International House Of Oothapam

So far, my first day of class was an eye-opener. It was disappointing that I was the only one "dressed" for the occasion. I had a classmate named Tolstoy. The first lecture of the year was an abomination to the English language. The fairer sex was neither fair nor average. And I hadn't even attended dissection hall yet. This was going to be the longest three hours of my life. I had heard about another anatomy professor, named Dr. C. D. Selvarasu. Everyone called him "CDS". This guy was an absolute ball buster. His was the class that you glued your eyelids open and paid attention because the slightest miscue would result in a torrential downpour of torment. The cumulative tension and apprehension of the class meeting this piece of work was palpable. We left the classroom for the 50 feet journey to the dissection hall. The double doors were open and the class filed into a large, neutrally toned room, windows barred of course. In the main atrium of the room, there were two separate rows of gurneys totalling 8 in number. On each of these gurneys was a cadaver draped in an orange rubber blanket. We would get to see those soon enough, I imagined. It was a very cold and uninviting place. What made the hall less tolerable, as I'm sure most medical school students can attest, was the smell. It hit me in my eyes first and then entered my nares. My mucous membranes were burning up and I started to tear a bit. I guess Abi noticed.

"Don't worry, man. I know it's bad and depressing here but you don't need to cry."
"It's the formaldehyde, buddy."
"Oh. Right."

I had never been in a gross anatomy lab in my life. I guess the first time is the hardest. I picked a table near the back, far away from the staff table, which was situated near the front of the atrium where we entered from. Sensing that there would be safety in numbers, Abi joined me. One thing that I had just noticed for the first time was that the boys would be sitting on one side of the room and the girls would be sitting on the other side. There was absolutely no integration of the sexes. None of the girls would even look over to our side. However, there were a few brave souls who passed the occasional corner-of-the-eye glance. There were about 15 stools to each table and I selected a corner stool at the bar. I felt like I could certainly use a shot of something even though those two sips of beer were the extent of my alcohol consumption. Once everyone was situated, the room grew deathly silent; eerily silent, like the calm before the attack. In a way, it felt like we were in a concrete and iron plain and we were being stalked by a hideous predator that would take its time in prolonging our anxiety. Sadly, there was nowhere to run for cover. I decided to alleviate the tension locally by having smalltalk with Abi. He was as good a pick as any since I could understand his english and vice versa. I understood the local cats too, but I spoke too fast for them and I didn't know any Tamil. We talked about our hobbies and interests. I told him that I did indeed play basketball, but that I was most likely not as good as Aunty Selma had made me out to be. I found out he was a fan of the Buffalo Bills. Hahahahahahah. Then Abi told me about life here in medical school. I learned then that he had an older brother who was in '92 batch. He had visited the campus before a year prior, and told me about this thing called "culturals". It was a big week-long fete organized by the final year batch and consisted of music and dance competitions, athletic competitions, and artistic competitions like poetry and essay writing. From what I gathered, it sounded like a lot of fun and was something to look forward to. He told me that '93 batch had a boys' basketball team full of NRIs.

"What's NRIs?"
"It means "non-resident indian"."
"So I'm an NRI then?"
"Yes you are, my son."

