Just another Wednesday… well not exactly. The day before the much awaited spring break was an event in its own right. With the interclass declamation (I being one of those organizers who were MIA most of the time) and the dreaded eye ward test ( I flashed that light in my patient’s eye so many times I gave him what was equivalent to laser surgery!) I had plenty to keep me busy. And, as usual, my friends had planned some impromptu lunch at a “to-be-determined-in-the-car” restaurant to mark the occasion…. So all that was left to do was to find everyone.

Wandering around, looking here and there, somehow we ended up in the anat dept (I say “somehow”, but actually we had heard some KAPS video was being shot there so obviously we had to check it out :P). It was only once I got inside that I began to think about the last time I had been there… my last anatomy viva. I began to recall that day… sitting in front of Ma’am Attiya, trying to keep up with the questions she kept throwing at me and doing my best to keep my mind off the fact that freedom was waiting for me just outside those doors. Alas, I screwed up my last question in the excitement, but it didn’t matter. I ran (nearly falling) out those doors, stopping to hand Anwar Kala a Rs 100 note before he had the chance to ask for “chai kay paisay”, then kept running looking back only to see his surprised expression.

I took a closer look at the models around me, remembering how everyone would be climbing on each other, kicking and pushing trying to get a better look at those dissected limbs in the days before the exam… how all I could do was scratch my head, too embarrassed to ask whoever was explaining exactly where she was pointing. That was enough to send me crashing back to the present, when the same room was deserted and eerily silent though my ears still rung with the echoes of the past.

I continued to the DH, finding the movie shoot in progress. BANG! That old DH smell hit me like a ton of bricks. Trying to stay out of the way, I kept strolling along…. Checked the old notice board bearing new notices. I chuckled under my breath at my instinct to check the marks of Roll numbers 129, 111, 95… but this time it wasn’t our result that was hanging there.

Waiting for my friend to finish her role in the movie, the rest of us dragged some seats together to form a circle as we had done so many times before. Same screech of the stool, same friends and their same strange behavior. Then I began to recall just how insane we had been on occasions… like that day some bug got onto Noor’s clothes… how she screamed while the rest of us suppressed our laughter doing our best to brush it off only to find the bug had jumped onto someone else and then the next and then the next until finally we fell back onto our stools, too breathless from screaming to laugh anymore. Substage studies, the stampede to the dissection tables whenever anyone said, “Maam Zahra is coming!”, and even arm wrestling matches just to pass the time… the DH was where it all happened.

My daydream was cut short by my friend yelling, “Let’s go!! My part is done. HURRY UP!!” So I grabbed my stuff and began to chase the rest of them out of the anatomy dept… no time left to look back anymore, many more adventures await.