goldenboy

I enter into the Homeopathy clinic, with much self-confidence, half a result of the lessons I have learnt from life, and half due to my psychiatric medication.

I have been diagnosed as suffering from Anxiety Disorders for 10 years now, and chronic depression! Panic attacks, every 9 months ensure unemployment and change of jobs after a break of couple of months.

Recently a Psychiatrist diagnosed me as having Mood Disorder and wanted to sedate me with Lithium, a highly toxic drug, “for at least two years” and that was the final bombshell! I wanted to run away, if not from life at least from her, as far away as I could!

I make myself comfortable at the clinic. I am heavily perspiring. I glance around to see men and women around me, mostly couples waiting for their turn.

The homeopath doctor is an aged lady, traditionally attired in a sari. She speaks to a gentleman, her patient in a soft but assertive voice. She says that his problem is not that of body but the mind. She says he is low on self-confidence. She speaks in chaste Gujarati. As she talks she simultaneously jots down her prescription.

She asks him for his date of birth, and looks through some guide. She speaks of his birth constellation and its link to his health. She speaks of Chakras in the body.

The moment I am seated in front of her, she says – “Pollution”. “I sense a lot of pollution in your body. Is it too polluted where you live?”

For me Mira Road is heaven compared to town, so I say a polite no. “Yes, but I travel in the trains”, I answer, thinking of all the pollution that one passes through in the city.

She asks me about my profession. I tell her that I was an English teacher before I left my job a month ago.

She asks me – “and no work in one month”. I nod a yes. She nods her head as if that is just beyond her how a man could be home for a month! She belongs to the typical mindset where man is for the fields and women for the hearth, I think.

I tell her about my Psychiatric predicament, finely observing her reaction. I am disappointed. She smiles and tell me… “Its only gas you have, nothing else”. “Your sweat is oily, and has a certain odour, you have caught heat in the sun, your body type is suited to colder climes, and wherever it is that you live is polluted.”

“Take the Psychiatric medication, we will bring down the dose in a week”, she says, “and by Diwali you will be off-medication!” Diwali happens to be just a fortnight away! My heart skips a beat, and my jaws drop with my mouth open! A thrill sweeps my spine!

She checks my date of birth; she asks me to keep my hands on the desk as she touches my hands and intuits. She writes the prescription.

“Believe me you have no Depression”, she says!

And Sanyas? I ask?

“No marriage?” she asks

“You have beautiful square palms” she says inspecting my hand, and “your future is good. There is prosperity”, she adds, “no roaming like mendicants…”

“The youngest is the closest to a mom’s heart. Don’t hurt your mom”

I want to ask about my Guru, yet she wards it off saying I was born under “Shukra” (hindi for Venus, the guru of Asuras)

I am speechless, yet I feel the resonance of her word for my problem in my heart – “Pollution”…

“All that travel, pollution, stress, some negative remark by somebody, and negative thinking due to psychiatry”, that sums up the root of my diagnosis…

I leave happily, with a package of small bottles of white pills and powders, and some recipe from the kitchen…

I am on cloud 9 already!

 -x-x-x-

Serendipity?

I get down the train, expectant, unsure… treading the path away from allopathic Psychiatric medicines, towards alternative medication.

While I look for the bus-stop to get a bus to my destination, I bump into a guy who turns out to be an ex-flame, somebody from whom I had learnt the chapters of grace and beauty of life. He had been my angel then, when I was mere 22, and I was head over heels in love with him, completely taken in by his charm and the beauty of his physical form, his romantic spirit and his grace. Motivated by his beauty and gay abandon, I had intended to one day dance like he did to music, with a bewitching smile on his lips, in complete love with life. Nothing existed between the music and his graceful dancing, when he danced; lines blurred between the music, he and the dance and they seem to be one.

Bumping into him in such a big city, quite a coincidence, rather serendipity, I blush and look away as he looks straight into my eyes. I try to maintain my poise, even as my heart bursts into a thousand shards of glass at the sudden recall of his love within my heart after all these years. Love never dies they say, and I know what they mean.

We exchange numbers, and I insist that I have to leave. I leave the pavement and hit the road, get a taxi (“forget the damn bus!”)

In the taxi, each of his words ring in my mind, “I am married with a 6years daughter now”! “Haven’t you got married yet? Would you never? Still want to keep the not-on-talking –terms with me?”

The taxi passes by the sea; I touch my heart in reverence. Love is aching, I feel.