The Lunatic

Hello, my name’s Kirkwood, and how can I help you? You have come a-visiting? Wonderful, and who will you be visiting? Bed No. 144, sir? Climb the stairs over there, and you’ll find 144 to the left. And, sir, please fill this Visiting Form here, will you? Thank you.

Like, sorry for the interruption, but I really have to guide people around to their folks in bed. To answer your first question, man, I am, simply, a Doctor. To be more precise, as my job as Chief of Doctors here, it is my duty to look after, and control and restrain as necessary, victims of insanity who have the misfortune to be admitted to this asylum. And I have very few visitors, mind you, there’s the one climbing the stairs now. I also have the responsibility of herding together a group of 50 strongmen, 5 for a floor, around the asylum. A few of them are trained in injecting morphia and tranquilizers. Sometimes when my mind gets the better of me, I lazily spend the hot afternoon in my office, with my legs propped up onto the table, and find myself thinking that my strongmen are as lunatic as any one of the asylum’s inmates, or even as me.

Oh, you want to know about the death. I quite forgot that you were reporting for the local paper. Let’s begin to take notes, shall we, hm?

Sankunni was an abnormal lunatic.
I mean, he did not those things which the world expects of a lunatic. While his hyperactive and perpetually excited roommates drove imaginary airplanes, and shut themselves up in imaginary pressure cookers, and barked, whinnied, mooed, clucked, and roared, Sankunni would lean back on the wall, and impassionedly watch the proceedings with a beedi between his lips. He was a very curious specimen to all of us.

Every time I came to his bed on my daily rounds, the belief I harboured in his sanity was fortified. Like, it is hard to believe a man is insane if he smiles at you every morning, offers you a beedi occasionally, and calmly asks for the day’s paper. At night, I would shudder to think of him as a sane man – A sane man living amidst lunatics!

Sankunni exhibited only one kind of repetitive behaviour. Every evening, at sunset, he would put his head out of the window (which was close to his bed) and seemingly yell at the trees. A carefully calculated few minutes later, he would drop a five-rupee coin out of the window, whereupon it would clang on something metallic and sonorous. Sankunni was perfectly normal otherwise.

He gradually began exhibiting ‘normal’ behaviour, and undeniable signs of sanity, that I was moved to think of his coin ritual as only a perfectly sane affair (which it was). One day, he called me to his side, and said that it was only right that I kept in mind the fact that he felt afraid during certain nights, when slumber was driven out from his brains by the mad ravings of a lunatic. I felt sorry for the man, and felt even more so with the secret suspicion that he was a sane man. I agreed to keep it in mind.

On returning to my room, I was beaten down by a huge anguish: ‘Have I not stored a sane man in a hencoop of lunatics? How many such sleepless nights must have passed for him?’ Acting upon this sudden but powerful impulse, I signed papers for his release.

The next day, evening time. It was raining torrentially, and bolts of lightning flashed down the length of our 10-floor asylum. Leaves of trees swayed and dripped, and seemed to be petrified by the howling of the wind.
The coin was dropped, and I approached Sankunni. Three strongmen loomed in the room behind me, patrolling. I had one strongman behind me. I handed the papers over, and proclaimed him free to go wherever he wished. He looked at me quizzically.

Then he laughed a ‘gobble’ of laughter. In seconds he was laughing uncontrollably, and then hysterically. Two strongmen came up behind me as rearguard. When Sankunni was done, he cried next. He wept, “My family is out for my life. Don’t send me out,” and such things he said, and burst into loud sobs. I was beginning to have dark suspicions regarding his sanity by now, but I tried to console him.

That was the last straw. He repeated, “Leave? Leave? Leave?” for maybe a hundred times, with intensity growing manifold, till at the end, his eyes were red, he was shivering all over, his hair drenched with sweat, gnashing his teeth – unmistakable signs of an outbreak of lunacy of the first order. My strongmen rushed to him, too late. He had, by that time, wrenched a whole bloody bar off the bloody barred window, and savagely mauled down the men. He lunged at me next, but I ducked, and ran out of the room, and turned right. As I crouched in a dark corner, I saw Sankunni storm out of the room, armed with his bar, and gored a nurse carrying pills and needles. He then made for the terrace. I tore my hair in despair – a lunatic on the rampage, two men down, a nurse killed…

I fetched my gun and burst out into the terrace. It was raining so hard that I was instantly drenched, head to toe. I think now, that he was probably waiting for me in the terrace.
As soon as he saw me, he ran at me with poised bar held aloft, and yelling as one with the surging hum of his testosterone fuel, a loud “Aaa…”. A huge cosmic bellow it seemed to me then, when suddenly, a bolt of lightning struck the bar he was holding. He in his speed, instantly let go of the bar, and went pummeling into the wall, and rolled over. I had him covered with my gun, and approached.

Even as the huge and numerous raindrops saturated the air spaces in my labyrinthine hair and ran down the barrel of my gun, I realized Sankunni had passed out. His body was toasted by the heavens, and foul singed odours arose from it. I would have, given the pathos of the situation, forgiven him with all my heart, if he had opened those wide white eyes of his, and looked upon my face, even if it was to be his last. But he did no such thing; instead, he just lay in the rain, his singed body sizzling in the rain. He had passed out , and away.