So last year, the '93 batch kicked everyones ass in basketball. They had several guys from Chicago, no doubt Bulls fans (I was a Knick fan), as well as New York and Philly. I was looking forward to seeing what potential our batch had. But, before my mind could get too carried away, a timorous murmur materialized from the crowd. With the evil empire theme from Starwars playing in my head, the anatomy staff entered the room. The entire room stood up in unison. I sat back down but everyone remained standing. Not wanting to stick out again, I stood back up. I tried to crane my neck and stand on my tiptoes so I could see who had walked in. It occurred to me then that even at my substantial height of 5'8", I was one of the taller ones in the class. I still had to compensate for distance and perspective, tho. There were three women dressed in saris and covered in a labcoat. The first one was pleasantly plump, had dark-toned skin, and big round eyeglasses. I found out her name was Beulah. She would receive the nickname, "Beulah-cow", in due time. Next was another pleasantly plump, short woman who was a bit lighter than Beulah-cow, but the shade gradient was minimal. Her name was Vijaylakshmi. She had an eternal scowl on her face like she was mad at the world or something. And then we had a thin, pasty, alien-looking lady with droopy eyelids. Those made her look like she had Myaesthenia Gravis or something. Her name was Maheshwari. Standing next to them was the Retarded Moose. And that was when Darth Vader entered. The man I had heard so much about, this "CDS", had made his presence known. I expected to see this big, hulking brute of a man with hairy arms and huge muscles. Instead, an old, fragile, skinny man with an exagerattedly hunched over posture, and a potbelly was standing before us. His face reminded me of an older, more vile version of Salvador Dali. He had the handlebar mustache and a perpetual curl the right side of his upper lip. Underneath his eyes were bulbous, discolored xanthomas. His hair was black with a hint of the graying that aging brings and was combed over from right to left revealing an inadequately hidden bald spot at the crown. He walked down the center of the room with a slow and deliberate pace, like a drill seargeant assessing his troops. He stopped in between each table and looked first to his right, at the girls. He made eye contact with each one with a look that could burn through you like molten pig iron. Then he slowly peered over at the boys table and repeated the process. Right before he got to our table, Abi gave me a piece of advice.

"Don't smile."
"Why not?" I whispered.
"If you smile here, people take that as a sign of you mocking them. Just look pavum."

That's the first time that word would rear it's head. "Pavum (paah-vum)" meant innocent or child-like. I did my best to have my puppydog-eyes at my disposal. When he got to our table, he looked over each and every one of us, sizing us up. When he looked at me, I gave him the most "pavum" look I could muster. Then he spoke.

"This is anatomy dissection. You will be in your seats promptly at 9 am everyday WITHOUT FAIL!"

He ended the sentence with a loud crescendo. His accent was quite thick. His voice and syntax were deliberate. Each syllable was emphasized so that no part of what he said would outweigh the other. However, he always ended his sentence by raising his voice at a constant rate to get the point accross.

"I will not tolerate ANY MONKEY BUSINESS. If you make ANY SORT OF TROUBLE, you will be sent FROM THIS HALL to the PRINCIPAL'S OFFICE. NOW SIT DOWN ALL OF YOU!"

I felt like Private Gomer Pyle and CDS was Gunnery Sargeant Hartman and we were both playing bit parts in my own, demented version of "Full Metal Jacket".

"Now open your Cunningham's Manual and read pages 1 THROUGH 19. DO NOT TALK."

Cunningham's was our dissection manual. I skimmed through it a bit when I first bought it. The first part of dissection involved the upper and lower limbs. But before we were to make an incision, we needed to read the long, monotonous, vapid introduction. These were the pages where I learned about planes of the body and terms like anterior, posterior, caudal, dorsal, ventral, sagittal, coronal, etc. It seemed pretty conceptual and once you understood those basic terms, it would make learning about the human body easier. Little did we know it at the time, but we would end up reading the first 19 pages of Cunningham's Practical Anatomy vol. 1 for the next 90 days. But back to the lecture at hand. When you sit in one place for three hours, with your head down, and reading a boring book, you tend to nod off occasionally. Every few minutes, my head would do the wild, disembodied boogie with my neck when I would straddle the plane between consciousness and coma. I have a big head so it's a wonder I've never hurt myself with its pendulous undulations. Each time my head started dancing, someone would nudge me with their bony protruberances and snap me out of it. I looked over at my neighbor and gave a tepid smile. I had no idea dissection was going to be this soporific! I had my dissection kit all ready to go. Had my scalpel, forceps, scissors, probe, and ruler. I wanted to cut up a friggin body man! ANYTHING to keep my mind occupied. Sitting there just made time pass by more slowly.
Like sands through an hourglass, so was the first day of dissection, only the grains of sand were too big to fit in the funnel so the imaginary men inside had to use their imaginary hammers to break the grains into more manageable chunks. AAAAAAAAH!!! I was going crazy!!!! Then, mercifully, 2 hours into the period, little Maheshwari meandered to the table. We all stood up and she took a spot at the end of the gurney in the middle of our oblong ellipse. One by one, she asked us each a different definition from the introduction. When she finally got to me, she looked me up and down before asking,

"Define anatomic position."
"Oh damn..." I thought to myself. Why couldn't she ask me what a sagittal plane was? Oh that's right she had just asked Abi that.

