The Secret in her eyes....

You cannot do anything.

A thing you hold on to, a situation when you will out that conversation you have been having for years inside your head. See a cute child, hear an old couple's love talk, a mother fighting for her son, a bird pecking endlessly at a car's mirrors as if it did not like it own image, the cat you run after, the acid scar on your thigh your friends mistakenly put on you, the first hint of rain on your face, two metal chairs on a railway platform, the possible duration of lactation....it goes on. Life's tit bits, till the memory attached to them becomes that passion with which you live your life, day after day, year after year.

The biggest truth of them all. That you are afraid. Of numerous things, faceless, nameless irrational fears. Your life, your way of life. The dirty room, the swollen left foot, the books you are supposed to read, the books you read instead, travel and fashion magazines you collect, the fear of entering a parlour, of being made to feel like the one you want to hide the most. Behind that grit, that volcanic anger and the humor for which your patients warm up to you, your juniors adore you. That girl who keeps looking on, behind all this. Day in, day out. Like a secret.

Like a death you remember nineteen years later with absurd details. And when you don't want to but end up crying and revealing everything through your tears to the person who should have been kept the most away from it.

Conversations that go on in theory for 4 years, and in practice for less than 3 hours. Amidst your diamonds, the smart phone, the A/C, the second Littmann...You are a rich girl. And you like it. A trip in the same position, as a pillion, in that same posture you sat 4 years back. Afraid. Afraid of many things. And time flows. This time though there were no irrationally humorous conversations. There were just forced silences of the inevitablility that was to come four days hence.

Fear is such a constructive force. It helps one to work better, unlike the absurd excuses one can give for not wanting to return. 'I don't socialize. I don't pretend to like a person I can't. I don't care how I look. I wish I could care how I work. But beyond a point, no.' You give one reason for it, its understood. You will fail. Love will not last, a second time. And you are afraid when it will happen, this time you wont make it. Notice the author has used the word 'when' instead of 'should' like this is an inevitability.

Fear of getting in the path of ones dreams, like returning home night after night fallen, beaten and tired to keep a smiling face at the door, and sipping coffee and discussing 'paradigm shifts...'. These are well founded fears of coming in the way. Once accused, they never leave you, even if the person says its unfounded, because you know it has always been there, inside your head..Your absence is a release, your presence has always been a prohibition. Beyond that 16 hours working thinking about everybody else and coming back home to read 15 other things in 2 hours time is a soul that is desperate to be talked to. Doesn't matter. It will be learned to be overcomed.

Tell me. Tell me anything you want.

There is nothing else to say.

Okay then.

I will call you sometime.

Click of 2 phones. Sum total of 4 years of relation summed up in these 4 sentences. And the difference in it finally came about from an enforced request to clear the muck. At a time when things had gone far far ahead. The 'I will call you sometime' has never been kept. An ordeal for one of them. An uncomfortable situation. Why did he decide to stick on to it then? She had only wanted to see him one last time before she went.

This and in other painfully unimportant ways do people stop being in love with one another. It starts with these mute cycles of respiration that grow out and snuff everything else in no time. Even if 'make up' has been a word in not so distant past. Because it takes you 1 hour of your duty to realize where you stand.

Nowhere.

Nowhere. No escape. Not even a fleeting thought that love could be enough.

Despite what the movie says, its never enough.

Pictures. Pictures you see, photographs, two people looking good, smiling at the camera, holding each other like friends, sharing dinner every night, talking, laughing, getting the sun together on their skin, discussing movies, books, music, dance...How can you even think it could be good otherwise? Convince the person. Slowly but reassuredly, make him know that the word 'make-up' is always a put-on. It always wears away.You are invincible when it comes to optimism. This is the lasting truth. One just lacks a little bit of strength, and a little bit of motivation to understand why 'everyone' needs the 'call before you sleep' routine. Even people laughing together drunk in the spirit of the moment, where the glint in his eye is visible while he sips that beer. Even in the space where at some other place someone is trying to decipher why the man she sent for a psychiatry opinion would have come back and arrested. She had never seen him look like that. There was no glint, perhaps thankfulness, and the so called 'respect and intimidation' stuff she heard regularly, when he saw her. She hates herself for herself. Fireflies had studiously disappeared this time.

Things are always that complicated.

