The biography reads “Dr Aparajeya Shanker, MD, is a Published Researcher, Medical Doctor and Surgical Instructor. His areas of research range from Public Health to Oncosurgery. His primary area of interest is Oncoplastic Reconstruction”. A month or so has passed since I graduated. Armed with a prescription pad and a charge of “Do no harm”, I am dispensed into the world. In some ways, the journey is over, and in some ways, a new journey is beginning. The long 7 years that constituted this journey, filled with hours at conference halls, medical wards, operating theatres, and waiting at laboratories has come to an end. I spent years waiting for the final title of doctor, consumed by the single-minded mission of becoming one and earning my own place in the world.
A novel can be written out of the magnitude of this journey, and my pen willing, it will. How else can one do justice to the hours I spent at medical camps, operating theatres across Europe, and in conference halls where much of life itself happened? The span of that journey is not the aim today, but the defining result of it is. After a long journey towards something, we come out transformed, and the birth of the doctor, is the greatest transformation I could hope for. Looking through the years gone by, I divide my life into eras, an era before medical school, an era during medical school, and an era now, as a doctor.
Flicking through my archives one morning, searching for nothing in particular, I came across a folder that contained my writing. Years of prose, poetry, essays, and observations were contained in that folder. In a moment of curiosity that is best described as a lapse of judgement, I opened the folder, and I was confronted by a library of written work: prose, poetry, essays, a few half-hearted attempts at novels, and of course, some works that words, ironically enough, cannot adequately describe. Were they thoughts given matter? Were they the bitter rantings of the young and wounded? Were they all just snippets of a life seen through the tangential light of words coming together?
The documents went back years, an almanac of a life lived. They abruptly stopped somewhere. In the consequential nature of space and time, I could see that I could measure my life with the nature of the written word. Letters were written, addressed to people, hitherto forgotten. Letters were written and unsent, condemned to the grave of a hard disk where they served as a monument to regret.
I had once considered, much more seriously than I wish to admit, the life of the writer. I spent a significant amount of my time writing, sitting at my desk, or at some cold bus stop somewhere. Armed with a small notebook, I would write, atop mountains, near cemeteries, near old abandoned churches. I am even willing to admit my greatest vanity: that I was a poet. The poems ranged, as they do, from topics of the mundane, to grand tragedies of the time they were written in. Like all the other young and perpetually wounded, some of those poems were written to someone.
I was filled with a sense of nauseating embarrassment. Indeed all writing and poetry fills me with a sense of nauseous disappointment, memorializing as it does, the transient nature of suffering. All writing, especially poetry, assigns importance to the mundane nature of our limited existence. Our greatest literary giants, spanning centuries, creators of universes of mythology, have wrought upon us monuments of their own personal regrets. In some way, the private emotions of suffering are given new life in words, printed and then distributed for all of us to consume, feeding our appetites for emotional suffering. We find kinship in suffering, we find kinship in human tragedy, we find kinship in the written word because we place it on a pedestal.
I fought the urge to read any of the works I saw. Instead, I decided to call my friends, scattered as they are across the globe. Brothers in all things, they were encouraging of my writing, often my only audience. They would read and critique my work, some of them even encouraging me to submit manuscripts to publishers or exploring ideas further. I called one of my friends, lifelong audience to the literary products of my tortured vain youth.
“Do you, remember the poetry I sent you, years ago?”, I asked, hoping that he wouldn’t.
“I do, yeah, which ones are you asking about?”, he replied, his voice distant due to the quality of the phone connection.
“I’m not sure”, I said, “Do you remember one that sticks out?”
“Oh yeah, the one about the woman in the room!”, he said. His enthusiasm sent a feeling of dread down my spine.
I remembered that one in excruciating detail. Inspired by Charles Bukowski’s exploits, it is not meant for public consumption. I told him as much, and he thought for a moment.
“Ah, Eventide!”, he said suddenly and loudly. I was taken aback and swore under my breath. I remember Eventide, written at the height of my monumental vanity. Tremendously grandiose, Eventide is a poem I wrote for someone. With a seething sense of internal shame I have quoted one line from it:
She’s my oasis, a distant lake I escape to,
Where eternal sunsets shine vermillion.She's my evensong, my last shining light,
The receding tide, eternal Eventide.
She would call me on her way to the hospital where she worked at. On the long bus ride, alone as she was till she wasn’t one day, she would begin the conversation in the exact same way “What you doing?”. English was not her strong suit, our conversations interspersed with me gently correcting her upon her insistence. In my corner of the world, I was either sleeping, or in the middle of the stillness of the evenings. She would call me and talk, ask me questions, poke fun at my general existence, send me videos of her playing the guitar, and pictures of her mean-spirited dog.
One day, she had travelled to her native city. It is an insignificant city, with no real history, an unfortunate inheritance of the Soviet era. Having lived in India for the first nineteen years of my life, I understood the weight of time. Cities held within them histories, old buildings that had stood for so long that standing before them was a reminder of your own mortality. Generations of people would come and go, the buildings bore witness, human tragedy came and went, the buildings remained. Her apartment block was in the same old Soviet architectural style that inspires nothing but dread, and it said nothing in particular apart from some vague statement of Eastern European socialist history.