"Anatomic position is the....um....position.....er......that the body........uh......lies in when placed on a gurney."
I didn't think it was possible, but Maheshwari's eyes opened up wide.
"What did you say?"
"Um.....Anatomic position is the position in which the body.....you know.....lies on a table."
"Where are you from?"
"States, ma'am."
"You're an NRI?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Did you not read the introduction?"
"Yes I did, ma'am. I just can't recall the definition of anatomic position."
"Please read better next time. You NRIs do not study and you will end up failing your exams. Please read and study hard or else you will not succeed here."
"Yes, ma'am."

She mercifully moved on from me and to the next contestant on "Anatomy Jeopardy". I let out a huge sigh of relief and looked down at my shoes.

"Not a good way to make a first impression, Bobby." I thought to myself.

For the next interminably drawn-out hour, she quizzed us on these terms. I got a couple right, a couple wrong. Not bad for someone as shell-shocked as I was. At 12 pm, they let us out for lunch. I grabbed my bag and joined Abi as we followed the herd out the door, down the stairs, through the reception area, across the street, and into the main hospital. Once in the hospital, we had to walk up this ramp that was adjacent and perpendicular to the staircase heading up to the cafeteria or "mess". It was an arduous trek, but we made it up to the fourth floor no worse the wear. We entered a big dining hall with a brown fence running down the middle, splitting the room into two more-or-less equal halves. On one side, the girls were lining up at the buffet. On the other side, the boys were lining up. The air was literally shattered by the sound of clanging metal trays, cups, and tiffins. A tiffin was like an Indian lunch box only it wasn't a box, but round. I put my bookbag down and followed my fellow inmates to gather my servings of what was indubitably going to be an inedible gruel.

"Don't make eye contact with any senior, man," Abi said to me.
"Why not?"
"Because they'll call you over and start ragging you. Just keep your head down and look at your shoes and eat quietly."

Abi was an old hand at this so I trusted his advice. As I got my turn to be served, I saw in one of the buffety-style (for a mess) bins stacks of round, white, bread that looked like pancakes.

"Oh HALLELUJAH! PANCAKES!!" I smiled to myself.

I took a big stack of them and put them on my tray. Now all I needed was some syrup. Hmmmm there didn't seem to be any. There were only these bins of saambaar, chutney, and some weird looking compost-like stuff with what appeared to be leaves and twigs in a brown sauce. Ok, maybe the locals didn't eat pancakes with syrup. I'm sure they had sugar. So I got me some sugar and a tumbler of water and looked around for a seat. Problem was, by looking around, I inadvertently made eye-contact with several seniors who were staring me down. Oops. One pointed his finger at me and flexed his finger in an upside-down come here motion. I walked over to his table and sat down, misconstruing his instructions for an invitation to make myself comfortable.

"What is your name?"
"Bobby."
"Sir."
"What?"
"When you are asked a question by a senior, every time you answer you say "sir"."
"Ok."
"Yes sir."
"Yes sir."
"And salute."
"Beg pardon?"
"Salute your seniors."
"Ok Sir."
"NOW!"

I gave a limpdick four-fingered salute to my senior and got up to walk away.

"You do not leave here without us telling you you can go!"
"Oh sorry sir."
"You must ask permission to leave."
"Ok, can I go sir?"
"Think of a better way to say it."
"Sir, may I request your permission to leave?"
"Much better. Fuck off from here."

