My heart skipped a beat last Friday as I stared down at the table. Only moments ago, I had stripped down to my undies, changed into blue pyjamas and shirt, tucked my mane inside a cap and covered my mouth with an antiseptic mask before being led into the OT. There were many more masked men around peering down at the table, scalpels and scissors and needles and sutures in hand. Going about their task in silent monotony guided to their target by overhead light beams and robotic arms.
And my heart went dhak-dhak... dhak-dhak... dhak-dhak. As my frozen stare tried to search for answers.
“Don’t do it,” colleagues had warned me in office. “You’ll go weak in the knees.”
But I held my ground. And peered. And dhak-dhak... dhak-dhak... dhak- dhak it went. Heart No. 40,001, in that motionless body of a man, ripped open by robots and scissors and scalpels so that it may go on and on and on for a little while longer. Silence never sounded so loud before.
“That lump of muscle,” I turned to Delhi’s superstar heart surgeon Naresh Trehan, “And then, another one. How many have you stitched up till date?”
Dr Heart let out a mild laughter. “Fifty thousand of them in 30 years so far; 40,000 here at Escorts alone in the 18 years it’s been running.” “Their silence must have turned you deaf by now.” Fifty thousand and 1, then 2, then 3. How does it matter? They all must add up to the same. A lump of muscle, pumping in blood. Then pumping it out. In need of a fix. So that one may go on and on and on. One beat at a time. Then one moment. Then one day. Then the next. And then, the day after.
“No, I can hear them talk,” the good doc threw back at me. “Each and every one of them. No two hearts are the same. You know what? You can say that muscle and tissue thing about your gall bladder, perhaps. Cut it out and it makes no difference. But that lump of muscle you call a heart, it’s your only link to life. So you constantly keep asking what can I do to fix it. And you end up having a relationship with the heart. Every single one of it. Because you know it’s the only lifeline between now and never.”
“If it is true that the heart really talks, then sure you must have also heard it cry. Why does one heart reach out to another?” I wondered aloud.
I had been at Dr Trehan’s for more than an hour now transcending the physical into the metaphysical, trying to make sense of whether the heart really hurts, whether it really bleeds. Or whether it’s all right up there in one’s brain. I could have thrown those questions to the best neuro in town, or the best shrink, for that matter, but I knew they would end up repeating what I have always heard before. “It’s all in the mind, stupid! It’s just chemical responses.”
So I’d come to the best heart doc instead. To figure out if the heart really talks. And here was Dr Heart into his 50,000th and whatever, saying it’s no figment of the mind. “There is a very good reason why people relate emotions to the heart. Because you feel it right in here...” he said, pointing to his heart. “And that’s why I believe your feelings come right from the heart.”
Dr Trehan should know. The Times of India had once reported how he had ended up tying the knot with Madhu, India Today bossman Aroon Purie’s sis. “I did one year at Hindu College while preparing for my pre- med. While still there, I was at a party where I saw this girl walk in wearing a grey raw cotton-silk kurta and salwar. I started talking to Madhu. I liked her persona, her eyes, the way she carried herself. Marriage was far away from my mind. But I was completely head over heels in love with her. The intensity of my feelings came as a shock to me as well as to my group of friends,” the heart doc had said. Dhak-dhak, you could say. “If you look at it the way I do, the seat of emotion is the heart. The brain may well send out a signal and that has to be the same for every person, but even medically, if you look at it, the response always differs from heart to heart,” the doc went on. Which is why when you love someone from the bottom of your heart, it’s the ultimate act of emotion. There is nothing more you can scrape. Which is why when you have a broken heart you feel the pain right in here. Which is why when you have a bleeding heart, it drains you of all your joys right in there. “That’s the ultimate truth,” the heart doc said. “And what about hate?” I wondered.
“I am certain that while love and compassion come straight from the heart, hatred can only come from the head. Right now, I have a lot of hatred in me, but I don’t feel any of that right here.”
I could guess why.
If they’d only let Escorts Heart Institute and Research Centre be, the way it’s been all these years... For at the end of it all, those 40,000 dhak-dhaks could have only come straight from the Heart. One more time.
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