অধ্যায়--80
The Bronchial tree
"Take a look at this chest x-ray…Hmm dense forests bordering on green rice fields
A cow munching grass, lazily waving away the flies, the setting sun, and one or two clouds
interspersed …Hmm looks normal-show the other one. What’s this! A giant jungle mower, Concrete
new buildings-all cooped up look alike? Hey can you hear the trees crashing!
Can’t make out – over here the mower’s creating a din. Hmm see anything more?
A lot of alveolar opacities which is probably the smoke from our upcoming power plant…
Hmm the diagnosis is clear—Lung cancer. Get a bronchoscopy but the prognosis is bleak
At the most 3-6 months--Sutra"
He was known as Dada to his friends. He had remarkably long
hair for an Indian along with a long beard.
They say he used to religiously tie it in a turban once everyday before they attacked him mercilessly one day when the prime minister died, killed by another person with a turban. That day there were countless such victims in the roads of Kolkata. It's a city where outdated Government tram-cars are usually torched by violent mobs at even lesser pretexts (the price hike in the tram ticket being one such routine stimulus).
Dada was transformed that day not only because of the hideous gash inflicted on his face by a religious fanatic but strangely the whole experience made him very unkemptly irreligious in the years to come.
He let his hair down like a hippie and started smoking like a chimney (smoking was strictly forbidden in his religion). Another development that was totally unlike Dada in his pre-hippie days was his fascination for poetry. He was a permanent fixture on the Presidency college campus spouting a free flowing stream of consciousness verse that would intimidate even the utmost post-post modernists.
June came to know him only as a solemn retired professor of chemistry from Punjabi university, introduced to her by the senior resident as one with interesting findings on his chest, a respiratory case that would be surely kept for her ensuing clinical exams if available at that time. Sure enough there was a bulge at the right upper part of his chest that was dull on tapping and there was a hollow sound on putting the steth. A mass lesion is the most likely morphologic diagnosis thought June. She had become quite deft in her handling of cases during her residency years.
She chatted with her patient as always but couldn’t find time to read what Amrinder Singh 'Dada' had written in his diary.
Last night I discovered the fruits of bronchogenic carcinoma growing on my bronchial tree.
Ugly and slimy it tasted of blood and phlegm. This tree…had long been a source of shade for travel
weary souls amidst sun burnt fields. Not any more…falling leaves, shriveled bark, ugly nodular fruits
with a slimy sauce. With each and every cough it shakes from its very roots caught in a raging storm.