He seemed nice. I found the table where Abi was sitting and joined him. Also seated there was a couple of fellows named George and Robin. I placed my tray down and took a whiff of my pancakes. That was odd. They didn't smell like pancakes. Well, maybe they didn't use bisquik. While I was preparing to chow down, Abi made introductions and we all said hello and whatnot. Robin and George were both from Madras. George was a Malu and Robin was Tamilian. George was a short, skinny, altar-boy looking chap with dark brown skin. Robin was my height but much thinner and had chocolate brown skin with beady little eyes and a big nose.

"So, Bobby are you living in the hostel?" George asked.
"I move in today."
"What room number?"
"334."
"Oh ok. Robin is 310 and I am 309."
"How's ragging in the hostel."
"Oh man better to stay in your room and only come out late at night when everyone is asleep."
"Yes," Robin said, "I've been ragged several times by my seniors."
"What did they make you do?"
"I had to get them water for their bath."
"That doesn't seem too bad."
"Wait until you see the tap. The water comes out in a slow trickle, practically drop by drop," said George.
"And if you don't stay with the bucket, some other senior will come and steal what water you collected."

Suddenly, moving into the hostel was starting to look less appealing. But before I would allow myself to be troubled by thoughts of this kind, I wanted to scarf down my pancakes. I took 3 at a time, stacked them up and took a big bite.

"BLECH!!!!!!!!!!!" I spat out the chunks before they could even touch my taste buds, that's how bad it was, "What the hell is this???"
"Oothapam," Abi said.
"What the hell is oothapam?"
"That's oothapam," he said while simultaneously pointing to the partially masticated pulp that I had just ejected from my oral cavity, "What did you think they were, pancakes?" and Abi punctuated the question with a snort of laughter.
"Um, YEAH."

And that's when Abi really started laughing. These were obviously not pancakes, but I was ignorant of the fact.
Oothapams were like thick dosai (which I liked) and filled with onions and other things. They were GODAWFUL I didn't touch the rest of my meal that day. I had a feeling that the local vermin would be eating better than me for quite some time.

Our final class of the day was Physiology lab. Our entire batch was split into three factions. One went to histology. One went to biochemistry. One went to physiology. Class consisted of learning what RBC count meant and how to use a microscope to manually count the cells on a grid inside a couter chamber (I think that's what it was called....it was 10 years ago so you'll have to forgive my recall of certain minute details). To do my RBC count, I needed blood. This was where the fun came in. We were split off into pairs, boy-boy and girl-girl of course. My partner was a fellow named Senthil. He was really dark and had remarkable halitosis. It was the kind of smell I would never forget as long as I lived. Provided to us was an electric microscope, a tray of equipment including the counting chamber, a lancet, anticoagulant for the blood, and pencil and paper. We had to draw a 10 x 10 grid on the paper and divide it as such. Each box on the paper corresponded to a box on the grid we would see under the microscope. When that was set up, we required blood. The sight of blood never bothered me, so I volunteered my finger. Senthil took the lancet and placed the sharp point on the tip of my left index finger. I closed my eyes because I don't like the sensation of being punctured. He gave it a quick tap. Nothing. Another tap. I peered out of one eye. Nothing. Finally, he gave my finger a swift, arcing stab with the lancet and I yelped out in pain. It seemed the lancet was now stuck in my finger. I tried to yank it out but it wouldn't give. I pulled harder and it finally came out, bringing a small bit of tissue with it after the point had been curved in like a hook. With more than enough blood oozing from this site, we added it to the citrate anticoagulant. We put a drop of my red humor into the chamber and focused the microscope. The RBC's looked like tiny little rings scattered all over the place. We made our counts and using an equation provided to us by the professor, we calculated that my RBC count was 5.5 million RBCs/cc. Not bad. I was healthy in that regard. The time was now 4 pm. Everyone handed in their papers at the end of the lab and made the long journey down the stairs, across the street, up the ramp, and into the mess for....you guessed it......tea-time!!