21st January, 1978, an hour & half past midnight. A conspicuously silent & dark winter night. Yes, that’s what it seemed, to the young medico preparing for her Surgery exams, in her room on the 2nd floor of the Students’ Hostel at the Medical College.
“Strange, with all those huge buildings around, why is it so silent? Are all asleep at the Casualty Block? The Maternity Wards? The Surgery? The morgue? Poor me, I have to keep awake & keep on mugging”, thought Namu, the young medico.
From Appendicitis to Crohn’s Disease, she was about to turn pages, when a screeching sound of iron gates suddenly broke the silence, then a couple of hushed up voices. These were familiar sounds. “Another body entering the morgue!” she mumbled to herself. “Funny”, she pondered,” Few hours ago this person was alive, moving, eating, crying, laughing, hankering and lamenting, and now there’s no ‘ing’ left in him! No verbs, just a noun, a ‘corpse’, that is a bundle of flesh, bones and organs. In a few days he’ll be on the table for dissection, smelling of stale barbeque. So what was it that was there & is gone now? Anatomically, its all there in place!...”
“Enough of your philosophy, young lady, and back to your books now!” retorted Mr. Conscience.
So again back to treatment of Crohn’s Disease. Half an hour later, Namu was just about to snooze off, when a shrill cry from behind shook her up. That was from the Maternity Ward. Another woman in labour. The shrieks came back at shorter intervals, each time sharper than the previous one, then a sudden silence. “Thank God, the baby’s been delivered.” “Oh, that means another new life! Exciting! Then this tiny baby is going to grow & eat and move and cry & laugh, bla, bla, bla, till all verbs come to an end…. Anyhow, for today, this is new life, a new creation! Just makes me happy” she mused and went back to her books.
Going through pages of intestinal malignancies, she felt disgusted. Diseases you read about but didn’t learn how to cure always left a bitter taste in her mouth. Just then came that heart rendering hoarse yelling from the Casualty…. Some badly hurt person was being carried in, or maybe an acute abdomen in pain. Oh, these voices sound so loud at the wee hours of night! “So that’s the missing link”, she thought, “We start life with one shrill cry, then go on groaning, moaning, crying & yelling till the final silence comes” A few sounds & some noise had opened her mind to a new perception. It reminded her of a line from Shakespeare she often quoted in school, but didn‘t really understand then, ‘Life is a dream between a sleep & a sleep, full of sound & fury, signifying nothing” Is this what he meant?
“Shakespeare or Surgery, what is your priority, Ma'am?” snapped Mr. Conscience.
“Oh, shut up! There is something here I’ve got to understand now. If I have to accept surgery & Medicine, I’ve got to get this straight first. I was just mugging up Surgery, but here I have a definite conception” Namu retorted.
“Birth, age, death & suffering… is this the cover to cover story of life? No, there must be something beyond all this. It definitely is not just ‘sound & fury’. That’s what we are busy with, so we don’t look beyond….”
“Weren’t these the things Goutam Buddha had witnessed when he renounced the world? In search of what? .Nirvana?... .What is Nirvana?
“I don’t understand Nirvana and I’m not renouncing, not even giving up the Surgery exam! But I’m disturbed because there is a message I can’t decipher”
With this Namu went back to Cholecystitis in Surgery. The exams went well; she scored good marks, got a good job and has been busy with her profession and family for all these years. But the lesson she learnt on this day 32 years back is still considered by her as her ultimate lesson.
A lesson on which she has been striving to give an open book exam all her life. “If we have to go through this apparently meaningless sound & fury which ends in nothing, how can we make the journey purposeful & cut out the extra ‘sound & fury’? Can we trace that “something beyond all this’ into our lives here on this earth, to add some meaning to it?”
“Oh God, teach me to lead a life by which I can touch that eternal light here in this life, in this world”
