I Wonder

I went for a drive today. Not anywhere in particular, just got out and drove cos I was feeling so terribly cooped up.

The monsoon’s here, and is definitely making its presence known.

There were houses on the roadside, flooded, women walking in thigh deep water to their only source of potable water - the government tap at the roadside, almost submerged in water itself. Children, half naked, making boats to float on the water, clothes drying on the thatched roof of the house, all ready to be pulled down and taken in at the first sign of the rains.

Innumerable people are sick, suffering from the viral epidemic that has been sweeping a lot of Kerala and Kottayam has not been spared. I get patients with their joints swollen and running a high fever, old men and women with chills racking their body and hacking coughs that shake every fibre of their being, ill, vomiting everything they eat, unable to keep even water down. There is not enough place to accommodate all the patients, and the government hospitals have people sleeping on the verandahs, with I.V fluids running through them from precariously hung drips. But the worst of it is over, I hope and think.

It is now that I am supposed to be truly happy. After all, I am doing what I was trained to. This is what I studied and worked for from the age of eighteen, and in the end graduated from no less than the best medical college in India . To treat and to bring succour for the masses.
And in the midst of it all, I feel like someone else. Looking at everything, at all that I do, from some place up on high.

I wonder if this is what I am supposed to be doing.And I wonder at what I wonder.
This is not supposed to be this way. I should be feeling satisfied, fulfilled.

And all I can think of is there is something missing. I don’t seem to have any goals in the near future, and two long years seems to be stretching on and on, right up to the horizon.

Ugh.