is infested with thieves. Everybody wants to steal the brilliant notes that I’ve managed to gather from the seniors. They don’t want me to do well.’

  Adi kept his eyes steadfastly on his books, hoping Rajeev would take the hint and leave him alone. For a while Rajeev pottered about aimlessly. Then, after a pause, he said, ‘Adi, I met Renuka today in the library…she was asking about you.’

  ‘About me?’ asked Adi, intrigued.

  ‘She asked what you are up to and whether you go to the library to study, or study in your room…that kind of stuff.’

  Adi nodded without saying anything.

  ‘Do you want to talk to her?’ asked Rajeev. ‘I can send a message to the library if you want to….’

  ‘I’m not interested,’ Adi muttered firmly, returning to his books.

  ‘What? Why? Is it completely over between the two of you?’

  ‘Rajeev, I need to study now, man. You know it’s over between the two of us, and anyway, I’m not going to let her get over it so easily!’

  ‘What do you mean? Not let her get over what easily?’

  ‘Rajeev, please let me study. I’m behind as it is. I’ll fail, man!’

  Instead of leaving, Rajeev pulled up a chair and sat next to Adi’s desk, grinning expectantly.

  ‘Oh come on, Adi! You can’t leave me hanging with tidbits of information. I’ll just keep thinking about what you meant, if you don’t tell me about it.’

  Adi clenched his jaws with impatience. He knew that Rajeev’s rather predictably egocentric interpretation of priorities meant the only way to end this discussion was to oblige. He narrated the events of the evening of Rose Day briefly. He glossed over the details in an effort to get it over with quickly, and left Neil completely out of the description. When he had finished, Rajeev looked fascinated.

  ‘So what are you planning to do?’ he asked.

  Adi thought for a few moments. Describing the events had opened some old wounds. He said slowly, ‘I want her to feel what I felt. I want her to feel the pain of rejection and the humiliation I felt!’

  ‘Why? She does have a point, you know.’

  Surprised, Adi asked, ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, sometimes it is difficult for girls to decide at the first instance. I mean, let’s say she had gone steady with you and then I had started to show interest…then she’d have had to make a choice, right?’

  ‘Rajeev, just leave me alone!’ snapped Adi.

  ‘Hey relax, Adi…it’s not personally against you, man,’ said Rajeev, smiling. ‘It’s just a general statement, that’s all. It’s not like I’m interested in her or anything.’

  Adi didn’t respond. Rajeev smiled and said, ‘I wish you had told me before…I could have given you some good advice about how to charm girls. I’m very good at it…you can get girls like that with my advice,’ he said, clicking his fingers to indicate the purported ease.

  ‘Like the advice you gave Harsha?’ said Adi.

  Rajeev’s face soured. ‘What advice?’

  ‘You know what advice. Six red roses…rings a bell? The advice you’ve conveniently forgotten now…because of which Isha avoids Harsha like he has the plague?’

  ‘I was only trying to help, damn it! Harsha must have screwed up! It was not my fault!’

  ‘Yeah, Harsha screwed up alright…he listened to you! If only I had told him about Isha, this wouldn’t have happened.’

  Rajeev stared at Adi. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing!’ hissed Adi, angry with himself for having shot his mouth off yet again.

  ‘What should you have told Harsha?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter now, Rajeev. Forget it!’

  Rajeev’s voice softened. ‘Look, you should tell me…maybe I can help Harsha…or work something out for him.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter now, Rajeev.’

  ‘Not to you, but maybe to Harsha it does!’

  Adi felt the old guilt return. He buried his head between his arms and tried to think it through. The anxiety of time being wasted added its weight to the guilt already burdening him. After a few uneasy moments he looked at Rajeev and said, ‘Promise me you won’t tell anyone.’

  Rajeev sat down and put his arm around Adi’s shoulder. He sighed deeply and said, ‘Look Adi, I too feel guilty about what happened to Harsha…maybe I can help him…If nothing else, it’ll at least make him understand why she avoids him…I promise it’ll remain a secret with me, and it might even make you feel better.’

  Adi studied Rajeev’s face for signs of insincerity. A persistent voice in his head warned him not to disclose anything. Rajeev couldn’t be trusted, it said. His promise was shallower than his skin-deep looks.

  ‘Rajeev, you have to understand I feel guilty about this too. So please, promise me you won’t tell anyone else about this.’

  ‘I promise.’

  Adi sighed. ‘I knew what was going to happen,’ he said, hanging his head low while recounting what he had overheard Isha and Payal discuss. Rajeev listened with bated breath.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell Harsha?’ he asked after Adi had finished recounting his story.

  ‘I don’t know, man. I didn’t think he’d actually do it…I don’t know.’

  Adi looked up at Rajeev and noticed he was smiling. It unsettled Adi, and he wished he had retained the secret.

  Rajeev said, ‘Don’t worry, man. Harsha had no chance anyway. He is just too unpolished…there is no way he can ever impress anybody.’

