If I had listened to myself when I was three years old, to become a cop and run around shooting thieves, I could have slept. If I had listened to myself when I was eleven and become an IAS officer, pumped up on a movie about a district collector who banishes evil all around, I could have slept. If I had listened to my uncle Major Rana Singh of the 7th Regiment Madras Sappers and joined the frigging army, I could have slept. But no, I had to listen to Tom dick and Jacky(uncle Jacky) and became an airhole and take up medicine. After five years of putting my hands up dead corpses’ ass, I had to again bear the stink for a couple more years I became a pediatrician, and then spent another year leaning how to spell the same. So seven to eight year s after my parents had sealed my fate and my granny sacrificed the two goats customary of good news coming into the family, I earned the letters Dr before my name. Dr. Supreeth Singh, MBBS, MD, Child specialist at your service. And now I can’t sleep.
Insomnia does not run through my family, neither does diabetes or hypertension, but for the past three months, I have been taking insulin injections and my naps last as long as a Pepsi commercial. I was not always like this. AS a matter of fact, after the first semester , I slept through most of my medical degree and even during my PG days, classes were just another place to rest the head. But then I got a “plum” posting in this god forsaken village in Haryana that cost my dad an acre and a half of his agricultural land and me my much cherished sleep. Had I known I would end up in this Banana republic where the rules of the land were as old as the land itself, where heads rolled like watermelons on a warm summer day, I would never have taken up medicine. Hell, I would have never even born even!! The local undertaker is a lot busy, since he has to mostly deal with corpses without heads, but I, as a doctor, have been much assigned the much better task of taking out those lives, the very ones I signed up to save. The little girl with the big eyes and the runny nose, her hair in a mess and her face as white as warm milk, has been staring at me for the past year. She follows me everywhere, to the small clinic near the hills, to the local bar where the Panchayat heads decide on the heads to roll that week, even to my toilet where I stare at her constantly. She does not harm me, doesn’t scream no r bite like in the movies, just stares and stares and stares. I would have considered her as just another mild side effect of my heavy pot smoking days in college, but then she started invading my dreams. And now I can’t sleep!!
First it was just her standing there, against a white background, her nose bleeding and one accusing finger pointing straight at me. Then her friends started to appear. Ugly , innocent looking little girls with their bodies deformed or their heads quashed to strange shapes. All of them were looking at me, the doctor, who killed them even before they were born. But what am I supposed to do? When a group of big men , moustaches twitching and eyes flaring, walk into the clinic of a small village doctor with guns and sabers, you can’t exactly pacify them by singing a lullaby or quoting medical ethics from the Hippocrates oath. You have to make that incision under the bellybutton or insert the dilators through the woman, hoping that at least she survives. After the initial shock, I was perfectly able to keep my instrument ready for my senior, Dr Sharma, as he did the procedure in two or three clean swipes of his blade. He took out the pound of mangled flesh with his hand, and usually threw it into the sterilized bowl, where it landed with a plump. Then the nurse came in and wrapped it in plastic, and usually threw it in a dump near the hills , a popular feasting ground for the dogs. Then Dr. Sharma put a gun to his mouth and had me watch as the cops picked up fragments of his skull and brain matter from the floor, while one half broken eyeball stared at me from near the bathroom door. The eyeball seemed to be making fun of me, screaming “You’re next City Boy.. Ha HA!!”.. So now I can’t sleep.
I kill nearly ten girl children a month, a c rime that, in a normal land, would have put me behind bars forever and away from this torture. But here, I am a respected village Doctor who performs his duties according to the patients wishes. I had always wondered how these illiterate villagers found out the sex of their unborn child, and recently found my answer. Apparently the local village astrologer, a man with questionable antecedents and even more questionable methods, places his hand on the woman’s stomach and mutters some goddesses’ names. He then looks at a betel leaf for some time, and pronounces if it is a Ram or a Sita coming to their house. He usually uses Shurpanaka instead of Sita, to make things simpler. The better-off villagers fly to Thailand or Philippines to take scientific tests, and, upon confirmation, come back here so that I can finish the job for them. I use the pump(“The Mother Pump” as Sharma sir called it) when the mother is just two to three weeks into it, so as to avoid a permanent scar on the belly. The whirring of its motor and the sound of the yet-to-be formed fetus moving through the pipe now play constantly in my head, no matter how loud I turn up the TV to. The girls in the dreams slowly started increasing day by day, to eventually form a small army. I was too afraid to go to sleep by then , and so these days, I walk around with a twitching eye and a permanent headache. I don’t feel hungry anymore, nor do I eat as much, and I think I am beginning to lose some of my hair. My shirt hangs loose on my shoulders, and my once tight pants, so fashionable when I bought them, now seem to be constantly slipping to the ground.
The one good thing I did was to kill off old Kanta- Behen, who performed female abortions before me or Dr. Sharma. She was an expert in the area of placing proper kicks to the belly, and had mastered the art to such a level of perfection that the job was done in a matter of seconds, with just a strategically placed kick!!The mother usually screamed in pain and bled a lo t through the mouth, and the fetus usually came out of her in a dissolved stream of blood and flesh, but Kanta Behen was cheap and did her duties in the confines of your own house. I invited the old crow to my clinic once, gave her an anesthetic injection that would knock her out for at least a couple of days. I then tied her up and me and Mr Bhushan, my assistant, carried her to the same dump where the girls are thrown into. I saw her follow me that day, that same girl with the white face. She seemed to be a bit happy, and even gave me a toothy smile, but blood dripped from her mouth and I quickly looked away.
The dump is far away from the village, but in the small snatches of dreams that I do have, I see small girls crawl out from it and walk towards me, all looking at me like a murderer (which I am!) They all seem to be beckoning me, asking me to join them in the dump, where I see a vast bed that looks really comfortable. But the dump is at least forty feet deep on its lowest side, and gradually rises so that it meets the ground on the other side of the hills. So one jump there means I won’t be coming back to the village, which , if you think about it, is not a bad thing at all.
I have stopped writing to my place, and lost any touch with the outside world. I just walk to my clinic these days, like a zombie, sit there and hand out medicines that god-knows does what, perform the occasional murder, walk back , and lie down. Food is tasteless, no amount of water seems to satiate my thirst, and beer or women don’t mean anything to me anymore. All I need is a good nights sleep. The little girl is starting at me now, and she seems to be pointing at something. I follow her, and she seems to be going in the direction of the dump. As I look behind, a hundred girls seem to be following me, all smiling their toothy smiles. I am sitting at the edge of the deep edge of the dump as I write this, staring out at the moon and the black sky that stretches to infinity. The girls are standing around me, all smiling and pointing into the dump. There I see a thousand or more girls, all with their hands outstretched, waiting for me to lift them up. I am going soon, and I hope to finally get my sleep there at least. In this diary I am also enclosing the names of all the families in the Village who killed their female heirs for reasons best known to them. I request the authorities who find this to kindly bring them to book and stop these girls from pestering me at last….I am going now, into a deep sleep from which I hope to never wake up….
The body of Dr Supreeth Singh was found in the dump outside the Mataul village in Haryana, a known Khap territory. Police suspect depression over a failed love affair to be the reason behind Dr. Singhs suicide. The doctor left no suicide note behind and the reasons behind hi s drastic steps are only known to him. The villagers soon covered the dump and erected a statue of goddess Durga over it, so as to prevent any evil spirits originating from the place. In other news, the Kolkata Knight Riders seem to be in blazing form this season of IPL………