In the limited rectangle of my screen, I could see her moving around her childhood room. This was the room where she grew up, it was personalized to her taste, posters lined the walls, a few guitars stood against the wall, a large mirror loomed in the background. She showed me her room which her mother now used as a storage room of sorts, and then, as if we were in a museum tour, she showed me the artefacts of her life.
Her first Fender guitar, displayed prominently in her bedroom was a gift. She strummed it lightly, her fingers gliding over the strings. She then showed me her stuffed animals, collected over her childhood. Her dog yapped its disapproval in the background. She sat on her chair and decided to show me her bookshelf. Books on popular science lined the shelves, all written in Russian of course, but most of them were familiar to me. I had read them all, Michio Kaku, Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, the works. I was a voracious reader in boarding school, one of my many avenues for rebellion, others involving a combination of pyrotechnics, that are best left unsaid.
She leaned over and picked up a book she cradled in her arms. She showed its cover to me, a hard paperback book with the words “Odin Istoriya” written on it in black. A History. For a moment I wondered if she had published a book too, seeing that she was already a published researcher by then. She cradled the book in her hands and told me that it was a collection of poetry written by her first boyfriend. They must’ve been nineteen at the time. On their first anniversary together, he presented her this book, a deep labour of love, misguided as it was. I dreaded that she would read them aloud, and I would have to bear the onslaught of teenage drama, made even more intolerable in Russian.
She kept the book next to a picture of her when she was a child, no older than seven or eight, two dogs standing next to her. She looked so unbelievably small, standing against the vastness of the world around her. A slip of a girl, she looked like she would be blown away by the wind. In contrast, the woman in front of me was an accomplished doctor, but wounded, like all adults are in some indescribable way.
“I treated him so horribly,” she said, “and he was so sweet to me”. She had been cruel to him, her version of the history between them was a familiar tale. I agreed that she had but cheap trick that I no doubt was, I had the audacity to tell her to forgive her nineteen year old self. I had always believed that we have to forgive our younger versions of ourselves, omitting the part where I hadn’t forgiven the nineteen year old me, trapped in the museum of my own memory. In her hands, the book of poetry looks like an object of deep reverence. She cradled the book in her hands, this labour of love turned monument to regret and for the first time in the years I had known her, I saw the trace of a fundamental wounding. She hadn’t told the history to anyone else except her closest friend and me.
She asked me if I had written any poetry for anyone, and I lied, that I hadn’t. I was a teenage boy once too, with the same misguided romanticism that affects us all, young and wounded as become in our course through the world. I had written poetry, I was even published in school journals, and I was successful with one of my submissions. I had withdrawn the submission, and asked other websites and journals to take down my poetry.
I told her that I hadn’t written any poetry for anyone.
Years later, separated as we were by the Black Sea, her city was in ruins. The war had reached her corner of the world. In her escape she hadn’t taken the book of poetry with her, it lay in the rubble somewhere now, where it probably belonged. She called me again, at some safe harbour, her life left behind. She was safe, and she asked me if I could help write a letter for her. It was her habit to ask my help with her scientific papers, letters to professors or heads of department, speeches and scripts. In her search for asylum, she had once again recruited my help, asking me to write her letters for her. She wanted to express a note of thanks for her hosts who had been so kind to her. I wrote out a letter and sent it to her. She was dissatisfied, and wanted a few changes, a more personal touch. I told her that I wasn’t the most gifted in the personal touch and she told me that she remembered the letters I had written to her.
In the long catalog of time that had passed, I had forgotten that I had written letters to her, a particularly irritating habit of mine that I have thankfully outgrown. For her birthday, for the New Year, for Women’s Day and Victory Day, I had sent her letters. She remembered them all and had saved them on her phone. I told her that I wish she hadn’t, she asked me why and I couldn’t articulate it to her. I thought of all the letters I had sent her, notes on postcards for some occasion or the other, and I wondered if they were best left in the rubble. I stopped writing many years ago, choosing instead to write words in the pursuit of a solitary truth in scientific fact instead of giving life to emotions that need eternal silence. I had become to her the very caricature I had despised my whole life. Like all literary giants spanning centuries, I had become the very image of the writer that I despised and never wanted. I am not the sculptor of monuments to regret, giving shape to the things best left unacknowledged.
“Your words meant the world to me”, she said. I laughed, I told her that words were cheap tricks used by the sentimental, forever whining about their internal wounding. I don’t dispute that my words meant the world to her, seeing that they served to get her published and get her recruited at an esteemed research facility. I do dispute the value of the other words, the letters that I had written to her, the pointless postcards, even the poems I had written but not sent her.
Revelers from a Friday night congregate outside my window, the night is dark and summer has found me where it always does, waiting for the next mission. I contemplate my life, spent at some outpost or the other, in streets spanning across continents, atop mountains and in dark forests, and I realize that there is no purpose to the monuments to regret. I deleted the folder containing the years of work.
The biography reads ““Dr Aparajeya Shanker, MD, is a Published Researcher, Medical Doctor and Surgical Instructor. His areas of research range from Public Health to Oncosurgery. His primary area of interest is Oncoplastic Reconstruction”. It will never acknowledge the monuments to regret that I sculpted, in my path towards this solitary truth.