Ten Steps Ahead

I'm 35, and I lost my dad in 2013, a few weeks before I was due to sit my 5th and final year preliminary examinations, just a stone's throw from qualifying as a doctor.

One of those papers was Forensic Medicine. It contained multiple questions about the physiology of dying, and somewhere between rigor mortis and terminal events, I felt the walls closing in. I fled the exam hall and stood outside for fifteen minutes, desperately trying to stop my mind from replaying memories of my father's final hours.

I eventually returned in tears and asked to continue the exam in a private room. I had not told anyone at university what had happened, yet I was met with kindness. I skipped the question that had unravelled me and carried on, reasoning that this was probably what Papa would have wanted. I shudder to think that if I had not returned, I would have had to repeat the whole year and life would have been much harder, and much different.

I passed those exams. One month later, I passed my final exams too and qualified as a doctor.

The wrong kind of triumph

Everyone around me seemed to feel that the tidal wave of grief we had all been riding had finally begun to recede. I was expected to feel triumphant. Instead, all I felt was anger.

The man who had wanted that qualification more than anyone else was no longer there to see it. The extra words before my name felt merely a waste of space and ink, and even a brutal reminder of loss perhaps.

An act of poor judgement

More than a year later, after completing my internship in a busy central city government hospital, I was left with significant moral injury. This was besides the painful echoes of medically unanswered questions surrounding my father's death. So I did what can only be described as an act of spectacularly poor judgement; I joined one of those twelve-hour coaching institutes with my closest friend, with a dream to get a place into postgraduate medical training.

The arrangement succeeded only in extinguishing whatever enthusiasm for studying I still possessed. Many years later, armed with an ADHD diagnosis and considerably more self-compassion, I realised that spending twelve hours a day in a room with 50 other humans memorising facts was perhaps never destined to become my optimal learning environment.

To earn a living, I took a job as a junior resident. Much of my disposable income was converted directly into petrol, which allowed me to spend evenings driving alone around Delhi singing loudly and out of tune. Thankfully, some well-meaning senior colleagues eventually persuaded me to resign and rejoin the coaching institute.

The spreadsheet

It was during this period that I discovered an Excel spreadsheet on his computer.

Inside was an exhaustive catalogue of university entrance examinations he had intended for me to sit. Beyond the national and local examinations, there were at least twenty-two others.

I can personally verify that by the age of eighteen, I had travelled across India by road, rail and air, sitting all those tests. Looking back, I am astonished not by the number of forms he completed, but by the fact that he somehow managed to keep track of them and become a professional travel agent, aside from doing his full time job, philanthropic work and voluntary commitments.

If you have stayed with me this far, well done.

What he understood

My mind has a habit of wandering before eventually arriving at its destination, which brings me to the reason I am writing this at all. Long before anyone else, my father understood that I was probably neurodiverse.

He absorbed all the cognitive labour that I struggled with. The university applications, the deadlines, the logistics, the planning. He never made a grand performance of it. He simply told me to study, and assured me that he would take care of the rest.

He was like this throughout my education.

I moved to a different city after turning eighteen. Whenever homesickness crept into my voice, an email would appear containing same-day return flights or tickets for a weekend trip home to Delhi.

No interrogation. No justification required.

Even during school examinations, he would quietly knock on my bedroom door late in the evening and say, "Come, let's go". We would be sitting in Nirula's eating hot chocolate fudge sundaes at an hour that would horrify most paediatricians and dentists.

My father knew not merely what I wanted, but what I needed, often long before I did. He understood my strengths and weaknesses with remarkable clarity, yet never allowed me to view either as limitations.

Quiet accommodations

I was one of the few students in my medical school batch who had both a hostel room and a privately rented two-bedroom flat available during examination season. He furnished the entire place himself despite the fact that it was occupied for only a few months each year.

At the time, I thought these were isolated acts of generosity. Now I recognise them for what they were.

A lifetime of quiet accommodations made by a man who understood me instinctively.