Whoever you are, there is only one end to life. Death. Death scares you and mystifies you, but it also piques your interest like nothing else. Man was curious about fire. He knew it would burn, but he touched it anyway, he played with it, he got hurt, but in the end, he tamed it. Man tamed fire because he was curious.
I am curious about death, I have always been. The art of living and the science of leaving. As we slowly learn the art of living, we master the science of leaving. In the mean time, every aspect of life, death and after intrigues me. I no longer ask where we go after we die, but I am curious about what happens to the body. Even as a child, I had wanted to witness a cremation. I know my intent is not perverse, so I am not guilty about it. The transformation of a human being into a… shell is fascinating. All the magic in the body, the beating of the heart, the intricacies of the brain, the utility of the stomach, the way each organ works, it is all gone, it just vanishes after death. We are literally a lump of flesh after we pass on. I saw it. It made me wonder, "that's it? That's all there is inside us?"
I witnessed an autopsy today. Three actually, one from right up close with a running commentary by the person who performed it. I could have known the identities of those persons, but I decided it doesn't matter. They were bodies on which a process had to be performed. End of story. So I was there, in the mortuary of the Gandhi Hospital, with the duty doctor standing by and three or four attendants ready to get to work on some bodies, five minutes after their lunch. But wait, I'll get to those details later. Let me tell you how I got till there.
I went to the hospital to gather some details for a story I needed, about how mortuaries are reeling under the spate of bodies everyday. Hospital management as expected, reacted with the reflexes of an arthritic hippo with an attack of Alzheimer's. I couldn't expect the information I needed anytime soon, so I decided to go to the mortuary, a few kilometres away and see for myself what the state of affairs was. I am not very glad I did, but I have no regrets either.
The smell of a mortuary is unique. It is usually the formaldehyde that assaults your senses through your nose. Then there is the…hmm, I have described the smell earlier. Well, that was how the Osmania mortuary smelled like. No, I'm not being gross; the Gandhi mortuary does have a different arsenal for our olfactory equipment. Devoid of any cold storage equipment, decomposition wins an easy battle with formaldehyde. The result is an unimaginably potent stench. I entered the premises, saw two bodies wrapped in blankets, got slapped by the smell and decided on my peg for the story – 'Gandhi hospital mort far worse than counterpart in Osmania'. I had decided to walk out and I turned round and reached the gate. But I didn't want to chicken out from some bad smell, so I turned back and boldly faced the odour. The room where the smell was coming from must be where they put the bodies, but the door was open. I peeked in, and found four men having their lunch. The shock must have showed on my face, because they all looked up, looked at each other, smiled and continued. One of them was sitting in a chair and directed me to the duty doctor. The doctor was polite and very helpful. So I popped the question, 'can I see an autopsy?' and well, he said yes.
The effect of ay horror flick is in the sound. If not for the ominous creaks, the subtle wails and the sudden screams and booms, the picture would actually look funny. So it takes two senses at least to perceive something completely. So wit was with the mortuary. The assault on my nose was indescribable. I had always prided myself on being able to detect subtle stenches in the air. There was nothing subtle about what I smelt. The kicker here is that every room had an independent and equally abhorrent stench. The transition from the office, a thin brick wall from the storeroom, that's where the bodies are stored, made my scalp prickle. I must say I felt rather proud of myself then for keeping down the contents of my stomach. I had no idea what would happen when I saw an autopsy. I had heard tales of supposedly brave men fainting at the sight of the mutilated dead, or throwing up after looking at gore. The fact that I didn't feel even an inkling of nausea surprised me. So I walked into the autopsy room, which had three tables. The body of a young man was put on the centre table. It was the newest. He had been dead less than 20 hours, died when his neck caught and broke in the bars of a window. A healthy, lean specimen, ready for an educational autopsy. On the two tables on the sides were bodies of women, burn victims. The men were ready for the job. They told each other, "Shall we begin? Lets do it, on the double, no time wasted." I understood that this was a kind of a prep up exercise. They got to work. The first few seconds of watching them with the body will tell you that they are absolutely clear that there is no life in these bodies. They were performing a process, and efficiency and speed was all that mattered. They pulled off the clothing from the bodies as quickly as possible, tugging, pulling and flipping. Salim took the centre stage, he was considered the best. The other two had already started cutting up the women. I could see the skin on their chest split clean open like a rubber suit. They were slicing into it, separating it from the rib cage. Salim called out to me, "Idhar Aao. I will tell you where the autopsy begins."
