Chapter 03

A sudden visit by Chaube, along with the dean, Dr. Gulati, to the dissection hall, made

everyone, including the tutors, take more interest in the task at hand. By the end of the

first session of dissection, I was able to tell muscle from skin.

For lunch, I rode my bicycle back to the hostel mess. Although I filled my plate, I

could not eat a morsel. The visual impressions of the cadaver cut open and the lingering

odor of formalin did not exactly help my appetite. For the same reason, most of the

students who had gathered for the afternoon biochemistry lecture had skipped their

meals, too.

Dr. MP Shah, Professor and Head, department of biochemistry, was lanky. His

longish face was clean-shaven and he was neatly dressed in a suit. His well-gelled hair

was swept back, exposing a receding hairline. The lenses in his spectacles were so clean

that it appeared as if he wore only the frame. He spoke so loud and clear that he could

easily have had the class mesmerized by his talk- only if the subject had been a little

more interesting. Biochemistry wouldn’t draw the interest of many even if a semi-nude

Demi Moore taught it.

It was a boon for us that the PSM department postponed its inaugural lecture to

Monday. And it was a heavenly blessing that the next day was a Sunday. There was, after

all, a good reason for the university to start college on a Friday.

Dinner at the hostel mess was awful but we ate with the hope that we’d soon get

used to the junk.

Back in the room, Achal and Sunil changed quickly into pajamas and I was

shocked at their temerity to strip down to their underwear in front of me. It was only

when they pulled away the towel I’d wrapped around my waist while changing, did I

realize that they’d stayed in a hostel for a year now.

“C’mon, Ajay, don’t be a sissy, man!” said Achal. “This is a boy’s hostel, so live

like one.”

“So, what do you guys have to say about today?” asked Sunil, changing the topic,

“Heavy stuff, those lectures were.”

“You bet!” said Achal; “I couldn’t keep awake during Chaube’s class.”

“If this is how things are at medical college, it’s quite an anticlimax for me. I had

expected a little more thrill around this place.” I said with a tinge of disappointment in

my voice.

“So what did you expect? That they let you do a heart transplant from day one?”

quipped Achal, and both of them guffawed.

“But that girl, Priya, is really something, I should say,” said Achal with a twinkle

in his eyes, “at least I have a reason to attend college regularly.”

“What’s so great about her?” said Sunil. “Such a snob she is.”

“Because she didn’t talk to you? Sorry, sour grapes.”

“Up yours, Achal, who wants to talk to her, anyway? She’s got a squint. You

noticed it, Ajay, didn’t you?”

A squint? She has the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen.

“Forget her for now, guys,” I said, “why don’t we check out our books?”

It is widely believed that each subject covered in the field of medicine is extremely vast, with a

long bibliography for each topic, and that medical books are generally huge volumes with

hundreds and hundreds of pages in fine print and reading them cover-to-cover in a

lifetime is almost an impossible task.

Well, all that is true.

Gray’s Anatomy, the Bible of the subject, for example, is so heavy that a hardbound

volume could be a convenient murder weapon. Just a firm tap on the head would suffice.

Ganong’s textbook on physiology could also serve a similar purpose.

Harper’s textbook of biochemistry is a weighty volume too but it can kill even

without a tap on the head. Just reading few of its pages at a stretch would do the job as

efficiently.

Thankfully, each subject had several second rung books for mediocre students

like me. BD Chaurasia’s Anatomy is one such wonderful book, divided conveniently in

three handy volumes. It is believed that most top-scoring students, who swore by the

Grays and the Harpers in daylight, secretly flipped through the pages of these so-called

second rung books on exam nights to finish the course in time.

We were soon bored by the daunting collection of books and Achal suggested tea

and omelet at the roadside shanties near the railway station. The mess meal wasn’t

exactly sumptuous, so we readily agreed. My roommates owned a moped each, and I

rode pillion with Sunil. Since such outings would be a regular feature in future, we made

a rule to go Dutch at all times. Sunil was a voracious eater and promptly gulped down my

leftover omelet too. “Never waste food,” he said with a grin. This selective wisdom, in

fact, was the reason behind his extra kilos.

Sunday gave us an opportunity to sleep through the morning. At 9.30 I was the

first to be off bed. Achal slept a violent sleep, I guessed, as his sheet was all crumpled

and his pillow was on the floor. He himself was sprawled all over the bed and a streak of

dried saliva made an ugly mark on his cheek. Sunil looked calmer in bed as he appeared

to crouch meekly on his side. When I returned from the loo, I found Sunil and Achal

sitting on their beds with sleepy faces.

“Is a toilet vacant out there?” asked Sunil, cleaning the corners of his eyes. “One

was, when I left,” I said, “but don’t leave your toothpastes on the basin when you go into

the loo. Mine was used by two guys when I did.”

“It’s okay if they use the paste. I’ve heard some nuts out here use other people’s

toothbrushes, as well,” said Achal in a worried tone, “So keep an eye on everything you

own. It’s a jungle out here.” “Ugh!” I said, fighting a surging nausea.

After freshening up, we went out to hunt for tea. Hostel messes did not serve

breakfast and only one hostel, the Nussarvanji Vakil Hall or the NV hall ran a canteen for

breakfast and evening snacks. The canteen was crowded on Sundays; since on working

days, everyone preferred to have tea on roadside larris or the respective college canteens.

The tea tasted not better than sweetened, colored, warm water and the bread in the bread-jam

was stale. We immediately decided that the roadside was a better place for all our

future breakfasts.

