Page 51 - Till the Last Breath . . .

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Zarah Mirza

Zarah had fifteen cases to file that day, each of them more boring than the

last. Broken arms, sprained ankles, torn ligaments, et cetera. Her boss, the
enigmatic and brilliant Dr Arman Kashyap, was not fond of filing reports

and that’s why he had the most number of interns working for him at one
time. Usually interns worked in pairs, but Arman was never a big fan of

rules. No one knew what he enjoyed more, flouting them or challenging the
hospital authorities afterwards.
‘If you work in pairs, you get complacent about what you do. If you work

alone, you become cautious from the word go,’ Arman had said on the first
day. Zarah had not been able to forget those words. She used to check every

medicine thrice, sometimes even more, before administering it to any
patient. Even if it was just cough syrup.
‘You look busy?’ A fellow intern walked into the room the interns had

been assigned. Though Zarah usually worked in the opulent office of her
boss, his overbearing presence used to made her jittery. The presence of any

man made her feel jittery. She clearly remembered her first day in the
hospital, with men crawling everywhere. Patients. Doctors. Ward boys.

Their eyes like slithering snakes on her body—undressing her, violating her
and rubbing their naked, sweaty, hairy bodies against her in their heads. In

those moments, all her latent hatred for men bubbled over and she had a
severe mental breakdown. Zarah had never been in a co-ed school or
college and it was on her insistence. Staying away from men was the only

way she could banish the horrors of her past.
‘I have a lot of filing to do,’ she said, trying to act busy. Ever since she

had started her internship, an alarming number of interns, resident doctors