The autopsy: the first incision, a rather long one, begins at the base of the chin, right under the bone. The slice runs all the way down through the middle of the chest and the abdomen, to the beginning of the pelvis. A new scalpel is required for every autopsy, since there is a lot of cutting to do. Then the folds of skin on the left and right side are split, the scalpel slicing through muscle to expose the rib cage and the digestive system. There is still a layer of muscle on the rib cage, but most of the muscle is with the skin. It looks like two equal folds of a rubber suit. Now, salim focussed his attention on the rib cage. He takes up a saw with a plastic handle. The saw is a regular issue carpentry tool, nothing fancy. He begins sawing the rib cage vertically, two inches off centre to the right. It takes a good bit of work. Salim's skill was evident when none of the organs inside the rib cage were damaged as he sawed. Then he saws two inches off centre to the left. When he finishes, there is a four inch by 7 inch slab of rib cage detached from the cadaver. When this is removed, the human body looks like a bowl into which a vulnerable mass of organs is placed. Salim holds the group of pipes un the neck, the oesophagus and trachea among them. he slices off their connection from the neck up. Holding on to this like a chicken's neck, he simply pulls, and all the organs, the heart, the lungs, the liver, the stomach, attached to each other, are removed. The intestines are slightly non cooperative, so they are scooped up to the side, but the rest of the organs are all connected to each other, so they are easy to remove. Salim then severs the connection of the digestive system with the lower half of the body. The liver is the biggest organ inside the human body. It's huge and covers most of the organs in the lower region. He showed me lungs, the three nodes of the right lung and the two nodes of the left lung. The two parts of the liver, the vital heart, dwarfed by other organs, the diaphragm, the stomach, the intestines, the pancreas, the spleen. It was then that the smell hit me again. The smell of human blood and cut organs repels you at an instinctive level. It's not disgusting, exactly, its like a horse shying away from blood. Instinctive.
The next part of the autopsy was to take away some of the organs for evidence. Viscera, pieces of the liver, and the kidneys are usually put in containers and taken to be studied. I have remind you that there's no cold storage in this mortuary, so there were a whole lot of organs, now unrecognisable in plastic containers on shelves. So salim cut a couple fo pieces of the liver, extracted the kidneys from under the pile of organs and cut them out and then he removed the stomach. Now viscera means the contents of the stomach, or at least that's what it implies in mortuary jargon. The stomach, deflated by now, was taken to another table abd sliced open. There was some brown green stuff inside. Apparently, one can detect if there had been any trauma by looking at those contents. Salim stooped and smelt it. "No stench, but definitely disturbed," he said. Ok. He scooped a bit of the stuff with his gloved fingers and put it in another container, along with the stomach. Then we went back to the body for the grand finale. The cranium. Salim bade an incision from behind one ear to the other, running through the top of the skull. He told me that the sawing open the skull was the hardest part. I stood back to watch. The scalp, with the hair, was split back and front from the top of the head. It took a bit of tearing at, apart from repeated slicing by the scalpel. Basically, he pulled the skin like a thick latex mask, from the face, till the eyebrows. The eyes were open all the while. It should have freaked out a person. Then, the saw was back in action. Salim was right. Sawing through over half and inch of skull was tough indeed. He did an excellent job, going round the skull neatly. He then took up a chisel and a hammer. Holding the chisel on the sawed rim, he delivers two smart knocks with the hammer, and the top of the head is off, the brain exposed for all the world to see. Salim collects the brain and severs it at the base. The brain is covered in a gossamer like membrane. He holds it in his hand and explains that if there has been any asphyxiation, the brain changes a darker shade of grey, like the one I was looking at. He showed me the medulla oblongata, the two hemispheres and sets the brain aside. He explains that the empty skull will be filled with cotton, the top of the skull replaced and the scalp sewed back on. For the present, however, he pushed the scalp into the skull. The brain is a funny organ. Each organ looks different, but the brain looks like its of another species. The squiggly appearance is hardly a couple of centimetres thick. When salim sliced the hemispheres, there was just some cream coloured spongy matter inside that seemed to be made of foam. Imagine, this is what makes our thoughts, the base and the lofty. And that was about it. The organs were shoved back into the cavity in the body (the brain was shoved somewhere in the stomach region) and the skin is sewed back with thick cotton thread. Now the usual autopsy, of a simple suicide or burns case is over in 15 minutes or 20. Road accidents and homicides take a lot longer, as each injury has to be measures and detailed. Every abrasion, fracture, cut or concussion has to be recorded. This process can take over an hour. Well, thankfully, I got a simple open and shut case. Literally open and shut.
This was an experience. Not one that I would like to repeat, but something that I will keep with me for a long time. There are a hundred things that this experience awoke in me. I can recollect only a few of them and reproduce even fewer. But as a writer, I feel I can draw deeply from this experience. Witnessing an autopsy doesn't make me a man of the world, but it has definitely taken me a step further in that direction.
-Ananda
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