So after a gruesome ride all through the countryside, all thanks to an auto rickshaw dude who was high on cheap booze and life, I tumbled out of that green monster looking like I needed a morgue more than a doctor. My limp hair was now departed in the middle, clothes clung to me as if out of fright and my rash had gone berserk, I now looked like a plump tomato on sale at the grocery store next to my house.
I trotted to the doctor’s chamber and stood there motionlessly, waiting for something to happen. I was hoping she would ask me my name, that would help us break the ice but instead she too looked back inertly, the kind of look someone would have on their face if they forgot the ‘recipe’ to make ice-cubes.
And then suddenly I felt like Indiana Jones’ female version, out to save both our lives by resuscitation through conversation and I began in my radio practiced voice about how a common friend who happened to be a doctor and a host with us, referred me to this wonderful little doctor who was seemingly down to earth but definitely not enough.
Suddenly my speech got interrupted with the doctor’s wish to check the rash all over my body. It was an almost pornographic moment, standing in attention, stripping at the orders of the doctor, only that the lighting was too fluorescent and the room smelt of antiseptic. Also, one little glitch was that the doctor seemed least interested in anything but the fluid deposits in the blisters on my body. My moment of pornography died a premature, ugly and dreadful death.
I was marched off to the blood sample collection unit on the first floor and as vial after vial of my blood was being siphoned off, the dark almost intense red of my blood was causing me to have morbid thoughts. ‘It is fatal, whatever it is’, I thought to myself.
Blood sample collected, I was on my way back home. Surprisingly, I was in good spirits thinking about the time that I’d managed to get off from work, even if at the cost of what most probably was chicken pox. As I smiled to myself and hummed a faint Frank Sinatra tune in my head, I bumped into a rather handsome doctor who must’ve thought that I was on the wrong floor. By his reaction to me, I am presuming he would’ve personally delivered me to the fourth floor where the famed psychiatry section of the hospital is.
I finished the rendition in my head and went looking for an auto that would help me get back home in one piece. If a half-wit could work part-time for NASA then this was it, the man who drove me to madness and then my house. This auto rickshaw trip was even more ghastly than the previous. This one was driven by a man drunk on stupidity. He made me realize that talk is cheap. The supply surely exceeds demand and in this case, I was hoping we’d run out of stock forever.
By the time I reached home, I knew that auto’s in Delhi were shared by two or more drivers, that this particular gentleman disliked people who kept their feet up on the rods and that he learned how to dance in his childhood when he and three brothers would wait in line for the bathroom.
As I reached my house, I wished with all my heart that Id have chicken pox and that I’d be put under quarantine for a lifetime at least!