This Bicameral Mind
I have always held the belief that there is a duality of man, that within us are two contrasting souls each trying to negotiate with the other as we navigate through the world. The news from the world has not been positive and there is nothing much to be hopeful about. My own life continues in a rhythm perfected over the years: rising before sunrise, seeing patients at their worst and then at recovery, forever changed through their course through surgical therapy, and returning home; where I wait to do it all over again. It was one such morning, the brightness of spring piercing through the window blinds in my flat that I recalled that it had been twenty years to the exact date since I started at boarding school. It was an intrusion, unwelcome and sobering to the passing of time. I was forced to stay with this realization till I caught a glimpse of myself in the dark monitor window before me, songs playing in the background. This long beard, the tired eyes, the expression of a man too used to things happening to grasp them in their entirety. A summation, I expect, of having spent too many years in the company of the sick and the work that goes into perfecting this art I have chosen.
Twenty years have passed since I was 9 years old, heading to boarding school, and it might as well be a lifetime away. I recall that spring morning and the years I spent there as a boy in fragments of sunshine, laughter, punishment, and brotherhood, all of which came back to me after an exhausting shift on a spring afternoon. It found me where my introspection always does, in a continent separated far from home. I have spent a decade in this part of the world, and even that surprises me. My memories have all become measurable in decades, the surest sign that is the bicameral mind of a young surgeon, who is also a man aged through time.
It has been years since I saw the boys I grew up with, each of us dispersed across the world. This tragedy of an impersonal architecture, where we are outsiders who come from "somewhere else". Of that particular day, me at 9 years old, I recall details and conversations, me in a blazer and tie, smiling widely at my parents as they waved me goodbye. On recalling it I open the door to the years I spent later at school, the only place I have ever felt truly at home. Me, with the other unwanted boys, all of whom share this one gossamer thread that goes back to the time only we remember and care to understand. I recall sunshine, the unrelenting rains of the monsoons, and the dark of winter, and through all of this is a warmth that I have never felt since. There was grief there somewhere, but there was also camaraderie, of unity without the need for sloganeering. Words I said I have long forgotten, but the words I heard from my brothers I remember almost clearly.
With age comes a sentimentality and beliefs about the world keep shifting. I had kept my keepsakes from my years in boarding school in a black metal trunk, my name painted by hand across the sides. In the railway station in Patna, you could spot the porters lifting these trunks and understand who was on the journey with you back to boarding school. All of us boys had a trunk issued to us, and it would fit nearly everything we needed, our clothes, bedding, books, and other odds and ends. I would keep a mental inventory of things that I had done and seen over the holidays, carrying little keepsakes of my holidays like postcards or paintings, and books. On the crawling train ride to the mountains I would rehearse the span of time I had spent away from the other boys in my company, and think of the questions I would ask them. I would wonder who would be made Prefect, which teacher would be more vicious this year than the last, and of course, if there would be anything new to look forward to. I still travel by train to and from the capital in this distant country I have come to consider home, and I find myself rehearsing little details about my trips. I think of the streets I have seen, the books I read, interesting conversations I heard and the people I met. I think of all the things that I have wanted to say, of my own heartbreaks and victories, and as the train pulls closer to the station here in this valley, it occurs to me that there is no living ear to bear witness. An empty apartment, a typewriter and some sheets of paper will be my only witnesses to this life lived.