The microcosm is a world of hunters.
Like hounds racing on a holt
Like bullets shot from a bolt
Virus, microbe, bacillus, germ
Sniffing the spoor overwhelm the quarry
All begotten of ova and sperm.
You may transplant the kidneys, for sure,
Replace the gene or the rib-cage,
Man will still be the prey –
Asthma, epilepsy, sheer old age.
So long as sun and moon endure
Some hunter in nature will have his day.
Morning In A Hospital Ward (A Patient Speaks)
Fetches of frizzled clouds blotch the sky.
Through the open window, a modena dawn
Bursts like a wound spreading its red dye
Upon crumpled linen, used pledget, lint,
As the man with bronchial asthma dies in sleep,
The orderly covers his face, adjusts the screen.
The morning sunlight changes to a monotint.
Unlike a demotic Hindi film
Where the hero never fades from the scene
Without recompense from pain
Without a grand apotheosis
Patients in this hospital
Usually expire in silence thus, worse
Unattended by the nurse.
Sleep is not easy here
Where we always feel
Symptoms of a neighbour’s illness
In the stammel fold of blankets,
And fears like shadows fuss
Between our ruffled sheets.
A single death in the ward
Is a death of all of us.
The Cancer Patient
Standing alone
Like a tree in winter
Leaf-stripped, his arms
Skinny as snarled branches,
Body, a decrepit bole.
He spent
Excruciating days
Under the chemo rays.
Now walks and walks
A single cloud
Somnambulant
Beneath the stars.
The Arthritic
You can’t imagine what my plight is
Since being plagued with arthritis.
All my knuckles and knee-joints rattle
Like machine guns overused in battle.
Round the year I’m troubled, but winter,
Is by far my worst tormentor,
Reducing me to a paraplegic,
Then I can hardly walk with a stick.
Am at that senescent stage
Where medicine plays second fiddle to age.
Candidly, the doc let out,
‘You must learn to live with gout.’
Stitches On A Child
Bleeding and torn
They bring him in
Amid yells and screams
And suture him
By winding silk and catgut
Into his skin
Twice above the eyebrow
Thrice below the chin
His bawling lasts an hour…
Operation Theatre
Trephines, probes, bistouries
In slots of metal trays. Soiled
Swabs, bowls of enamel. Strong
Tang of antiseptic. The room
Resembles an abattoir. Attendants
Move as spooks around
Carpenter of the human frame who
With scalpel, trocar, saw,
Hacks and chisels – quite routine this
Amputation of a shank, as
Cartilage and gristle scatter
Like splinters and shavings of wood.
The oblivion of nitrous oxide
Permits not a twinge
On the sleeper’s face.
Monologue of A Captain, Shell-Shocked In Kargil War-1999
(Hospital Trauma Centre. Full Moon. Sounds of Music Beyond)
Wrapped in her shawl
Of astrophanous clouds
She draws me
As the spindrift in the sea
Her globed face floats
Like a minim among quavers of stars.
Celestial rout of notes
Mell with the music I hear,
Bars release me from bars
Song-key, time-barred, time-rusted,
Unlock far room of a young year.
Open door, song-key-stirred,
Time-cobwebbed, dusty
Shut window and shut shutter.
Song is a sunbeam
Light night, gloom of the room,
Frightened rat in the holed floor
Memory’s lizard lay
Song-day-sunbeam
Gazed dazed amazed
In a trancing glare.
Guns sound in my memory
Guns boom, blast, boom, boom;
Arms lost, legs lost
Groaning, moaning.
Guns boom, blast.
The tree is trunkless.
Its branches are burnt to cinders,
Its leaves are pulp, fire and ash.
What did you hear, my mind?
What did you see?
I saw drunken gods throwing dice.
One said, ‘That man is mine’.
Another, ‘No, he is mine’.
Then the boom and the blast of the guns;
One said, ‘I shall be the vulture
Feeding on his carrion’.
Another, ‘I shall be the dog
Feeding on his bones’.
