SEARCH FOR THE SIXTH RIVER

Blank is not a feeling. I feel it is an absence of it and that is what I have been going through these past few days. There are times when the mind is cluttered with thoughts, ideas, dreams, the past and sometimes like these days you seem to just exist. Time goes by, and you breathe in and breathe out and call it living. Wake up in the morning, go to work, sit in your office, mechanically finish assignments, leave office, reach home, eat and sleep. In between, like a defibrillatory shock, a thought may come, someone may say something, or you see or imagine a moment of truth, but it does not last long. Like a long bleep after the heart has stopped beating, the days have become a long silent flat line on the monitor. 

I talked to one of my friends recently and was suggested that I should pull out a story about something I had done long back but still remembered related to my profession. A psychiatric advise no doubt, but worth considering as it came from someone who knows me too well. So, today, I have decided I will force-feed myself with the past. I will sift through the dust on my memories and pull out something that makes me feel good. And the only thing that I can think of right now is the time I started my life as a clinician. To say, I was very good at it from the beginning would be such a transparent lie. The story should start from the life in the place to the work that I did. A cab, then a plane, then an auto-rickshaw, followed by a bus. That is how I reached the hospital I was assigned to work.

It was my first year in Gujarat and it was not easy. Now it is so easy to fall in love with international cuisines, but back then, for me to eat sweet daal (lentil soup) and eggplant was like a punishment for my sins, both known and unknown. I survived on bread, butter, jam, biscuits and coffee for a month before I met Augustine's father who had been a cook for the British missionaries who worked in the hospital. I was introduced to different kinds of soups, which I now believe were failed attempts to follow some European recipe book. I lasted few months on stew, soups, chicken curry with with so much of gravy I thought they put the chicken live in the curry and drowned him. 

I was a young, just out of college doctor, with a physical appearance resembling a teenager on a perpetual diet plan, who had come to a place with different food, language and culture. Being driven by the desire to really learn new things and work, I hit my first hurdle when I found out that the state of Gujarat was dry in more than one sense.  I had  migrated from a land of five rivers (some say six, you know what I mean) to the land of cha bhajiya (tea and fritters). I took an auto-rickshaw and asked the driver to show me the town, all the while searching for the sixth river. After circumnavigating the town twice in nearly two hours, the driver patiently asked what else I wanted to see. Needless to say, he was as good a guide as I am a clinician and he had guessed what I wanted. Within five minutes he had earned himself a good tip and I had found the sixth river. I said to myself, I can live here, no problems now.

I hope you enjoy the song. I love the lyrics...

- to be contd.