Tring tring… The phone kept ringing. Mohan sir, my math teacher, frowned and put his hand in his pocket to disconnect the call. After a minute, the phone rang again. Somebody from the front benches giggled. Mohan sir walked out of the class, leaving his beloved integration alone on the board. Rahul gave me a high five and said, “Success!” I was the one calling Mohan sir from my phone, saving the class from the lethal and evil integration problems. I winked and hit the call button again. I heard a strange beeping noise. Suddenly, I was going into a white tunnel and at the end of it, I saw light. Was it THE LIGHT, the light that people saw at the end of their lives? But I wasn’t dead. Because instead of taking me to the mortuary, they took me to a nice room with a flat screen TV and an AC.
My tear faced mom was standing near my bed talking to a man in white, a doctor! My grandma looked at me and said, “It’s okay. You’ll be fine.” My body hurt all over and my head felt heavy. Clean, white bandages covered my hands in different patterns, making me look like half a mummy. I put my hand near my eye, where I felt a sharp pain. There was blood. It was my face! If I were not in shock, I would’ve said it’s cool because it was in the same place as Mike Tyson’s tattoo. A couple of hours later, I felt conscious enough to ask what happened. I was thankful, at least I didn’t have to ask who I was! I was in a road traffic accident, they said. I had a head injury which looked like a golf ball growing from my head. I wasn’t unconscious for a second, the doctor said. But I couldn’t remember anything. “No way,” I said when my dad handed me a mirror. In the place where I used to have an eye, I had a purple colored, deformed lemon! I looked like a deadly monster. Then the doctor explained how I had finally become “Gajini” after watching the movie a thousand times.
Post traumatic amnesia, he called it. Sounded fancy at that time. I always wished I could fast forward life or shift-delete stuff from my brain. But when it happened in reality, it wasn’t nice. Not knowing what happened, forgetting all the memories, no matter good or bad, was a helpless feeling. P-block elements and wave optics refused to come back to my memory, just like the weddings I’d attended and the movies I’d watched. Maybe I was paying back for prank calling teachers. It felt like getting in a time machine, skipping nearly three months of my life. When it happens in real life, it isn’t awesome like the Bourne series or extremely cute as The Vow. SO WEAR YOUR HELMETS, FOLKS!!
About the Author: Manognya Chekragari is an MBBS student at Kasturba Medical College (KMC), Mangalore.
Edited by: Anirudh Chand
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