Another I shall swallow him whole
And savour the sirloins of his soul.
They say at full Moon
Like a corpse from a grave,
The hypodermic will rise
By itself from the autoclave,
Pierce a hole in my head
And if I shriek
They will tie me down to my bed.
Lab Nurse
She comes with little vials
And a syringe wrapped in surgical cotton
‘What are these for?’ He asks.
‘To take samples of your blood
TLC, DLC, ESR’…. ‘God knows what!
He hardly understands her mumbo-jumbo
She will prick his arm below the elbow
Again and again, probe his arteries but not
Find a vein…. ‘Ouch’! He can scarcely hold his scream
‘One last jab’. There! And she brings out
The beet-red sap, emptying it into vials,
One by one, beaming as she leaves.
He only sees a vampire in her face.
A Pathologist’s View
III-health to some is a way of feeling important,
They are never at ease unless cut open.
Fractured limb, malfunctioning ventricles,
Tumour in the brain,
An MRI, ECG, Catscan
Can expose you completely on a plate. Almost
Every secret is known
About your tendon
Ligament, cell, tissue and bone.
Even a routine count
Of pressure and pulse can reveal your state. So
We welcome patients, who think they are ill,
Who always want a medical opinion
About every boil or bunion –
The hypochondriac foots the fattest bill.
ICU Attendant Speaks of A Patient On DI List
His near and dear they are not here
It is we who have been more close
In sleep he came, in sleep he goes.
We were the ones to withhold his drip
Or switch off the ventilator.
We were the ones to stop his blip
And send him to his Creator.
He arrived here in such a mess
We couldn’t stop a lizard climb his nose
Or a rat biting off one of his toes.
This is the resort of the last distress
Sooner or later
We all meet the Creator
Does it matter, then, if one toe is less?
- A young lieutenant who led an operation in Handwara in J&K in which two militants were killed, had his toe bitten off by rats at the Army Base Hospital in the Capital on Saturday. – Indian Express 22 October, 2012
- A 70-year old comatose patient on ventilator was bitten by rats at intensive care unit (ICU) of Mathura Das Mathur Hospital in Jodhpur. – Indian Express 12 January, 2012
The Diabetic
He is not on his bed
His blood-sugar level has risen steeply
Food won’t travel down his gullet despite
Shots of insulin before each meal.
A concatenation of hiccups
Denies him sleep. An ulcer
Festers on the big toe of his right foot,
Its shooting pain makes him
Snivel and wince. ‘It’s not
Gangrene, I hope,’ he says,
‘Else they will lop off my toe’!
‘If you are old’, he tells me,
‘And have a choice of disease, die
Of any other ailment but diabetes.
Out-Patient Department
An aged sikh has bouts of endless cough,
A patient wheels past in a chair,
Ankles in plaster, another carefully
Hobbles on crutches, afraid to slip
On the slick corridor, miasmic with odours.
An old woman holds her head between her hands
And wanting to vomit, retches, retches. Urobag
Sideways slung, an elder snails away with a catheter,
A girl with a polio-leg leans, half-hidden at the gate,
She is waiting, perhaps, for some boy to meet her.
A Tale of An AIDS Patient
‘Once’, the doc said, ‘we had admitted
An AIDS patient here – whom we treated
For months. Nothing worked, so he fled
Leaving a note. “If I have to be dead
Let it be elsewhere”.
A year later, he returned
Bereft of the ailment. We were stunned’.
‘I went to die in the mountains’, he said
But chanced upon a Swami, who learning my plight
Taught me yoga and sacred hymns to recite.
Within ten months or so, I became all right’.
Then one day he spoke, solemnly raising his head,
‘Healing is no complex science, my son,
But the intuitive art of wooing nature,
You were cured because you were willing to be one.
Man, indeed, is such a foolish creature.
* On Astha channel, a man who had once shown AIDS symptoms, confessed before an audience of Swami Ramdev, how he got rid ofthem, inspired by his teachings