Fate lurks around the corner

So there we were, my irreverent, iconoclastic, irrepressible friend Ramdas with his impish sense of humour and I. He had moved in pretty late the previous night after conducting one of his by now popular training programmes on some esoteric branch of applied statistics. The plan was to head out to Mysore by the milk train to meet my old English professor turned Sarod player Rajeev Taranath, who had only last year turned a sprightly 90. Just before turning in, Ramdas had put on his affected accent and told me that he would love it if I could wake him up with a hot cuppa cawffee. 

Ever striving to be the perfect host, I got up before the crack of dawn, made coffee to the exact specifications of my epicurean friend and, waking him up and asking him to get ready chop chop, I went into the bathroom for a shave and a shower. That’s when it hit me. I had just run the razor over the two-day stubble on my cheek once when I found my hand behaving like a liberated soul which had lost its tether with the body it was attached to and started doing its own independent dance. Sensing that something was amiss, I rushed out of the bathroom or rather staggered out of it because, by then, my right leg had started misbehaving too, and banged on the door of the other bathroom where Ramdas had gone in for his bath. Hearing the commotion, my wife had got up too and between the two of them (A towel-clad Ramdas having hurried out of the bathroom by then) they managed to dress me up. 

Thereafter, events happened fast. We happen to stay just next door to a tertiary hospital, which is where we hastened, with me being supported by my friend. I told the doctor on duty that I was probably having a stroke and lay down on the bed. The doctor and her support staff  got down to their task and, to cut a long story short, in the matter of the next hour or so they had pumped an expensive clot dissolving drug into me, and I found my limbs returning to a near normal state. The danger had passed.

The faithful will turn around and say Rama himself had sent his Dasa to save me. But as it turns out, both the principal players in this episode are sworn agnostics, one of them irreverently so. It was sheer coincidence that Ramdas happened to be around when this happened. And for every such happy coincidence that takes place, there are possibly a thousand not-so lucky ones. 

And if I were to think of propitiating the God who saved my life that day, I know what he’d ask for - a bottle of the choicest single malt, matured for
21 years in Oaken casks kept in the dark cellars of some highland distillery
in Scotland.