George Menezes

I just celebrated my 80th birthday a few months ago, regrettably in a hospital bed.

It took me 80 long years to really experience being operated upon. I have been inside a hospital lots of times. As a Management consultant, to conduct training progammes , to donate blood which is no different from Management consultancy with a little difference. In the case of Blood donation you know or hope some one will benefit.

In the case of Management Consultancy for hospitals I will really never know if any one has benefited from the painful donation of my report or whether it has been consigned to the dustbin or the dark recesses of a cockroach infested file. As a first time patient I had anticipations and anxieties.

Could employees have read my report and be waiting to retaliate? Would it happen to me like it happened to friend of mine who had criticised the watery soup he was being served every evening.?

“Our Chef is very proud of our soup” said the Catering Assistant. It is his mother’s recipe and no one has the temerity to refuse it. My friend did and realized that the soup was served to him via a scalding enema.

As it turned out no doctor or nurse or Ward boy had heard of me and my Management report. Praise the Lord. It was a frank, honest and somewhat critical report.

All went well the only mystery being that after 80 years of good health I had to have 3 surgical interventions.

First some of the unused stones meant for street fighting, mainly North Indian bashing seem to have found their way into my innocent gall bladder.A simple enough operation that would have been over and done with considering the skills of our surgeons . Unfortunately one of the stones who must have felt left out of the fraternity of stones slipped away and lodged itself in the bile duct and had to be removed via an endoscopy and the bile duct blocked with a stent.

All is well I thought to myself except on being discharged it was discovered that I needed a prostrate surgery.

“Continue your chopping” I said to the surgeons. Not so soon they said. We send you home with a catheter and operate after a month.

I was getting used to getting by body being butchered, but a catheter for a month was a new experience. How does one hide a plastic urine bag from the gaze of the rude and scoffing multitude?

A family conclave came up with many ideas. My grand daughters suggested that they would paint the bag….surrealistic art, bright, permanent colours and I could hang the bag round my neck. Brilliant I thought’ till I found that the weight of the urine was cutting into the back of my neck and no amount of deodorant spray could take away the “sulabh” public toilet effect.

We finally settled on my daughter-in-law’s idea of tucking it cozily into one of those long strapped cloth bags, carried over the shoulder by priests, nuns, social workers and poverty stricken artists who were expensive “Kholapuri chappals”

It worked wonders allowing me to lead a normal life including attending a party where I danced with females whose perfumed bodies did not give my urine bag even a momentary chance of recognition. Hurrah I said almost tripping on my partner’s floor length gown.

Happy to announce that with initial regrets there is always a flood of joy.

The other good news is from the devoted wife of an actor who swears that women are equally capable of rape as men are.

I tend to agree. Some years ago in a moment of misplaced charity I gave a lift to young woman waving frantically from the pavement. When the time came for her to get off she asked for five hundreds and told me bluntly that if I refused to pay a she would started screaming “Rape….Rape !!”

I opened the door of the car in front of a crowed bus top, gave her a fifty rupee note that I had, and told her my age. I am no Charlie Chaplin.