Midnight Encounter with Courage

 

“Mard ko na dard hota hai aur na darr lagta hai”, he used to say. 

This was way before 1985, the year "Mard (the movie)" came out with Amitabh as the megastar.  

It was 1969.

Neil Armstrong had landed on the moon. 

Woodstock was over

It was still 4 years for Zanjeer to be released

Amitabh was yet to become famous.

He was a friend of my dad in his first year of college, who had arrived at a firm conclusion about himself. He was, he maintained, a man of indomitable courage.  There are people who are known to be brave, and there are people who are brave enough to say it loud at regular intervals. Dad’s friend belonged very definitely to the second category, although he had hopes of graduating to the first.

Nothing frightened him. 

Ghosts were a superstition for the intellectually undernourished. Darkness was merely the absence of light, and haunted houses, one gathered, were properties in need of better management. In short, he was a young man who regarded fear as an unfortunate habit acquired by other people.

 

Now, a medical college is not the ideal environment in which to cultivate such opinions. It contains a number of young men with three of the best things in life: free time on their hands, a lively interest in the weaknesses of their companions, and access to a dissection hall. 

 

The dissection hall of a medical college is not a place designed to improve one’s spirits. By day, it was a place of learning, where earnest young men in white aprons gathered to explore the mysteries of the human body. By night, it became something else altogether, a dimly lit chamber in which the boundary between science and the supernatural appeared to have been drawn by a particularly nervous clerk. The smell was a combination of formalin, ambition, and the faint suspicion that somebody, somewhere, had made a terrible career choice. It clung to your clothes, invaded your nostrils, and followed you around for hours. One could leave the dissection hall, return to the hostel, brush one’s teeth, and still feel it. Two sets of human forms inhabit the dissection hall. The first set, the cadavers, lie on their steel tables with the relaxed indifference of gentlemen who had retired from (public) life and had no intention of being disturbed. Their expressions, where expressions remained, suggested that they had seen the volumes of books to be studied and were relieved not to be doing it. The other set, the first-year medical students, were the other end of the spectrum. They approached their dissection tables with the tense enthusiasm of men who had been assured that knowledge was power but were beginning to suspect that ignorance might have been considerably more comfortable.

 

By daylight, the whole business was scientific. Every incision had a purpose. Every structure had a name. Every demonstrator had an opinion. Every student had an answer.

At night, however, the rules changed. A shadow became a potential apparition. A draught beneath the door acquired sinister intentions. A loose window rattling in the breeze sounded suspiciously like that-which-should-not-be-named. And the cadavers, those quiet, uncomplaining gentlemen who had spent the day helping students pass anatomy, seemed to acquire, in the darkness, a certain unsettling capacity for independent thought.

It was not that anyone actually believed the dead would get up and walk. 

Naturally not.

They were medical students, after all. They believed in science.

They simply preferred their science to remain horizontal.

 

So! 

Coming back to my dad and his friend. One afternoon, in the college canteen, he was sitting with dad and some friends. During one of his long speeches on bravery and courage, a wager was proposed. The task was straightforward. He was to visit the dissection hall at night and pour water into the mouths of all the cadavers. The cadavers don’t drink and so the water would stay in the mouth and the evidence of the bravery would be there in the morn for all to see and behold. 

“A simple task for someone as brave as he! Surely, he will do it….. right?”

A less confident individual might have asked whether the experiment was absolutely necessary. A cautious one might have suggested that the dead had probably managed quite satisfactorily without drinking water for some time. Dad’s friend, however, was not a man to be troubled by considerations of this nature.

He accepted. In a second, he was ready with it. 

“Oooooh”, We all said.

“Oooooh” said the girls too

He added another dimension. “ I will do it at midnight” He said.

“Oooooh”, We all said again.

“Oooooh” said the girls again too. 

 

So night fell and progressed silently to the deathly hour. He walked to the dissection hall. Alone. It is fair to record that he carried out the first part of the undertaking with admirable efficiency. He entered the dissection hall and began his work.

The first cadaver received its portion of water.

The second followed.

The third, fourth and fifth presented no difficulties whatsoever.

The dead, it appeared, were a remarkably obliging lot.

Then, came the sixth. This part of the hall was darker than the rest so he proceeded caustiously. On reaching Mr Six, he proceeded to pour water into its mouth. He thought he heard a sound further inside the corrider. A giggle probably. He was unsure so while pouring water in Mr Six, he looked up trying to locate the source. 

