The absolute last day of my visit was spent in meeting up with the rest of 'em who seemed important enough to me vis-a-vis my parents. Is this selfish, one might ask? I feel it is. But then, you have to be selfish to achieve anything in this burdening life and once you have achieved what/whom you wanted, you can be selfless to that/them. Thereby, you get to be even-steven and probably get through to Jew-Parsee heaven.
Jokes apart, I had a quite weird encounter with my medical college batchmates. I had wanted to meet more but I just managed to meet just 4 out of the 200 who had once set forth to be doctors in August 1996. Everyone else was/is busy with their lives working, marrying, copulating, nursing, parenting etc I guess. I got to meet three of my close buddies, all of them surgeons, over dinner that night.
J, the closest and kindest of them all, was as wonderful as he has ever been. Despite being a devout Christian – he would be at the Christian heaven even if it files in for Chapter 7 bankruptcy – he listens to me and tries to understand about homosexuality. He asked me how it was to be in a relationship, the hardships that I faced, the responsibilities that I would face after my eventual adoption/parenting of a child.
He is the only one left back home who I can trust with to deal with my parents. The others like Dee. and the remarkably homophobic catholic Pauletta, are either busy or simply not made-for such a responsible role. We three, discussed stuff ranging from our careers the sudden outcropping of out gay folk from our own batch. Each of them has a kid and I tried to, without much avail, extract information from them as to how it felt like to be a father.
J and I, soon afterwards, went to visit a the still-stunningly-beautiful looking colleague of ours, at her home where my erstwhile Head of the Department (her Dad) was present. It was such an unfortunate situation when we started discussing how my career was more music than Orthopaedics now; the Professor was not even making eye contact with me.
Later on, J came home and met my parents which I thought was an extremely nice gesture from him. But then, I'm used to stuff like that from him. He was the one, after all, who had taken care of my father (and mother) when he had an acute attack of breathlessness (and panic attack respectively) one night a year back when I was here in Mumbai doing my residency.
Apart from them, I met my close friend and erstwhile neighbor and his family. He too has a child in his life – everyone who's anyone, in Kerala at least, seems to have one these days – and we discussed things about my life as a rock-star in Kerala. He had been the one who had sorta challenged me to try and achieve success in music (link). But the most entertaining part of that rendezvous was the wonderful conversation that I had with his father in law, a poet/linguist/teacher, about things as wide ranging as the anatomy of the nervous system and the paintings by his son!
I also happened to coincidentally run into the most wonderful neighbors that I have ever had in my life. It was at the railway station where I had gone to meet someone else where I met them and then eventually went to visit them at their new home in Thiruvananthapuram. I was so happy! Catching up with fun folks is always fun! The absolute icing on this cake was the wonderful Thanjavur paintings that I got to see made my the Mrs. of the house and the wonderful nibbling that I received from a 2 month old Pug pup which was the latest entrant into their household. Believe me, I have never had any thing chew on my Adam's apple or my nasal cartilage - man or animal, ever - and it felt good!
The last little snippet here about the meeting that I had with the father of my friend. He was one of the people who I kinda respect because of the way he treats me – not just as his son's friend, but as a friend or an intelligent person. I was forced to come out to him during the conversation and it was surprising to see the kind of reaction from him, given the background that he was trained medical postgraduate. But that's his generation, not his education which imposes itself on such contexts unlike religion as with the case of Pauletta. That just made me aware of how fortunate that I was with the set of parents that I have.
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