I have always wanted to write a novel, dreaming to become a whodunit queen like Agatha Christie.
Seeing this alarming preoccupation, my grandfather gifted me a copy of Erich Segal’s Doctors . I suspect that was a ploy to hook me into the glamorous world of medicine at an impressionable age. He probably felt I would be inspired to become the next Laura Castellano. But I identified more with Maury Eastman, the wacko guy who joined college only to write the great medical novel.
I felt it prudent to take up forensic medicine or psychiatry as a specialty to get a ringside view of crime. But my mother disapproved of the idea. “Do you want criminals to climb my wall and psychopaths bang at the door,” she asked. So, in the end, I chose please-all pathology.
I soon discovered that the arrangement of cells under my microscope looked like intricate bed-sheet patterns and would fervently wish I had this superpower to look at my microscope and the printed final diagnosis would come flashing before my eyes in Comic Sans font. I continued with such self-annihilation for about a year or so until one day I realised I had stumbled into the wondrous world of cells. And sooner or later, the diagnosis would reveal itself like the cold-blooded culprit in a murder mystery. I was a whodunit buster but not the type that could lend itself to writing a novel.
I reminisce about my old dream and dig out the Doctors novel. My 12-year-old is curious to know what I am up to. She has been vocal in her antagonism to the medical profession. As our Kindles are synced, she can see what I read. I notice that she has started reading Doctors . Two days later, she is well into it. And I can’t help wondering, “Have I unleashed another wannabe doctor writer into this world?”
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