The Hypocrite's Oath
When gentle cool early-morning winds brush past your face and caress your hair, fluffing them upwards, they make you want to perform extraordinary deeds of valour during the day. When a fair breeze creased our shirts at 7 AM on a pleasant Saturday morning, we -- all of us -- felt impelled towards more epoch-making pursuits than oneiric. We had feeble idea of what those ennobling endeavours were, but we were sure we felt that fire burning within us. And we felt invigorated.
One fellow suggested that we go canoeing, to which another pleaded that the very sight of water reminded him of his Fluid Dynamics assignment. Another fellow cried that he was afraid of water in the lakes. He said the lakes reminded him of his aunt, placid and cool but always waiting to swallow you; he concluded that they made him 'hydrophobic'. His vehemence was, well, rabid. And canoeing was vetoed. One guy said that it was very obvious that the weather gods wanted us to get along to the adjoining park and play. Moreover, he asserted, it is high time we teach the yankees that football is to be played with the foot. We did not quite see how the divine ordainment was obvious but we relished the prospect of teaching the Americans a way of doing things. We proceeded to the park.
A group of Indians were playing cricket. We stopped to see them. It is in our culture to go and join in if cricket is played in the street, in a stadium, in the park, anywhere at all. That was exactly what one of the guys echoed. A couple of Americans passers-by stopped beside us to watch the game of cricket, their curiosities kindled by a game that seemed to resemble one of their own but did not quite. “I can’t see any bases!” one of them remarked. “Where are the bases?” he sought an explanation, indignant. The irreverence to cricket must have irritated the guys. For a piqued fellow in our group shot back, “Look behind your selves!” We decided cricket was not the game we would play here.
The fellow who had initially exhorted us to play cricket now said that he wouldn’t dream of playing cricket in a land of base people. We decided we had had enough, and if we had to play anything, it would have to be football (with the foot).
The next fifteen minutes we were into serious football which all of us played with a zealous commitment (apart from playing it with our feet). I passed the ball to the left flank, who dashed forward with a savage energy. He dribbled past a couple of people until he was almost face to face with the goalkeeper. He then tried to kick one so hard that the ball would drill a hole through the goalkeeper and crash into the goal. Instead he ended up kicking over the ball, his leg kicking thin air. He ended up getting on top of the ball and executing a balancing act, before nose-diving into the ground with a ‘thud’. The ball rolled out of the field of play slowly, nonchalantly.
Outward nonchalance often sheathes in its cloak of assurance imminent catastrophes. I went up to the fellow to clarify if he had been tutored anytime by the person who performed impressive pyrotechnics in the local circus. But something else caught my attention. I saw him wincing in acute pain, clutching his left ankle. It was only after an excited crowd had gathered around him that we managed to find out that he was seriously injured. His ankle had swollen to the size of brinjals -- I mean the ones you get in the US -- and he had to be carried away to the hospital. He couldn’t walk!
The four of us who had bundled him to the health clinic dropped him in a chair in the lounge and screamed, “Emergency!” (The lesser said about the baby in the perambulator nearby which began to shriek in excitement the better. Even lesser said about the mother who woke up with a fit, swore at us most unchristian expletives and collapsed back into her seat, even better.) The nurse at the nearest desk motioned us to come over.
We seated him and shouted in a chorus that the case was an emergency. In response, she handed out a sheet – a questionnaire – to him. He let out a sound that I thought I had heard more often from puppies when they suffered from tummy-aches. The first question read: “Rate your pain on a scale from one to ten.” He seemed to just lose it there; he was flabbergasted. He thundered, “What do you mean! On a scale of one to ten! What the hell is ten?” She elaborated slowly, unruffled, “Imagine the greatest pain you have ever felt.” “Hark,” he cut her short, “imagine I were to pinch you till two layers of your skin peel away. Do you imagine that?” The nurse shrieked in alarm. “How would you rate that, on a scale of one to ten?” “Maybe six!” she gasped, trying to regain her composure. “What! That would be SIX?” he thundered, “My foot!” (“Hmm. Actually looks like the ankle,” a wisecrack from behind reparteed.) “Well, then I shall rate my pain,” he vengefully declared. He snatched the paper from her, thought intensely for a moment like only engineers can think, and furiously scribbled down his rating. The nurse stole a glance at the answer and, in a fit of disgruntlement, almost tore up the paper. I am sure she felt the pinch; the paper read 8Pi/3!
The nurse refused to lend his pleas her ear until more questions from the questionnaire were read and all of them answered. The fellow wrote down his answers in a tired scrawl, allowing himself the luxury of the odd grumble. The nurse took the completed questionnaire, surveyed it briefly (for more quirky answers, I thought) and took a deep breath. All of us heaved sighs of relief. He was breathing heavily.
“You are all set now for an examination,” she assured him. “But wait! Before we proceed for an examination, I just need your name and names of two emergency contacts. Okay, first, what’s your name?”
“Subramanian Shivaramakrishnan,” he replied.
“Shoe-bra-what?” she stopped and stared at him suspiciously.
“It is Subramanian Shivaramakrishnan.” he reiterated, in pain.
“Could you please spell it out for me, slowly?” she began to plead, by now desperate.
“S-u-b-r-a-m-a-n-i-a-n S-h-i-v-a-r-a-m-a-k-r-i-s-h-n-a-n”
“S-u-b-r-a-m-a-n-i-a-n S-h-i-v-a-r-a-m-a-k-r-i-s-h-n-a-n. Is that right?” she counterchecked, biting her pen-cap. She read it once, choked on the pen cap and made a snatch at the glass of water on the table.
“Whew! That is some name! Now will you please give me the names of two of your friends as emergency contacts?”
The poor fellow, by now, did not have to be told that his fate would have been better at the hands of the wrestlers in the local wrestling arena, who had no necks.
“Anand Thiruchandhoor Venkatanarayanan,” he feebly mustered.
“I don’t need names of three of ‘em,” she interjected solicitously, “give me just two.”
“Oh! That is merely the full name of the first person,” a fellow from behind grinned, “Oh, it is spelled A-n-a-n… Couldn't you please take it down faster?”
She was staggering back onto her seat, apoplectic.
***
And I would rather not tell you that it was twenty more minutes before my friend’s leg was so much as given a look. When he came out of the examination room, with crutches, his feet plastered in a cast and left shoe hanging from the waist, he looked a crippled wreck.
The cast, crutches and all cost around a fortune. He thanked God he was insured, but momentarily found out that he would still have to shell out a sizeable fraction of that amount. And he had to have an X-Ray taken after a week.
The X-Ray suggested that his bones were intact. It also suggested his fortunes, especially with the dollar, were not particularly good. The injury was merely a swelling and needed no cast or crutches. No bones were broken and he made no bones about it. He still claims that the nurse did not exactly relish the thought of his pinches and hence made sure that he paid for his meanness. Literally. But we have not given our ears to the nurse's version. We must leave the matter open.
But, often, issues of the wallet get to the head. One of these days, you might just chance upon an unshaven ragamuffin standing by the pavement of Oak Street with a tattered cloth-bag, using a pair of crutches, his left leg in a cast and the left shoe hung around his waist, and using them to a good effect...
