Page 26 - Till the Last Breath . . .

wanted to peep in, worse still, whip it away from under the senior’s head,

but she didn’t want to come across as a nerd.
‘You have finished the course, haven’t you?’ Venugopal asked
suspiciously.

‘Yes,’ she said and blushed. ‘But I still have to revise,’ she added.
‘But when? You spent all the time with us. When did you get the time? I

didn’t see you study!’
‘Promise you won’t tell anyone?’

‘I won’t,’ Venugopal asked and adjusted the spectacles on his hunched
nose. Obviously, he wouldn’t. Pihu knew that. Venugopal and Pihu were

destined to be friends after the first roll call in their class of 335 students.
Their roll numbers were consecutive, since Venugopal’s full name was P.
Venugopal where P stood for something unpronounceable for north Indians.

They were partners in dissection and had cut open their first corpse together
—it’s the sort of thing that binds two doctors together for the rest of their

lives. Kind of what it means for two engineering students to have the first
peg of whisky together. Other than that, they were very similar. Middle-

class families, dads in government service, mothers as housewives and
CBSE toppers of their own regions. In a parallel universe where north and

south Indians got along, it was a match made in heaven.
In the past three months, they had become the best of friends. They never
kept anything from each other. They didn’t have to, since they led simple

lives. Simple people with simple desires. They had nothing to hide. They
had never partied, never smoked, never drank. Neither of them had stayed

out of their houses after eight. They never felt the need to.
‘I had gone through a few books before I joined college,’ Pihu said.

‘You had? Which ones?’
‘Anatomy. Physiology. General Pharmacology. A few others.’

‘A few others? That’s like the whole course,’ Venugopal gasped.
‘I always wanted to read them ever since I started preparing for medical
entrances. That’s all I have ever wanted to do.’

‘You’re crazy. Why would you?’