Sometimes, in a vacant or pensive mood, my husband, a doctor, would regale me with anecdotes from his medical college days. Some of it I would dismiss as frivolous while others were meant to be chewed, digested, even passed on to the younger generations. There is, however, one gem among them, which needs to be documented in his persona, to do justice to the speaker:
Our college days in Madras Medical College were made memorable by the many eminent personalities who dealt with us. While I revelled in the fact that my batch had the privilege of being trained by some of the best professors, I can never forget one teacher who, by virtue of being a role model, instilled in me the values of integrity, dedication, and perseverance, all with a stark, stoic missionary zeal for one’s chosen calling. That was Madurai, the attendant in the anatomy laboratory.
Madurai’s job was to pull out arms, legs, torsos and various other body parts from a formalin well and distribute them to the students at the various dissection tables. He would arrive earlier than all of us, wear a tattered lab coat and go about his business with the air of a man born to distribute limbs to the world. This, along with the fact that he was a kindred spirit to corpses, made him a body-whisperer of sorts and none of us dared to mess with him. We tended to talk in hushed tones when Madurai was around. We simply, honestly felt very secure and safe with him, especially with blood-curdling cadaver parts staring at us. After all, he was hand-in-glove with the dead and knew how to appease the ones that would not have wanted a mess made out of their precious ligaments.
Madurai knew more Anatomy than any of us. From time to time he would help us hold our scalpel right, discuss veins and arteries and bone structures, and hold forth eloquently with an inimitable, all-knowing swagger that was both unnerving and awe-inspiring. Looking like a spectre himself, Madurai would suddenly appear from nowhere and throw an arm or leg nonchalantly onto a dissecting table.
“Your medical college education starts with me.” he would say. “I live with these bodies day and night, so use them wisely and well,” he would warn us. The flourish, the ease, the elan, the professional expertise, were all nurtured carefully over the 20-plus years that he had worked there.
A gang of six of us were notorious for our pranks in the dissecting room. Whenever the dissections got a little boring, we would drop our scalpels and start singing the National Anthem loudly. The rest of the students too would pitch in, drop their instruments, stand in attention and join the chorus. The seriousness of the room would disintegrate into loud, raucous laughter, much to the disgust of the Anatomy Professor. That was the only time I saw Madurai sneaking a smile at our mischief, but he would quickly get back into his serious limb-picking mood.
When our session was over it was his duty to clean up the mess, wipe the tables and gear up for the forthcoming classes.
One spine-chilling incident rattled even the Zen-like Madurai. One of the new students was apparently forced to do Medicine by his parents and he did not have the aptitude, interest or sensibility to forage into the intricacies of the medical field. On his first day at the dissecting table, Madurai, as usual, threw a relatively fresh arm on to the visibly nervous, new student’s table. The hand had a few bangles and a bold tattoo which read ‘Pichamma’. The scene was too real and ghastly for the student, who had probably known too many Pichammas in his village. In a matter of seconds, his scalpel fell from his hands, he swirled, gyrated, screamed and fell down on to the floor, hitting his head against the rim of the table. Blood started pouring out while all of us ran to help him. Madurai was simply shocked. He could never understand the logic behind a person’s reaction to something that had been a part of his psyche for years and years.
We were not surprised when this new student discontinued the course and went back to his village. I wonder how he would have reacted to any other Pichamma whom he met in the course of his later life.
After I completed my graduation and started working, I made several attempts to get in touch with Madurai. Somehow he had left a delectable impression .
He was the finest example of someone who took pride in his work and chose to enlighten younger souls by opting to do what many might call an ‘unsavoury’ job. I remember catching Madurai off-guard once. I asked him what his children were doing. “I hope one of them becomes an Anatomy Professor,” was his humble reply.
I should have seen it coming. After all, he wanted his child to be a chip off the old block, determined to hold the hands of young aspirants and walk them through the hallowed labyrinths of the human anatomy.
sreelatharadhakrishnan53@gmail.com
