He bred pigeons, he petted snakes. He had a menagerie in his wake and a bunch of street dogs yelped and yipped in glee as he drove by on his moped. The mess workers told him that Ben was taken away by a mean looking college employee, from the physiology department.
Now physiology, as we all know is a first year subject: and the teachers! Man, they take mean pleasure in making students perform experiments on live frogs. For blood counts and simple lab practical, students have to poke his own digit with a pin to draw blood for the slide. This pricking one’s own finger is a terrible ordeal, but who can argue with physiologists? They are a class apart – they train their technicians to bag sacks of frogs: they prowl at night, torch in hand, searching for frogs – and once they are fixed in the beam of light, Rana is easy picking. Serenading one moment and sacked the very next – it is a toad’s life for
these amphibians.
Back in the lab at experiment time, each student is handed a pithed frog: slimy green ones: the pithing is a cruel process; an attendant just grabs the wriggling specimen, and plunges a sharp lancet into the fellow’s brain through his skull. The frog loses consciousness, but isn’t dead. You can’t do work on dead frogs can you? The corridors echo with the shrieks and piercing cries as one frog after another, are prepared for the exercise. Ear-splitting catlike meow of agony. I didn’t know that frogs could produce this type of cry till then. They do, and once heard it remains embedded in your subconscious.
For PG students, experiments, especially finals, involve dogs. This is where Ben comes in. The MD exam was due the following day, and a good healthy street dog was required – and who healthier than our Ben – not to forget the 50 bucks the attendant is given for procuring a dog: Why go searching when readymade Ben was around. News had it that Ben had just trotted behind Nithya in khaki short pants – all Nithya had to do was wave a chicken leg, and the nitwit, Ben, followed him like a dog (pardon the inappropriate expression) to the phsysiology department’s animal house, where to his endless amazement he found himself surrounded by cages and rows and tiers of white mice, guinea pigs, rabbits and that odd bonnet monkey. He saw the lights go off and the door close with an eerie bang. Ben’s fate was sealed.
Kushal was livid. The pan - beeda chewing betel leaf ruminant who spewed and squirted red juice all over, now not just spat red, but saw red. He rounded up a few un-worthies from the hostel at stroke of midnight and stole into the college building. Ben’s pitiful howls punctuated the night. In a jiffy or less, the gang had broken into the animal house. They undid Ban, and as a fitting riposte to powers that be, un-caged and let lose every other confined creature.
Calamity ruled the next morning, with white ice and guinea pigs scurrying in classrooms, the sack load of toads which were released into the thickets behind the college, croaked in delight, as for the rabbits, who all their life munched insipid lab chow, they were now in hostel rooms, merrily chewing carrots and cabbages. And Ben, he scampered here and there, his tail almost disappearing in thin air, such was the vigor of its euphoric spin.
The MD physiology practical examination was conducted without its usual dog experiment – and for the next few weeks no frogs were pithed, there were no frogs around to be pithed. I later heard that, among the animal raiders was the physiology MD candidate, whose bonafides as a green I suspect. His voluntary enlistment into the ‘Free Ben Now Brigade’ was to circumvent the often tough mammalian practical examination, a mine field scattered with the skeletons of MD candidates.
Kushal is now an ophthalmologist – and Ben, he went along with Kushal to Bangalore when he graduated. The animal laboratories were later converted into impregnable fortresses and inaccessible to anyone but the designated faculty of the department. Frog experiments are now passé, and pithing is proscribed by law. Many senior physiologists shake their heads and grumble, what has academics come to these days? No animals? How can science progress?
Yet it does, quite well, thank you. As regulations and rules regarding animal experimentation now limit their sadistic compulsions, they take it out on the novice medicos. I hear these days, to make up for their lost dominion over animal-kind, Physiology teachers coerce edgy teens prick every alternate index finger, every alternate day.
Long after that eventful day in the mid seventies –to this day - generations of baby rabbits, frogs, mice and guinea pigs have heard the lore and adventure their great grand-papas and mammas went through in 1978, from their mums.
In the animal mythology and lore, Kushal is worshipped and is always shown wearing a halo.
(The article originally appeared on www.sulekha.com).
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