The most annoying thing about family reunions is elderly relatives with selective memory loss. Ask them which day of the week it is and you will be met with a blank stare; two minutes later they display an elephantine memory, recalling in pitiless detail anecdotes that are best forgotten. Time, the great healer, stands no chance to work his magic especially with aunts equipped with a faulty filter between mind and mouth. Family holidays should be spent eating, drinking and …whatever. As Mr Jaitley reminds us, albeit in the context of the rupee, it is important that one aspires to more than low gossip. It happens in political families too - cartooning is unlikely to be the subject of conversation at the Thackeray dining table - but one has to draw the line somewhere. Unfortunately my family, much as it pains me to admit, has very little going for it in terms of taste and discernment. 'No holds barred' sums up their attitude when it comes to spicing up the dull moments between evening tea and the cocktail hour. The incident of "Matron and the Syringe" is one such low point, the recitation of which made me long to misplace Aunt B's Alzheimer's medication.
I am no stoic: as Shylock said, "Prick me and I bleed." To which I could add that when pricked, I don't merely bleed, I howl. I'd sooner go three rounds with Tyson Fury than face a needle. The mere sight of one is sufficient to evoke gibbering terror; I cowered near the water-cooler when my kids got their MMR shots.
Having established that I am not "Who-dares-wins" material, we cut to the sixties in the sleepy town of Mysore. Aunty Selvam, who held rigid views on thrift and child rearing methods, decided that a tutor was just what a growing lad needed to cope with the arcane mysteries of trigonometry, so there I was stuck indoors with a hairy-eared mutt, Subramaniam, reeking of mothballs and asafoetida in equal proportions. "The squeer rood of the problum," he would drone, while I looked longingly at the gooseberry tree outside, "is the zum of the squeer on thee other doo sides," or some such convoluted crap. Eventually light dawned and while I didn't exclaim "Eureka", I banged my fist on the table in a spirit of boyish exuberance straight onto his ballpoint pen which caused a nasty lump in the fleshy part of my palm.
Aunty returned for lunch, took a look at the wound and gave me a small bottle of medicine. I was all for swallowing it then and there but she assured me it worked best in a hospital. Being innocent and unschooled in the crafty ways of adults, I sauntered along the next day with a merry tra-la on my lips and the vial clutched tightly in my hot little hand. Matron, a Goan matriarch of some sixty summers who weighed in at about 120 kg without her uniform, (this is a scientific phrase and should not be taken to mean I saw her in the altogether), took the bottle from me with a kindly smile.
After fussing with it for a while she turned round and asked me to "pull down my chuddies." Now I'm as broadminded as Rajnikanth but my convent upbringing precluded selling my body so cheaply. Drawing myself up to my full height of four-feet-bugger-all-inches, I coldly enquired whether she had an unsatisfactory sex life or words to that effect. To my horror, she laughed uproariously and then grasping what to my fevered imagination looked like a huge enema syringe, she drew the contents of the vial into it while getting my frail shoulder in a vicelike grip. When the going got tough, I'm proud to say I got going. Pausing only to give her a smack, I streaked through the hallway past several astonished patients in wheelchairs, vaulted over a stretcher bearing some unfortunate soul in for a hernia operation (I found that out later) and disappeared like the proverbial streak of lightning over the distant horizon.
Alas, I had reckoned without the orderlies who on Aunty's high-pitched urgings compounded by Matron's higher-pitched shrieks ran me to ground a mere two km from the hospital. I was unceremoniously hauled back to suffer the indignity of my body being pumped full of harmful chemicals (antibiotics, she claimed) on the labour table. Not surprisingly, I developed a lifelong phobia for women in white and needles, though not necessarily in that order.
