The Second One: A Lady

After that incident life continued as it was. The strange thing is I still do not know how I should have felt. I was not at all scared but something had changed. My mom always told me that human beings are survivors. Keep us in any conditions and we will come out stronger. I involved myself in the studies and started running with life.

It was the first day when we were taken to a morgue for dissecting a human body. It was cold inside and was the room was dimply lit. The wall contained small rectangular boxes with rounded handles, and each of them contained a frozen dead body.

The unnerving thing about a morgue is that you start become philosophical once you see dead; made of same flesh and bones as you are. The frozen bodies also have frozen expressions and it looks as if there was a sudden pause in life, similar to the ‘Statue’ game we played in childhood. Many of us vomit or faint there but at the end of the day you take a big knife and cut it straight across the chest.

In no place you can feel so closely what mortality of mankind means.

From first day in college, we had been hearing of stories that seniors lie there as dead and try to scare the juniors. I was ready for that but I did not anticipate what actually came for me.

All of us were being shown a dead body and we were going to start the dissection of it when I found somebody whispering my name. At the entrance of that room, there was a lady who was signaling me to come to her.

While walking towards her, I noticed that she was fat and was dressed in complete black. She was wearing a distinguishing large bindi on her forehead and had all sort of strange ornamentations, somewhat similar to those of hermits. Her appearance sent chills down my spine but it was too late to turn back.

Her voice was polite and without introducing herself she asked, “Vandana, how does one donate her body to the medical college?” I looked taken aback not only at her question but also as if asking her how she knew my name. She just smilingly gestured towards the batch that I was wearing.

I explained to her all the formalities and sent her to the relevant office. After a week we again had a session at the morgue. Last time we were told how dissection was to be done and all the external features that had to be marked before touching a dead body and today was going to be the day when we were to cut open a dead human body.

I was completely relaxed and got my instruments issued. Everything was normal and then I shrieked. On my table, staring right into my eyes with calm frozen expressions, as if trying to soothe me up, that same lady was lying……..dead. I felt as if I have forgotten how to breathe and I became dumb for a minute.

After that I shrieked and shrieked and my friends took me out of that room. Later on I found that that lady’s death was completely natural and her body had been shifted to the morgue just that morning.

I took a break and went home for some days. There while turning some family photographs, I found pictures of last days of Sharmila aunty. Under the influence of some hermit, she has started wearing black and when she was being taken for cremation she almost resembled the lady that had come to meet me in the morgue.