After breakfast, we took time to arrange our things and Sunil, innovatively, pasted

beautiful and scenic posters on the dirtier areas of the wall or at places where the paint

had peeled off. Achal surprised us by pinching three rose saplings from the nursery near

the hostel’s administrative offices. The saplings were in plastic bags and I offered to

procure pots for them later in the day. Later, we toured the hostel and spent time at the

common room watching TV. We met a few decent seniors and talked about our hostel

and hostel life in general.

All general university campus hostels had inmates from various faculties and so

did ours. Good, in a way, we had thought, it’d be nice to know the guys from other fields

too. Or so we’d believed. Although ragging was unknown in the MSU campus, and the

warden’s terror had prevented even the most adventurous of our seniors from overtly

harassing any of the juniors, it soon became obvious that ragging did not always mean

forcing the rookies to dance in the nude. Locking up the freshers in the bathrooms served

just as well.

Our hostel, like most others in the university campus, was a double-storey, L-shaped

building. There was a third floor too but it had only the warden’s quarters. BD

Chiplunkar, a professor in the physics, was a no-nonsense man when it came to being a

hostel warden. Each wing on both floors had sixteen rooms each, eight rooms facing each

other on either side of the passageway. The main entrance to the hostel was at the ‘apex’

of the L and the longer wing had the common room. Apart from newspapers and a few

outdated magazines, the common room had a television set that was often clandestinely

used late in the nights by the notorious guys to watch lewd movies on rented VCRs. The

mess hall was situated behind the hostel building. Most of the inmates were the decent

kinds, minding their own businesses and studies. The ones who were the bhai kinds usually

holed up together in adjacent rooms in the vicinity of the common room. Their rooms

were characterized by gaudy graffiti on the doors, like ‘Enter at your own risk’ (As if

anyone would want to), round-the-clock blaring music (usually hard rock), smell of stale

smoke and dirty linen, loud voices even when they weren’t fighting among themselves,

and plates containing leftovers from the late night dinner outside their doors (These guys

were the privileged ones and were often provided, on demand, room service by the mess

manager). The mess never served non-vegetarian food but many of us had often noticed

chicken bones on those plates. Not many outside the gang had ever been inside their

rooms but the mess boys said that their walls were full of posters of nude or semi-nude

girls, snazzy bikes and cars. Some had even noticed empty liquor bottles strewn

carelessly under their beds.

There were two sets of toilets, one at the end of each wing. One was just next to

our room. Though this meant a perennial stink, it did not necessarily mean we got to rule

the facilities. In fact, one’s hold on the bathrooms was directly proportional to one’s clout

in the hostel. On finishing his bath, a guy would leave the bucket inside with the tap

running and an unwashed set of undergarments on the plumbing fixtures to denote that

the place was booked for the successor. The process continued till the last of the despots

finished his bath. Once I had the audacity to usurp the bathroom by throwing out the

bucket and other accessories belonging to the bullies.

They had not fought me. Maybe fighting a puny medico was below their dignity.

They simply locked the bathroom door from the outside and made sure no one opened it

till noon. Though Achal and Sunil swore that they had left by the time this happened, I

have a feeling that they had simply chickened out.

Of all the bullies, Kedarnath (a weird name for a contemporary fine arts student),

I thought, was the most dangerous. He wore a permanent haggard look with his unkempt

hair going awry all the time. It seemed he never bathed and shaved just once in a

fortnight. His eyes were forever puffy and red as if he’d not slept in years. He wore the

same shorts and smelly t-shirt for ages. A chain smoker, his lips and teeth, the inside of

his index and middle fingers had deeply tanned from holding cigarettes for a better part

of his life. I wondered if he ever attended college. No one knew his academic status but

people said that he’d been with the department for several years now and was showing no

real intention of getting out in the near future. A liability he must be for everyone, I

decided.

I’m embarrassed to put it here but I was terrified of him no end. Once, out of

curiosity, I had simply slowed down while passing by his room and stared at his door. At

that instance the door opened and I suddenly came face to face with the man himself.

“Hey you,” he said, pointing a finger, “you snooping around here?”

“No, no, I was just passing by.” I managed to blurt out.

“You were not passing by, you were standing here staring at my door!” he

hollered. I almost pissed in my pants.

“No, no,” I started off again. “I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t mean to do any such thing,

please believe me.” I was cursing myself for being so weak-kneed.

He mellowed down a bit probably because I addressed him as sir.

He spat out the blob of tobacco he was chewing and jabbed in a toothpick instead,

before asking, “What’s your name? Which faculty?” On hearing my reply he broke into a

large smile, jerked open his door and shouted to his pal inside, “Hey Rambo, we got a

real doc here. You said you had a headache?”

Before I could react, a large goon appeared from inside looking much worse than

Kedar himself. “Oh yeah?” he asked in a sleepy voice. “I got a bad hangover, doc, gimme

something. Aspirin is no good for me.”

“I’m not yet a doctor,” I confessed in a weak voice, “I’m only in the first MBBS.

Presently I don’t know anything about treating people.”

They both looked at each other and I anticipated a shower of abuses. Or even a

few punches here and there.

“Don’t know anything about treating people.” Kedar mimicked me, and both of

them laughed. “Then who do you treat? Cattle?” There was more guffaw and thankfully,

they disappeared inside, slamming their door on my face. It was at least better than a

punch on my face, I thought, though the effect was the same.

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