The Drift

I walked into my office and switched on the intercom.

The first patient was a young girl. She had been suffering from an on-and-off stomach ache for many weeks. Her tests were nothing out of the ordinary, and her diet seemed balanced enough.

I did the usual things. Collected her vitals. Asked a few questions. Got her to hop on the scale.

That was when I noticed how much weight she had lost over the last two months.

And it dawned on me.

I asked her if she liked school. Then I asked who her friends were.

That seemed to click something in her mother's mind.

I saw that kid a couple more times that year, but never again for a phantom stomach ache.

✦

There was a girl in school. I don't quite recall her name or even what she looked like.

I remember Srilatha and I were in Siberia with her a few times and not much else.

After she moved away, Srilatha and I became friends.

Not the sort of friends people wrote poems about. There was no school romance, no passing of folded notes, no dramatic waiting near the gate. We were simply two children who had somehow ended up in the same corner of the school and found that we didn't mind each other's company.

She talked more than I did. That wasn't difficult. Most people talked more than I did.

I discovered that she was quite funny when she wasn't frowning. She seemed to think I smiled. We still got sent to Siberia, occasionally. Both of us had changed. She didn't defy teachers as much, and I have been told, I didn't glower as much.

What I do remember about the other girl was her climbing the guava tree at the edge of the playground. I never quite understood what she did up there. What was even there to do, up high on a tree! It wasn't the fruit I tell you, the parrots and sparrows ate them all, if they could get there before the crows did.

One day from curiosity born out of idleness, I climbed the tree.

I found her perch.

It was a little hollow between two branches, just high enough to see over the playground. I sat there and leaned back, almost upside down, with my legs hooked around a branch.

The sun was on my face, warming my closed eyelids. My almost-upside-down posture sent the blood rushing into my head, making me delightfully dizzy. For a few minutes, I understood exactly why she had spent so much time there.

There was nothing to do.

Nothing.

You could hear the shouting from the playground, the teachers calling out names, the slap of a ball somewhere below. But up here, everything seemed far away. The school looked smaller. The children looked smaller. The teachers looked smaller.

I began going there quite often.

Srilatha climbed up once.

"Why do you sit here?"

I shrugged.

She shrugged back.

That was about the level of our conversations.

Eventually, I had a degree, a stethoscope and people calling me "Doctor" who had no idea that I had once spent hours sitting in a guava tree with my head hanging upside down.

Sometimes, when I am tired, I think about that tree. It was a good place.

Come to think of it, whatever happened to that girl?

Srilatha said something about a one bedroom flat

Stir something?

Do you ever find yourself returning to a place from childhood and wondering who you might have become there?

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