By Dr. K. Javeed Nayeem, MD

The unseen hand of God or Destiny or Providence, or by whatever name we may choose to call it, has some very strange ways of playing with our lives. And, perhaps no one sees it at work, more often and more closely, than a practicing doctor like me. And, over forty long years, I have on more occasions than one, seen the twists and turns  that it has given to the outcomes of medical treatment, which have left me amazed, perplexed, deeply grateful and sometimes deeply distressed too!

I am narrating here one such incident from my own life which I feel is worth sharing with my readers. I am talking of the time exactly thirty-five years ago, when I was working as a young, newly married physician, attached to a Christian Mission Hospital, perched on the very fringe of what was then known far and wide, as ‘Veerappan Territory’ in Malai Mahadeshwara Hills, that stand between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.

Veerappan, the elephant poacher and sandalwood smuggler, was then the most dreaded man in the region, whose reign of terror held the law enforcers of three States on tenterhooks, for over twenty long years, while taking a huge toll of the lives of men and beasts alike. The former he slaughtered mercilessly because they stood in his way and the latter he slaughtered for their tusks. His domain began, where the domain of our hospital ended and the abode my wife and I considered our home for many years and brought up our two children in, was a solitary, storybook house, standing on a vast, thirty-acre plot of land.

On all four sides, it had views of the distant hills, across seemingly endless plains. Watching the sunrise and sunset from our porch, day in and day out and the giant full moon rising from behind the hills, once a month and an occasional forest fire, burning bright on the hills, was the magic we lived on!

The four of us, spent, what we still consider some of the happiest days of our lives, in those pristine, wooded surroundings, from which we had to draw ourselves away only with much effort and a sense of loss too, when my children needed to begin their formal schooling. Until then, they were both schooled only by their love for nature, which we tried our best to instil in them and which has thankfully remained deeply ingrained in them even now, long after they have finished their education and have begun to reap its fruits.

Being the only big hospital in the vast forested region, we used to get all kinds of medical cases, minor, major and very often hopelessly beyond any help, because for villagers dwelling beyond the shadow of civilisation, medical care was not easily accessible. Even now, more than three decades later, the scenario is not much different, for a good many of them. The commonest problems we used to treat were advanced infections, injuries, snake bites and pesticide poisonings, both accidental and intentional. Nothing very unusual or surprising, because people injured themselves quite often while at work and snakes abounded in the forests and pesticides were widely used in all the farmlands.

One evening we got one such case of pesticide poisoning as we were winding up our work for the day. The patient was a very young handsome boy, from a fairly wealthy farming family, barely aged twenty, whom I shall call Raju for two very simple reasons. Firstly, because a doctor is not supposed to reveal the real identity of patients he or she treats and secondly because Raju is for some strange reason, the most favourite storybook name, that we all know of, through all the books we read and all the movies we see!

While the storybook Raju does many interesting things in the books and movies he figures in, my Raju was in my consulting room that evening because he had chosen to consume a large dose of pesticide to snuff out his young life, that had not even begun to see life, in its true sense!

The reason why he resorted to this extreme act was because right from the day he turned eighteen and thus legally eligible to ride it, he was pestering his parents to buy him a motorcycle, and they had been dodging and delaying it for reasons of their own. The main reason for their reluctance to accede to his request was because they felt that he was still too young to ride a motorcycle. A reasonable enough fear, which most parents have, out of concern for the safety of their children, but which most children, sadly do not understand.

Raju’s condition was very critical for three reasons. Firstly, he had consumed a very heavy dose of a very potent pesticide, from what is known as the Organo-Phosphorous category which are all extremely lethal. Secondly, he had done it away from home, in the pump house of his farm where he was noticed lying unconscious next to a poignant suicide note, by one of the farmhands, a couple of hours after the act.  The third reason was because their farmstead was located in a very remote place far away from any medical help, with the nearest hospital being ours, more than twenty miles away.  Now he was lying completely unconscious before me, clearly looking like he was beyond any help. But I tried my best to console his distraught parents and only sister who was considerably older than him and who I was told was very close to him, being almost like a second mother!

This done, we got down to giving him a thorough stomach wash in the emergency room and then shifting him to the ward for further treatment. Despite our best efforts, the boy seemed to be hanging between life and death, only by an invisible thread of destiny, taking more than two full weeks to recover and regain consciousness completely.

There were times when we were certain that we would lose him but somehow, he continued to pull on. I felt that the passionate pleadings by his parents and sister, during his frequent intermittent periods of semi-consciousness, to get well and come back home and ride his dream motorcycle, which helped as much as our treatment itself.

Once ready for discharge, the family and a host of their relatives came with a priest who performed thanksgiving pujas at the bedside of the patient and declared that he was fit to go home. They distributed sweets to all the other patients and the hospital staff before thanking us all and taking Raju home in a decorated jeep, like a bridegroom going in a baraat to his wedding!

A very weak but yet beaming Raju bid farewell to everyone around as the jeep drove off and we at the hospital heaved a sigh of relief and thanked God, for gifting us the miracle of Raju’s recovery, because it was indeed nothing short of it.

After his discharge, Raju would come regularly for his weekly check-up and he soon was in the pink of health. Then one fine day, he came to the hospital smartly dressed in jeans and a jacket, wearing goggles and riding a brand-new motorcycle, with his sister in a bright silk saree, riding pillion with him. The duo once again thanked us all profusely and drove off and vanished into the distance, while we stood and watched in amazement.

That was the last time we saw Raju, our patient who had defied death, only because he was destined to live! But a little less than a month later, his sister turned up at the hospital wailing loudly, even as she entered the lobby.

When we gathered around her and asked what had happened, between uncontrollable sobs, she told us that her dear brother Raju was no more.

A week ago, while riding his dream bike, as he was going to the family temple, which he had vowed to visit after his miraculous recovery, he hit a truck head-on and met his end, this time, instantly! Through misty eyes, I could visualise the boy’s smiling face, as I stood transfixed and pondered over the strange ways of destiny. Cicero, the Roman philosopher, was so right when he said: ‘Fate guides the willing and drags the unwilling!’

e-mail:  kjnmysore@rediffmail.com