  ‘Is that what you’re going to tell him?’ Adi asked, sarcastically.

  Rajeev’s lips curled into a smile. ‘You’ve changed a lot, Adi. A lot!’ He closed the door behind him and left without answering Adi’s question.

  Nobody slept the night before the first paper. Adi realized, after having studied for hours at a stretch, that he’d been reading the same line for the last ten minutes without being able to comprehend what it said. Panic-stricken, he forced himself to take a fifteen-minute break and walked into Sam’s room. Sam was stuck on the fifth revision of his favourite book in medicine – Medical Mnemonics. Despite Adi’s repeated entreaties in the past to abandon mugging-up mnemonics in favour of their meatier derivatives, Sam stuck to his guns, convinced that salvation lay in the thin book and the entertainment it provided. This time Adi didn’t repeat his warning.

  Sam woke him up after fifteen minutes of heaven.

  The sleepless night rolled into a harried dawn, and a few hours later, Adi and Sam headed for the exam centre together. The scene outside terrified Adi even more than the one in the hostel. About five hundred students from all the medical colleges in Bombay stood discussing the likely questions with ardent fervour. In this state of mass hysteria, Adi tried to cram himself with more facts for almost immediate regurgitation. His anxiety rose a few more notches.

  A bell sounded, signalling the start of the exam. Then the question papers arrived.

  Staring at his paper for the next few minutes, Adi suddenly realized that he actually knew the answers to some o
f the questions. His breathing suddenly felt natural again and his anxiety receded even further when he realized that most of the questions looked familiar. He sighed with a sense of reprieve and plunged into the task of writing.

  Adi wrote and wrote till his fingers cramped, his arms hurt and the tetany in his hand left the pen’s imprint on his fingers. Three-and-a-half hours, two pens, one pencil and forty answer sheets later, Adi walked out with the confidence that he had done fine. One down, five to go.

  TWELVE

  Then came the practical exams.

  Although conducted on familiar territory, the circulating horror stories about the viva-voce gave the students a lot of heartburn. These sessions of intense one-on-one questioning, lasting five to ten minutes in an isolated austere room, were more akin to a police interrogation than an academic exercise. The internal and external examiners essayed out the roles of good-cop and bad-cop with élan. Out of courtesy to a guest, the internal examiner would let his colleague do most of the questioning, who would then proceed to revel in the suffering of the students, sparing no opportunity to show how little they knew.

  One particular external examiner in Biochemistry, Dr Singhal, struck terror in their hearts with his notoriety. He was reputedly brilliant, but a symptom of his genius was an eccentric nastiness, attributed to a keen sense of underachievement because the doctor in his name alluded to a Ph.D. in Biochemistry, not the pedigree of a medical degree. This manifested as a sadistic trait that caused several students to leave his room crying, thus ensuring him the adulation reserved for a serial killer.

  In the days that followed, a lot of amusing stories about the practical exams did the rounds of the hostel. Sure enough, Dr Singhal had made a few girls cry. Sam, picking up a dissected out tongue, had identified it as the heart. When both the examiners had burst out laughing, Sam had joined in the merriment. If Sam passed, Adi thought wryly, it would be purely a consequence of his entertainment value.

  Finally, all that remained was the Biochemistry practical exam. Adi looked forward to it with a huge sense of relief, planning his well-deserved vacation to relax and recuperate at home while the exam results were tabulated. With most of the exams behind him, he even began to enjoy a vague confidence that he had done fairly well – a feeling that left him wondering if he’d be among the ones with a ‘D’.

  ‘D’, which stood for Distinction, meant a score of more than 75%. Recipients of ‘3Ds’ (i.e. Distinctions in Anatomy, Physiology and Biochemistry) became instant celebrities in the class, while 2 Ds also offered significant recognition. Their titular use around campus, viz., there goes Meena Sinha 3Ds – led to instantaneous respect for both the achiever and the achievement.

  Adi’s performance so far had left him cautiously optimistic about being one of the blessed ones. All that stood between him and final glory was this Biochemistry practical. He took comfort in the fact that his schedule had left him an entire day to revise for the exam; enough time to feel confident about his tryst with Dr Singhal.

  On the morning before the exam, just as Adi opened his Biochemistry books and prepared to sit down with them, a worried looking Sam rushed into his room.

  ‘Adi, something is wrong with Toshi!’

  Adi followed Sam into Toshi’s room. They found him on his bed, curled up like a foetus, breathing noisily through his mouth. His face looked pale, and dark blotchy patches encircled his sunken eyes.

  Adi shook his shoulder. ‘Toshi, wake up, man! Don’t you have to study today? Wake up!’

  Toshi raised his right eyebrow and peered at them. He tried to say something but his dry, cracked lips made no sound. He motioned weakly for some water.

