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| Writer | Preeti Shenoy |
| Category | Novel |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | westland ltd |
| Publish Date | 2014 |
| Pages | 158 |
| File Size | 1 MB |
| File Type |
I wait for my turn on the chair outside the doctor’s office. The psychiatrist, to be precise. The so-called expert. We have travelled all the way from Bombay to Bangalore to make this trip. Getting an appointment here is like getting an appointment to meet the Pope at the Vatican City. I don’t know how many months one has to wait to get an appointment for that.
Life Is What You Make It PDF – Preeti Shenoy
I am told many months. For this visit, Dad had to pull a whole lot of strings. Finally, one of his oldest friends managed to get it. It is one of the best mental health care centres in India. Or so I have been told. Perhaps it is. Every magazine and every newspaper seems to mention it and quote its expert doctors on anything to do with mental health. Life Is What You Make It PDF
The drive to this place itself is beginning to seem ominous. The road is lined with large trees, spreading their branches, covering the place with gloom. As our hired car makes its way, it makes me want to get down and run. But I do no such thing. I sit and watch my surroundings.
There is a blue board with large white letters proclaiming the name of the mental health institute, which is spread over a sprawling campus of ten acres, full of old buildings with fading yellow paint, dingy corridors, trees, bushes, even a cafeteria, and scores of vehicles in which patients arrive with their families in search of hope. In me, there is none left.
Life Is What You Make It PDF – Preeti Shenoy
There is only despondency and an increasing feeling of frustration. We pass a large building brandishing a board which proclaims it is some kind of a guest house. I notice the peeling paint again. The car passes the other buildings, the Psychiatry ward, the Casualty and Emergency services, the De-addiction centre, the General ward, the Observation ward, and the pale yellow cottages called units for some in-house patients. Life Is What You Make It PDF
It looks like any other hospital, and there is nothing to suggest that it is a mental hospital, except, of course, if you observe the signs and the people. I hate it all. It fills me with a kind of dread. I don’t belong here. I ought not to even be here in the first place. But I am, and there is nothing I can do about it.
The driver parks the car, and we enter a building that is an outpatient screening block. It has more than a hundred people and their families, all waiting. The faint stench of human odour, which emanates when bodies are packed together, hits my nostril, and I hold my breath involuntarily.
Life Is What You Make It PDF – Preeti Shenoy
My dad approaches the counter and joins the serpentine queue, which seems to be inching forward at the pace of a snail, and I read the board at the entrance on which the following is written in bold letters: “Patients visiting National Mental Health Institute for the first time are requested to register themselves at this block for consultation/ treatment. Life Is What You Make It PDF
Registration is carried out between 8:00 A.M and 11:00 A.M on all days except Sundays and certain specific holidays. Please observe the queue.” I realize with a sinking feeling that the patient now refers to me. I feel helpless.
And in my mind, I think that the whole mental health institute thing is bull shit. Hype. They talk nonsense and have no clue as to what they are doing or saying. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to see any psychiatrist or doctor. My opinion now does not matter anymore. I had my chance, and I screwed it up badly.
Life Is What You Make It PDF