In any case the entire situation is the same as it was a month back, a year back, four years back. Things don't change and the only thing you know is that you make a better choice by choosing to step back. Like the numerous lies you told him in lieu of asking him if he wanted you any closer. It was a negative. People forget. He forgot. Or else his smiles wouldn't have been that happy, his looks wouldn't have been that satisfied. And even when he asks to bring it back, you know it cannot be brought back. You have been too wasted in that wait. Its too late. Things somewhere have been signed, sealed and delivered.

Its better to remain in status quo. Better for both, and at least for him, on a personal option too. Because the four years old secret you read in four days in the eyes of a person you will begin to forget before four weeks pass. Its not your cross to remember. It the other's. Looking on from behind that formidable force she presents.

The Secret in their Eyes, I saw this movie tonight.

I hated this movie. Too much of the things I would not want to be told.

CIRCLES IN CIRCLES

4 years changed everything, the concept of myself as a human being, as a woman, of fears and anger and betrayal, of dreams that are above everything else to dreams that do not seem as important when you come close, so close to realize them.

Tomorrow I fly, with eyes lidded with some breatholds of a quiet unsettling acceptance; things don't always turn out to be the way you want them to. To my city, that overdunged underdrained city I mentioned, where the metamorphosis first began.

Todays OPD was filled with happy moments. And I counted I touch approximately 400 people a week; save my insouciance for wondering, I wonder if this sea of people I have been thrown into, to think about them and worry about them putting my life into back gear, brushed below the carpets into a deadened awareness later, does compensate for my not being able to go and be with the people I most want in my life. That my habit of thinking about them makes them hug me, touch my feet, come hunting for me and all that, yet the people I most wanted to help in this life, I was tainted with a sense of expectation that ruined, always ruined the trust.

And I will never know why the people you most love in your life are always the ones to hurt you the most. A lot of them happen to be in that city I am going to now.

And I guess the papers I will be carrying this time will be signatory to the coming to an end of the entire section of a life. Less lived by or more, I don't know, its happily sad in a weird way. Perhaps I should have done somethings when I did not do them. Its never been an ego issue, but I hesitated, for several reasons in saying the most important thing. Maybe I would have, could have done better in a different set of circumstances. But in any case, they were mine.


You know, someone had asked me what would I do if I ever knew there was this one last day of my life. The answer to it is the same as it was then. I am prepared. No dues remaining to give to anyone, no one left whom I could have said how much I loved them and did not, no work left undone, no money borrowed, no love lost with parents, sister brother..the ilk. A little short of effort maybe, as far as my job was concerned, but I have given every working hour the best of my effort.

Yet I would like to go and take a long walk on the road, this time alone maybe, and go watch the fireflies on mahanadi patha and go to some austere corner of the other side of kathajodi to cry and cry, till I dissolve into nothingness.

I miss you my tropical over heated worthless city, I love you with that passion I drove my scooty challenging the train, where every temple nook and cranny was filled with a prayer to three hundred gods, and every rainy moment had a tear of longing. I am coming to you. Last time as me. And I will leave it from the soil where any remaining of my soulcry goes to. Puri. Nothing could have been better than this.

To Feel

I have never been able to decide if its a good thing or a bad thing to get passionate about people, or the patients I treat. Sometimes, they catch my fancy. But its usually the nitty gritty things about them, like brushing their teeth, or getting a posture change. I usually don't bother them too much about the diagnosis. Most of the times I am to be found catching a CT Scan and explaining it to people. I feel that its good if someway we tell the people what their condition is all about. And trust me, each time you tell, you will notice a difference. The attendants grow far more conscientious, the adherence to treatment shoots up. And doctors should never make the mistake of undermining a parent's education in this country. I have seen absolutely illiterate people turn around and care for their own with a vigour that is unmatched by some of the most literate people in the hospital.

Health is not just about curing a disease. Its about bringing about a change in life, its about perceiving that something is wrong and that people desperately want to be heard, no matter how hard they try to stay away. Sometimes you manage it with people. Sometimes you fail. But if you look a little deep you will find its not so difficult to connect. Especially for people who do not live up with pretences.

I am not going to fail. Search for happiness has been a tough battle but I am generally optimistic. I tend to swim over the situation. I will tell you how it works out. And its true. I still cannot contain the blessings. But I feel happy about it now. There is no baggage of secrets or misgivings associated with it.

Lessons in ECG

Starting from today.

And the book is called....

"The only EKG book you will ever need"

:(

LOL