It’s been a month since one evening, straight from Bombay (they call it no other way over here), a bunch of men deposited Ganesh at Doti hospital. Ganesh came as a tiny creature – he had to be searched for inside his blanket. Ill-health had eaten all his flesh away. When you called him he slowly writhed out of his blanket and showed his face – feline, with nothing but two large vacant eyes. He could barely talk.
A brief series of tests found he had TB. That however turned out to be the easier part. The devil lay waiting at the curb ahead.
Times change, and how. One tiny microbe had in a while decimated the hero into a sorry excuse of a human being.
Ganesh was shifted to the isolation room after the diagnosis. One day, an unusual stench came out of the usually fresh isolation room. Inside, it was not hard to find out why. The room was drenched in a puddle of early morning urine. Ganesh was repugnant – with wobbly feet like these, you think I can walk to the toilet all on my own?The earlier gaggle of visitors that came with him had changed to a trickle and then slowly, it turns out, there was no one by his side – not even any one to hold him out of his bed. Ganesh had been deserted by his folks. He had run out of the money he had brought from Bombay and with that he had run out of relatives and friends.
So there he was. All alone in the room, bundled up inside his blanket day in and out, peeing where he slept and lost in a desolate slumber. Ganesh had resigned to his circumstances and there was only so much the hospital staff could do. In any case he hated the nurses—they always gave him pills that drove his bowels mad.
From bad, Ganesh grew worse. In his mind, he seemed to have long given up to his condition; his body too he appeared to be crumbling into pieces – the flesh in his face had long been gone; his parched, lusterless skin caved on his bones. And that too was hidden inside the thicket of unkempt beard that had grown to cover his face. He refused to take off the socks he had come wearing. For his feet that had grown stick-like, the hosiery appeared more like some sack. His clothes had turned into some appendage out of his body.
Ganesh was hardly 30. He had so much to live for but right in front of our eyes he was disintegrating from a human being into some lifeless heap of organic debris. Not often before had the hospital staff had such crippling sense of helplessness. But then how much could you do for someone who did not want to be cared for; someone who had given up on himself?
Time was when Ganesh was alive with life. In Bombay, he had an apartment of sorts. For young men from Doti escaping poverty to that far away land, he was their hero, the idol, the one to hold on to. Young migrants stayed at his place, hung out, ate there; they aspired to one day to be like him.
Times change, and how. One tiny microbe had in a while decimated the hero into a sorry excuse of a human being.
Ganesh however was never convinced he had TB. It was the devil’s doing he thought. He felt the devil had ambushed him into this hole and he promised vengeance. Underneath the veneer of that fake growl though, Ganesh was a defeated man. The devil had checkmated and arrested his very soul.
A hospital is a strange place to work – very unglamorous. It is almost the antipode of showbiz where everything looks tantalizingly pretty, however fake it may be. At a hospital, things can get very ugly, sometimes to the point of being grotesquely so. Here, in their state of unfettered helplessness, human beings find themselves at their utter bases: naked, unguarded, sans the faked gloss under which people usually hide their true selves; people in their original color – warts, worries, fears and all. And in such an unguarded state, a human being is not always a very pretty creature to behold, nor is he a very brave animal—what if he still manages a growl!
Slowly but surely Ganesh was sinking and we were beginning to run at our wit’s end. One day we scooped him out of his bed. He resisted but then how much of a resistance could you offer when you hardly weighed 30 kg? We had him shaved, showered and found him a new set of clothes. We thought we would start it all over – that Ganesh would start taking his medications and would at least start making an effort to get well. Ganesh however had other ideas: he wanted to relent to his devils, to declare that he had lost, that he was willing to make the animal sacrifice that he had promised before he went to India.
So that was the devil Ganesh always referred to. This one lived behind his house and visited him at regular intervals. So this was one regular deal gone sour – what if the dealing parties were a human being at one end and his own fears at the other. Imagery it turns out can create as powerful a creature as reality. How else could one explain the fact the something that came out of Ganesh’s imagination could so summarily defeat its own master?
We were going nowhere holding Ganesh up at the hospital against his own wishes. It took quite some time before we could find anyone to take him back to his own home, which was a few hours away from the hospital. Ganesh had no immediate family and his relatives hardly bothered because he had no money. We had to resort to gimmicks of force before we could get any of his relatives down to the hospital.
We sent Ganesh home, so he could appease his devils with an animal sacrifice. He would never realize that he had sacrificed his own self to his imagination, that his own fears had eaten him alive. Probably, at his death-bed, Ganesh found his peace with his devils; we however lost ours.
(Writer is a medical officer in Doti District Hospital.)