Sutured Dreams

If you're the main person mourning at a funeral, you'll remember every agonising second of it. Including the people. Who came. Who didn't. How they spoke. And what their expressions were.  I've already written in fairly exhaustive detail about the time when me and my father were basically thrown out of the only house I'd known in 25 years one night. That was a pretty crap day but there was a side-story I hadn't mentioned before that is pretty sad on its own.  Shane was my cousin and we are more or less the same age. Shane had a difficult upbringing. His father died of a complicated viral illness when he was just a kid. He and his mom, Teresa were basically on their own after that. His father's brother, Benny, did try to help them out but since he was basically unemployed most of the time himself, it was sometimes difficult to tell who was helping who.  I can't really say that me and Shane were the best of friends or anything. But when we did meet at fami

If you're going through a relatively peaceful spell in life, then you can be pretty much be rest assured that some massive headache-inducing problem is about to come your way. Well that's what life has taught me over the years anyway.  My father, bless his heart, had this habit of making extremely poor and strange financial decisions. After his death, I've often struggled to make heads or tails of what exactly he was thinking at the time. He never used to tell me these things either, whether it was because of a sense of pride for him or whether he thought I was too young to start talking finances, I'm not sure. Either way, it made my job harder over the years with some unwanted surprises.  Unexpected Visitors It was on a quiet December evening in Trivandrum as I was preparing to make the usual 35 km trip to the Taluk Hospital I was employed in at the time. I wasn't expecting any visitors because literally no one visited that year (partly because of Covid, partly bec

We as a country are obscenely obsessed over exams, that too even when our kids are at a young age. Learning and growth take a backseat to the numbers on the marksheet. Many of my friends still have panic attacks before exams.  The good thing about medical colleges is that the marks don't matter anywhere near as much as pass/fail. The bad part is that during practical exams, things which have no relation to academics can be used to decide if you'll pass or not.  It's been about 5 years since my KUHS final year results came. I passed. Ideally, you'd hope that a sense of happiness and relief would result from this. But what I got instead over the next few months was a sense of unbearable guilt over things I had no control over.  My Big Mouth The problem first began the day before my 1st surgery theory paper. We had about 3 days gap and during a small break from studying, I decided to do what most people do and browse Facebook.  It was there that I learnt that one of our mo