When Sandeep Doctor was growing up, everyone told him he should become a doctor, because after all, that was his name.  And so, for lack of imagination, he did.

Sandeep hates being a doctor.  Every morning he embarks on a procrastination routine, starting with a 5.45 wake up call.  After several minutes of protracted burying further and further into the depths of his doona, he drags himself out of bed to run up and down his apartment corridor.  For breakfast he eats two slabs of roti and acidophilus yoghurt to keep up his bacteria levels.  After meditation, he watches the morning news and does yoga.  He cleans the kitchen and reads the paper, (scanning the personals in rotation with the obituaries) before brushing his teeth with mint flavoured toothpaste.  He takes two showers (in case he missed any grime the first time) and puts on two pairs of undies.  In his room he walks through his wardrobe twice, initially for the fun of it, and secondly to reorient his sense of balance.  He chooses his tie; unchooses it; selects another; realises it’s the same one as he wore yesterday, then sifts through them all until he selects the tie which he had originally picked.  Cheered by the decision, he buttons and unbutton his shirt fourteen times.  When he leaves the apartment, Sandeep takes the elevator to the fifteenth floor, the third floor, and then takes the stairs to the ground floor to catch the 472 bus to work.

Once in his rooms, Sandeep does his best to dislike his job.  Time and time again he shoots up diabetics with maple syrup instead of insulin, and puts flour in fractured bone plaster.  When asthmatics come in they get happy gas. Leukaemia patients, laxatives.  One time he gives an electric shock treatment to an irritable bowel, just to see what it would do.  At times guilt trickles down his spine as he leaves for home, but mostly it doesn’t register. The more he tries to sabotage them, the stronger their faith in him.  An attempt to tamper with thyroid patients’ medication results in thrill.  Surgical destruction turns into delight. Ribboning needles through tamarillo flesh, results in riotous joy.  Sometimes, in an attempt to dissuade the geriatrics, he overcharges them, then shortens their sticks.  But still they come.

Sandeep doesn’t care.  When the weekend comes, it’s off with his white coat. After locking up the surgery and wishing Clara the receptionist a good evening, Sandeep doesn’t go anywhere near his rooms again.  Instead, he heads down to a small café near the river and gets out his pen.  There, he pulls out all the caesuras of his life and begins to work.  Since reading T.S. Eliot in highschool Sandeep has thought of nothing else.  It fills his life like a UV ray, both lovely and insidious. While writing, Sandeep feels as if nothing can touch him.  He walks down the street in iambic pentameter.  He taps out limericks on strangers’ knees. As he swims in the local baths, words kick backstroke.  Sometimes he pauses to fish the idioms out, shimmering and thrilling, and lay them drying on the street.  But he can only share his wares during Sabbath.  Never during the week.

One day Sandeep is walking to work. The river, oily and foetid, runs greasily by him.  Feeling a strange magnetic pull, Sandeep stops and looks closer.  The river is black, and as he looks down the length of it, wide and deep.  As he stares down at it, the blue piping veins beneath Mrs Wilkinson’s skin and Mr Johnson’s belly like orange peel running through his head, a thought crosses his mind.  He has considered it before, but he’s never given it serious thought.  As he stares down at the river, a rush of clarity, as if his veins have been drenched with alcohol, suddenly comes over him.  Staring at the river, he knows what to do.

As the trains rattle across the bridge, Sandeep puts down his briefcase and umbrella, and jumps.

For a moment, as the world seems to slow around him, he hangs suspended in the air. A silent scream through his ears, his nose, his mouth.  He exhales.

Then he falls.

Goodbye to patients, he thinks as the world rushes by him in a waterfall of colour.  Goodbye to the surgery, goodbye to late nights in the office.  Goodbye to the heavy metal band who practices at 3am.  Goodbye to parking tickets, to burst fuses, to insurance levies. Goodbye to the drunk whose puddle of piss he steps over every morning on the way to work.  Goodbye to warming up frozen pizza in the microwave.  Goodbye to Clara.  Goodbye to you all.

Then, as the wind buffers him slightly to right, his head facing down stream now, the things that he’ll miss:

Goodbye to the oeuvre on Tolstoy’s life still on his desk.  Goodbye to Christmas decorations on discount.  Goodbye to German beer and mixed-berry tofu and cream cheese pumpernickel bagel with the lot. Goodbye to women.  Goodbye to sucking ice cream sticks after finishing the ice cream so that they’re wet and fall apart. Goodbye to the stack of petrol discounts on the fridge.  Goodbye to the woman showering through his living room window.  Goodbye to women.  Goodbye to breezy walks by the river in the morning and cycling round the park.  Goodbye to women.  Goodbye to poetry.

His soul bursting through his face, his skin.

His heart banging against the roof of his mouth, trying to get out.

His anus, shitting.

Out of the corner of his eye the black seaweed of a woman’s hair waves at him.

In a split second of panic, Sandeep turns his head.  The wind shifts one more time.  And an instant later, as he hits the bank, his arse wet with moss, his shoes filling with water, his back broken but his soul alive, he thanks this lucky stars, he thanks his angel, he is grateful, he thanks them, thanks them all.