 And.... at that very moment, as if on some cue, the seventh cadaver raised its hand straight up into the air as though it had suddenly remembered an urgent question. For one brief, extraordinary second, our friend stood frozen, staring at this flagrant violation of the laws of nature, medical science, and hostel common sense

Now, there are moments in life when the human brain has to choose between rational thought and immediate survival. Our hero’s brain did not waste a single second on rational thought. It reached a conclusion. “Science could wait. Survival was a compulsory subject”

 

At this point, the reader may be tempted to ask what became of the young man’s celebrated courage. It would be unfair to say that it deserted him. Courage, after all, is an abstract quality, and it is possible that his remained perfectly intact somewhere in the dissection hall. The young man himself, however, was no longer there to supervise it.

He ran with a speed and determination which, had they been applied to his academic studies, might have brought him considerable distinction. His feet were a blur, his arms performed movements hitherto unknown to human anatomy, and his progress suggested that he had suddenly discovered a hereditary connection to a racehorse.

He reached the hostel, flung himself into bed under a sheet, and lay there contemplating the mysteries of life, death, and the advisability of choosing a career that did not involve dead people. For a man who claimed that fear was an emotion reserved for lesser mortals, he had certainly made a very convincing study of its aerodynamic properties. He made no attempt to discover why the seventh cadaver had raised its hand. He did not return to inspect the scene. He did not even appear to feel that the matter required further discussion. One might have supposed that a man who had just witnessed a corpse performing an unexpected gesture would have found sleep elusive. But our hero was a practical young man. Whatever the seventh cadaver intended by its behaviour, it could presumably wait until morning. And so, to bed.

---

At breakfast the following morning, he was in excellent spirits. Indeed, he was boasting once more about his complete absence of fear. The events of the previous night had apparently been filed away under the heading of ‘matters too trivial to mention’.

One of his companions eventually asked the question that had been troubling the company.

“Well, did you put water into the mouths of the cadavers?”

“Yup”

“All of them?”

Our friend considered this for a moment. And before the pause gave up the event, he said, “Na yaar. “I think chaar paanch mein daala. Phir bore ho gaya. Apni baat prove kar di thi, so I came back. Ab paise nikaal!” In other words, he had watered four or five cadavers, become bored with the exercise, and returned to his hostel because he had already demonstrated his courage. The wager, he felt, had been won. Payment was now due.

 

It was a splendid piece of reasoning. He had not fled. He had not been alarmed. He had not abandoned the enterprise. He had merely lost interest.There is something deeply reassuring about a young man who can convert a humiliating retreat into a triumph of personal discipline before breakfast. The evidence, moreover, was in his favour. The following morning, students found water in the mouths of six cadavers. No one had witnessed the seventh raising its hand, and no one had seen our friend running for his life. The six watered cadavers stood as silent witnesses to his courage. The seventh, rather inconsiderately, had kept its own counsel.

 

The wager was settled, and our friend became famous.

For the next week, he enjoyed the sort of reputation usually reserved for men who have performed some act of extraordinary daring. His story was told and retold by him and all.

He had gone into the dissection hall at night.

He had watered six cadavers.

He had returned because he was bored.

And, of course, he was a man whom nothing frightened.

It was a very satisfactory state of affairs.

Unfortunately, satisfaction is one of those things that tends to encourage further boasting.

---

A week later, our friend was once again holding forth on the subject of his fearlessness.

Dad had listened to enough of this. He waited until the proper moment, then regarded his companion with the warm admiration one might extend to a particularly successful explorer. “Too good, man! You are a bloody fearless.” Our hero, one imagines, received this tribute with becoming modesty, though not so much modesty as to prevent him from enjoying it.

“But then”, dad continued, “why did you run when I raised my hand?”

The effect was immediate. Our friend’s expression underwent a change which, had it occurred during a practical examination, might have attracted the attention of the whole class.

Dad supplied the explanation. “You see, I was lying next to the seventh cadaver.” There are moments when a carefully constructed reputation collapses so completely that it is difficult to know where to begin picking up the pieces. This was one of them.

The seventh cadaver had not been a cadaver at all. It had been my father, lying next to it, who had raised his hand. Our friend had seen the movement, abandoned the scene at a speed worthy of serious athletic consideration, and spent the following morning in the glory.

---

The moral, if one insists upon extracting one from this unfortunate affair, is simple: Never Boast (about your courage or anything). Boasting is a dangerous habit. It encourages one to make grand declarations in the morning, only to spend the night providing experimental evidence to the contrary. The trouble with boasting is that sooner or later, life takes you seriously and arranges a practical examination. And you may discover, as my father’s friend did, that you run rather well.