Now, just consider the word, ‘malignancy.’ Just seeing it in print, does it bristle with all kinds of evil possibilities for you? Do you immediately break into a cold sweat, hear alarm bells go off, recall all the sins you may have committed to reach this point in time when you are reading a medical report where the malignant word leaps out at you without warning?

Without warning? Well, not necessarily. The very fact that you have undergone this particular test is an indication that you have reached some kind of crisis point, or perhaps just that age when all kinds of idiotic tests are deemed advisable! Your body, old sturdy mate, friend, the one you trusted to go on unshakeably forever, has caved. No more junkets, fad diets, loading on the pounds, maligning, (that mal-word again!) undermining at whim…

That report fills you with… what is it, if not dread? No, I robustly counter. I am not afraid. Is this not a moment we have encountered before in dream or playacting? The whole martyrdom scenario? See, how calm I am, my hand, look Ma, no trembling, no quivering lip. Underplay, underplay, this is the role of a lifetime! But it sends you scurrying all right. First to the phone, tell closest friends, to ask if they have a name, a surgeon’s name with a well-established reputation. In this city, word-of-mouth is almost instantaneous.

Then, making the appointment, with images of masked men, with white coats, or green scrubs, wielding thin, sharp knives, hovering over prone bodies. A week later, it’s all over, you are at your desk typing an article. Every crazy idea, stereotype has been discarded; instead you are serenading those magnificent men in their white coats. Your self has been obliterated somewhere among those teeming battalions from every possible state in the country and outside. Women with shaven heads, children whose scarred heads and bodies shame you, men clutching those perennial plastic bags with medical reports and pink and yellow payment receipts.

“State of the art,” someone whispers in your ear, but there ought to be twenty such places to deal with the numbers. Machines break down, people from the North-East or Kabul wait hopelessly in the corridors for the tests for hours, the sight of a doctor walking past has everyone’s faces light up, or rush to show him an X-Ray or the latest report. But there is no gainsaying the very real fellowship that fills those spaces.

You still haven’t mouthed that word. That hideous C-word. In relation to you, it still sounds comical, someone’s idea of a practical joke. With friends and family, you are still reassuring, playing it all down, negotiating the conversational thickets with aplomb, lapping up the unspoken admiration at your courage, if not bravado. Then when the encounter with the mammogram machine happens for the second time in a week, is when you are practically screaming, stripped of that vainglorious image you’ve created. With tears running down your cheeks, you are begging the doctors and technicians to stop, please stop the excruciating torture. If the machine didn’t look so much like Aar-2 Dee-2, it would rank with the guillotine or all the medieval instruments of pain you have ever seen or visualized. You are then whisked off to the OT where there is loud chatter among the junior doctors and technicians. The knives and scalpels are laid out in glistening rows, but mercifully, you are soon out with a whoosh of anaesthetic rushing through your veins.

You are now just a statistic, trailing a plastic drainage box attached by a tube to a spot uncomfortably close to that area where your flesh has been sliced off. No pain. No pain is good because you can laugh and chat with your visitors who all say how brave you are, and thank goodness it was caught in time, and it was so small. The malignancy was tiny. But because it was a malignancy, the body still has to be zapped with radiation or with horrible chemotherapy. Every newspaper or magazine or online stuff I pick up or tune in to, has something or the other about breast cancer. Just yesterday an online journal I subscribe to, carries an article by a young woman who has also had a lumpectomy, (another hideous word), that spoke about how the chemo affected her. She was writhing on the floor, wallowing in vomit, unable to move her arms or legs, with a small baby to attend to. She went on to talk about friends recommending she smoke marijuana to help ward off the worst effects.

I now see myself in hash heaven.