  Sam and Adi stared at each other in disbelief. Adi checked Toshi’s practical exam schedule. Toshi had finished everything except the Anatomy practical exams. They were scheduled for the next day; the same day Adi had his Biochemistry practicals.

  ‘We’ve got to take him to the hospital!’ said Adi. Sam nodded and ran out to make arrangements.

  Toshi fell back on his bed after having a drink. He closed his eyes again, breathing noisily through his mouth. Dry spittle immediately began to crust on his parched lips. His heart thumped rapidly underneath the thin shirt, creating swiftly moving ripples on the fabric. Adi felt his forehead; it was hot.

  Sam returned after having arranged for a car. Adi slung Toshi over his shoulder and carried him down. Toshi flopped on to the back seat like a rag doll. They drove to the hospital just a few hundred yards away. Sam carried him inside while Adi went to arrange for the necessary paperwork to admit him to the hospital.

  That was his first experience with hospital bureaucracy.

  The clerk in charge of admitting patients needed an outpatient slip. The clerk issuing the outpatient slip was in the other building, and when Adi reached his desk, he had just stepped out for some tea. The junior clerk assured Adi he would be back in five minutes. And for the next forty-five minutes, he kept repeating his assurances that his compatriot would make a blessed re-appearance within the next five minutes. Adi stood patiently, deducting every minute he spent away from his Biochemistry revision by biting his nails down to their beds.

  It was 10 a.m. His exam began at 7 a.m. the next day…twenty-one hours away.

  The saga didn’t end when the outpatient clerk re-appeared. He insisted that he needed a deposit slip of one rupee from the cashier.

  ‘What for?’ Adi screamed in frustration.

  Taken aback, the clerk soured up and demanded an apology before he’d provide an explanation. Embittered but helpless, Adi apologized, following which the clerk informed him that he didn’t make the rules, the Government of Maharashtra did. And the rules stated, rather explicitly, that Adi would have to obtain the deposit receipt. Adi felt like shooting him but realized that it wouldn’t help matters. He ran in pursuit of the hallowed deposit receipt that gobbled up forty-five precious minutes. Then there was the information that needed to be filled out: Toshi’s name, his father’s name, his home address, the name of his local guardian, income, religion…information that was about as useful as the name of his cat and his favourite movie. There was much Adi didn’t know, so he decided to oblige the bureaucratic appetite for nonsense by inventing Toshi’s parentage and whereabouts right then and there. The clerk looked at him suspiciously a couple of times, but had no way of verifying the authenticity of the information.

  By the time he completed the paperwork, it was close to noon… Nineteen hours to go.

  After fifteen minutes of hunting around desperately, Adi discovered that Toshi had been admitted to one of the medical wards. A resident doctor with an intense, caustic face sat next to his bed, starting an intravenous drip. Sam and Adi waited for him to finish.

  Finally, the resident doctor turned around and motioned for the papers, spiriting them out of Adi’s hands. He scribbled on them and then he turned to address the two of them.

  ‘Are you first-year students?’ he asked. They nodded in unison.

  The resident doctor nodded back sagely, as though protecting Sam and Adi from their inability to comprehend what he was about to say was a key element of his job description.

  ‘Your friend is very sick,’ he said. ‘I think he has either typhoid or malaria…we have…’

  Adi cut him off. ‘He is in the middle of his first MBBS exams, and has his practical Anatomy exam tomorrow.’

  The resident looked at Adi with the expression a king might posses upon being rudely interrupted by the court jester. ‘Do you even understand what malaria and typhoid are?’ he barked. ‘On top of that he is dehydrated, hypoglycemic and very fatigued. He may have been having chills throughout the night! Exams? No way!’

  Adi had just about had his fill of unpleasantness for the day. He looked at the wall clock. Quarter to two…less than sixteen hours remained.

  Adi was a head taller than the resident. He took one step towards him, until their noses almost touched. He clenched his teeth and growled, ‘Toshi has finished
all his exams except the Anatomy practicals. We’ve been through hell to get to this point! He will take the exam tomorrow in whatever way, shape, or form. Either you help us, or we will arrange it ourselves!’

  The resident doctor’s self-righteousness vanished, replaced by a sudden understanding of their frustration. ‘Yeah, yeah… I’ll start the medicines, but he is going to be too weak…’

  Adi ignored him and turned to Sam. ‘I think we should talk to Dr Gomke to see if they can postpone the exam for Toshi by a few days.’

  ‘You should talk to her, Adi,’ said Sam. ‘If I talk to her, she’ll want to conduct his exam today! She hates me, man.’

  Sam’s remark had obvious merit. Adi ran out of the hospital and headed towards Anatomy Hall.

  The steady stream of students exiting the building meant that Dr Gomke was still in her office. Relieved that he’d have a chance to talk to her, he rushed towards her room, only to be stopped by the scrawny peon sitting outside.

  ‘Enh! Where do you think you are going?’ he said, studying Adi suspiciously.