Yours meticulously

Perfection is an important ingredient for the medical profession. The all-consuming habit of lawlessness, started for me, in our medical college hostel. Locking the hostel room was a great ordeal, I would scuttle between the locked door and the stairs recurrently.

I diagnosed myself with harbouring an obsessive-compulsive disorder. When I started turning the pages of the textbook, to my bewilderment, I was a brilliant and shining example of each and every disorder enlisted. I beseeched my friends to keep an eye on me, in the light of my fresh discovery.

Notwithstanding my various fears, ultimately I landed up in NIMHANS, the premier neuropsychiatric institution of the country. I quite literally got on the nerves of my Neurology consultant as I made grammatical and spelling corrections for the interns' language. My consultant suggested I give in to my literary urges by pursuing a PhD in literature and later return for my Neurology residency.

Several years later, on a lazy afternoon, I looked forward to something interesting. God had answered my prayers --a good friend of mine called me and said that she was organising a conference, first of its kind, called the 'winners'. In a New York minute, I accepted the invite. Meticulously, I started preparations for the talk. The resulting PowerPoint presentation was nothing short of a burgeoning metro train at peak hours.

New saris were bought, blouses stitched, matching chappal, ear drops, bangles, watch and such things lined up for the occasion. Finally, the D-day arrived. Sleep eluded me, a frisson of anticipation swept through. The refrigerator was hurriedly reshuffled so that my hubby would lay hands on the right stuff without tinkering, until my return. The domestic flight was at 17 hours, but the driver was called at 12 hours, to surmount unforeseen obstacles. I kept rechecking my laptop, ticket, credit card and USB stick.

My grand entry into the airport was met with a rude shock, as my flight number was at the 'final boarding’ stage. A bespectacled me removed and replaced my glasses trying to make sense of things desperately. In a last-ditch effort to catch the flight, I hopscotched across the various counters and staggered to the help desk. To my utter dismay, with imperturbable tranquillity, the flight attendant circled the departure time on my ticket which was 12! All the hell broke loose...

Yours meticulously was last seen running aimlessly with an eye in the sky to catch a fleeting glimpse of the already departed flight!