Examination Time

As a little girl, I still remember, there was a special charm whenever Exams knocked ‘round the corner. My mom always made it a point to buy me a new geometry box filled with long sharp pencils. Totally rid of the heavy bag pack, it felt good to be walking majestically with just a thin clipboard and the brand new geometry box to flaunt.
If you are thinking of the notes to be rote learned, well I was a sucker at that. I mean who studies at that age? If chased around by my parents, I would slip a comic in my textbook and go on reading as if exams were the best things in my life.
But today is different. I am on the other side of the fence. Overlooking a hall packed with grim looking students, I pace back and forth with a stern look that clearly should spell, I am serious about exams and have always been look. But the kid in me is still prancing about in my heart. I learn that little girl wanting to flip though the pages of the comic I always relished. Yet! The Teacher me yells out “ No! Not allowed!”
So, I get back to my walking with measured steps and roving eyes. A boy in the corner is busy scratching his head. I remember my Dzongkha exam times, how I would have scrapped off all dandruff if I had any during those days. One particular incident never goes amiss whenever I combine Dzongkha exam and the head scratching business. My Dzongkha was always bad and today I say this with my head lowered with embarrassment. But not to forget, in those days, people who excelled in English were kind of happening, not people who drooled out with Dzongkha. Whatever, coming back to the incident I was going to talk about. So, it was during the ICSE time. I was stuck with a question that was more Greek to me than all aliens put together. I was scratching my head looking at the picture of my mom and me and my sister. It was during a warm winter spent at my mom’s place. I stared at our chubby faces and grinned. Two months of mom’s special dishes plumped us up. Had we been pigs, all set to go to the slaughter house. But staring at my mom’s dimpled smile didn’t fetch me the response needed by that question which had me perplexed.
“Are you Ata Tandin’s daughter?” I looked up to see my invigilator staring at my mom’s familiar face on my geometry box. “Yes!” I almost jumped with joy. He was the same man who was supposed to be giving answers to help students in distress.
Following the instruction received as a gossip in the hostel sprang fresh in my agonized brain. Immediately I picked my left hand and placed it on my head to start away with the scratching ( that hideous act meant, ‘Help! I am doomed!’) And gently I placed my right index finger on the question sent with vengeance all the way from Pluto. Meekly, I turned up to face the benevolent messiah but to my utter dismay, by the time I had the whole act put in place, he was in the faraway aisle, walking with a distracted look.
“Tee- hee” before I could help it, a giggle evolved. The nearby students came out of their alien world and casted a glace of “what’s so funny?” look. I moved my eyes with an unsaid apology and turned back to my Hitler walk.

THE FIVE PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HEAVEN: a book

The Five People You meet in Heaven is another soul quenching book by the author of Tuesdays with Morrie, Mitch Albom. This book is almost fable like, telling a story about a man named Eddie, who dies at the age of 83 at his workplace. Eddie is born and raised near a seaside amusement park, Ruby piers and interestingly he spends his adulthood also in this same place working as a maintenance guy till he breaths his last.
The book begins its chapter with The End. Paradoxical. But the whole length of the book begins with the end of Eddie’s life. Eddie, the maintenance guy dies while trying to save a little girl from a mishap at the park. After his death, Eddie walks the unknown path into what the writer calls heaven. Heaven is not the grassy hillock abundant in peace and respite. It’s the same world we live in yet seen in a different context for we look at it with different set of eyes and a different set of consciousness.
One by one, Eddie meets five people who demystify his life before death. The first person Eddie meets is a stranger, whose stark grossness of physical look perturbs Eddie in the beginning but with the meeting the first person Eddie learns that the people he is supposed to meet in the afterlife need not necessarily be his family or friends. From each of the five people Eddie meets, he learns a section of his own life he had lived yet wasn’t aware of.
This book makes you accept death in a new fashion. We think of death as an ultimate phase out thing but after reading this we see death as a door to self- discovery and self- redemption. May be I could connect to this book at this hour when I am trying to combat death sitting in a place where all I see is illnesses and death.
But today, I look at death, not as a foe but an accomplice to that new unseen world of afterlife. Death can be the time machine that reveals our past, unlocking its mystery and giving a new path leading to a known future. This book breaks the cliché- a known past and the unknown future. Ironically, this book shows past is unknown and future can be known.
While I’ve been scared of life after death, this book has opened my mind to a new realization and like Eddie I took a mental journey of afterlife, trying to figure out who I might meet. While I could not give shape to the strangers I might meet, I am pretty much sure of the family and friends I might want to meet and settle the scores for once and for all.
A soul fulfilling tale which makes one ponder on death yet make you accept death in a new limelight. A must read for people who fear to tread the path we all must walk on one day when our business on Earth is done.

Being in a hospital

It is a strange world we live in. Ignorance is bliss. Indeed it is. We discuss death; think of it; talk about it and know it’s gonna come for sure but when it actually comes knocking on our door, ain’t we frightened out of our wits?

I was one person who always claimed death to be my close buddy. Adolescent years’ struggles had me clutching onto the rims of death, trying to pull it my way all the while.

But today is a different story. I don’t know if I am trying to say I can still look at my own death in the face. Haven’t thought in that line yet! But sitting in this hospital ward listening to painful moans; looking at ghastly pipes shoved in various openings of the patients and holding my friend’s feverish hand; I fell a change in my vision of death.

Death is to come to us, all of us. ONE DAY.
But so long as no illness knocks on our doorstep, we ain’t aware of it. Death is a ghostly shadow lurking in every brick of this hospital ward. Hospital- this very term is a big joke of an oxymoron. Hospital is the last place we would wish to be in YET it is the first place we think of in times of illness.
I would like to loath the people who got this grand idea of a hospital where people breathe their last. At the same time I want God to bless these same people for in this same place, people take their first breath of life.

If this is a place abundant in pains and illnesses; this is the place where there is cure. I hate my presence here in this hospital ward yet feel lucky that I’m here nursing my ailing friend back to health.
Call it life; call it death; it is here you’ll find
Call it cure; call it pains; it is here you’ll hear
Call it blessing; call it curse; it is here you’ll feel.