Autopsy

I used to be a peppermint addict.
Then, I read somewhere that some components of peppermint oil lower the tone of the Lower Oesophageal Sphincter and cause an aggravation of reflux oesophagitis. Fearing the torment of heartburn, I had controlled my mint-mania.
I have eaten nine Shinsei lozenges since four-thirty. They contain some of the world’s strongest peppermint oil made in Guangzhou in Southern China. They are bitter, and a friend had once told me (after I had given her one to try), that they made her head swim. I could see her eyes. They were watery.
I am unwrapping my tenth. My stores are exhausted. Somebody will have to go to Hogg Market soon.
I used to repeat often to myself the observation that medical school leaves you bereft of the noble virtue of Disgust. After Anatomy, I had thought I would not have to wrinkle up my nose at anything.
I have to eat my self-administered words now.
It’s the odour that hits you first. When you’re close enough to read the words “Nilratan Sircar Medical College Police Morgue”, you temporarily stop breathing till your fatigued olfactory epithelium fails to register any further protest at this torture, and you may then stand for a few minutes outside. Under the porch the stench is stronger, and relatives of the poor souls undergoing autopsies clap their noserags close, and barely breathe.
A friend I don’t like much rendered some useful service today. He had brought some terrible, intolerable perfume with him. I had sprayed liberal quantities of the same on my hand-towel, and felt my nasal mucosa burn and my insides squirm.
But it was better than the smell inside.
There are some of a weird necrophilic race called the “domes” in Bengali – swarthy, large, paunchy, smelly and alcoholic beyond measure – that make their living in that hell. They drink like octopi, and chew “Gutka” to kill the putrid fumes creeping up the nostrils.
I’m not sure they could smell it anyway.
But let us not dishonour them, the Children of Charon – ferryman across the putrid Styx, they have ceased to notice that which we find revolting. They are at home amidst the stench. I actually admire them, but no one can ever like them.
One led us into the dissecting-room. Nine corpses lay there- four on the tables, five scattered hither-thither on the floor.
As he demonstrated ligature-marks and lacerations, we made our way towards a table where lay a man with a near-severed head- probably a suicide who had sought his end on the broad-gauge paths of Civilization. Another man lay torn and mangled on the floor-a side of his head nearly disintegrated probably due to a fall, or jump, from a height. As I looked, a “dome” trod on his outstretched arm, his latex boots making a squelchy noise in the process. My emotions were nearly paralysed by then. I was strangling them, like the rope the woman lying behind me had used to end herself.
On my way back, I nearly trod over a body myself. Shocked by the prospect, I checked my step in time, to look straight at her face. She was thin, stiff from rigor mortis, her teeth grinning up at the ceiling while her open, glassy eyes that no one had bothered to close stared into empty space. I was getting palpitations. I chided my autonomic nervous system and coerced my stiff legs to step gently and respectfully over her. I almost prayed. I thought she had probably died of starvation from her looks. Later we learnt that she had swallowed sulphuric acid. A painful end.
As we waited for the professor to arrive, “domes” sprinkled disinfectant on the floor. They used it like a deodorant- a few drops here and there. I was surprised at the strength of my mental constitution, and everybody else’s. After a shock like that most would have broken, but there I was chatting nonchalantly, albeit through a hand-towel soaked in bad perfume.
When the professor arrived we followed him once more into the room. The woman in the red salwar was our “subject” for the afternoon. The smell had grown. Over the buzz of the exhaust fans the professor lectured us on inquest reports and dead-body-challans. She was only three years, maybe four, older than me. The ligature mark was demonstrated again. The froth on her nostrils was fresh. Rigor mortis was there throughout. The professor had to inspect the corpse before dissection could begin. No one had suspected sexual assault, as he explained, but it was standard medico-legal procedure. The dome did the undressing, the turning-over, and then the cutting.
It was brisk work when it began. Before long the body cavities were open. The stomach yielded up her last meal for inspection. Had she mulled over the idea of dying over dinner? Strange.
Thoughts were forced from my head. It is impossible to think in the dissecting-room. When you watch the “domes” cut open skulls with hammers and chisels, evry sharp “thuck” seems to rattle your bones and make you flinch. Aquilus beside me murmured something about dishonour of the dead. I was not comfortably numb, to exhume a cliché. I felt… something I can’t describe. Not shock, horror or disgust. Those are for a world outside the dissecting room. I couldn’t think. I had to look at her lungs. Telling a tale of asphyxia through the bluish-black Tardieu’s spots beneath the pleura.
Samples of the viscera were collected in plastic bottles to remain trapped in the dissecting-room shelves till the end of time. One could see them everywhere. On shelves in the walls, in side-rooms, their contents getting blacker and blacker everyday. Thunder rolled in the skies. Rain lashed down hard. Aquilus thought the situation fit for a horror movie. My reactions were unequivocal. They threw her brain into her abdominal cavity before closing the skull. I felt nothing anymore.
We tarried to look at the blackened stomach of the woman I had nearly stepped on. It spilled its dark contents into the plastic bottle as we looked. The acid wasn’t strong enough to perforate the wall. But it had killed her. Aquilus wanted to leave. So did Abhishek. It was raining. The perfume seemed to have vanished from my towel.
Water had overflown the drains outside Fraser Ward, and I had to choose my way carefully past the contents on one side and the ubiquitous lumps of canine excrement clustered on the other. On another day I would have considered it disgusting.
But today’s been a strange one.
Back home it seemed that the stench had penetrated everywhere. I could smell it in my bag, my clothes, in the hand-towel in which no trace of perfume remained. After a forty-five minute bath, I unwrapped my second Shinsei to drive the memory of the stench away. My bag and sneakers have been washed. I have to carry another bag and wear another pair of shoes to college tomorrow.
I have broken many of my old customs today.
Will I ever be the same again?