Life in the Audio-Visual Room

Zamania, a good friend and former roommate from Israel, was travelling around India by herself, and with a little bit of persuasion, she visited me in Madurai for 3 days. I picked her up at midnight at the Madurai Stain Station. Palani, the driver who was taking me to the station, asked me which train she was coming on, which was when I realized that I didn't know. Not because Zamania didn't tell me, but because I had been too lazy to check. Not wanting to look like a bad friend or unprepared person, I said, “Pandian Express.” Mr. Palani looked at me a bit suspiciously and said, “The Pandian arrives at 8 in the morning. Isn't this a bit too early?” I don't think he was being sarcastic as much as curious to find out if I had peculiar tendencies. After asking the station master, we deduced that Zamania was probably on the train from Coimbatore, the closest place to Ootty, which is where she was leaving from. Mr. Palani and I executed a division of labour plan, each of us standing at different exists, so we could catch Zamania as soon as she got off the train. In hindsight though, I realize that that plan wasn't so foolproof because I never told Mr. Palani anything about Zamania's appearance, besides telling him that yes, “she's from foreign.” But luckily, Zamania walked out through my assigned exit. After being happily reunited, we proceeded to talk to each other, only going to bed at half past four. I feel like I only barely prepared Zamania for the day that was to follow. Even though Aravind employees work on Saturdays, I was hoping to cash in on my first “off-day.” Everything was going according to plan until on Thursday evening, I realized how overly ambitious the video project I had taken on was. As the videographer constantly reminded me, within the span of a week, we had amassed up to 7 hours worth of footage for a 10 minute video. My sometimes unrelenting attitude, combined with the fact that the editor was recovering from jaundice meant that the ambitious deadline of Wednesday went by unnoticed, with no fanfare or congratulatory pat on the back. So on Friday night, I shared the audio-visual room with a bemused freelance animation artist (working on a different project). The editors, unamused by my request to stay on past 7.30 pm, had left, asking me to please shut down the computer before I leave. They also made a copy of our work in progress, and told me that I could mess with it as much as I wanted. After playing around with footage for about 2 hours, I did mess up with something because the computer froze. I asked my roommate to please take a moment from his work to help me out, and he did, but to no avail. So I shut down the computer, and went home, with dramatic premonitions of doom, including people shaking their heads after watching the video, talking about how I had, in one quick spate of miscalculated artistic and editorial decisions, reduced the entire legacy of Dr. V to a joke. So the next day, after waking Zamania up early in the morning and treating her to breakfast at the hospital restaurant whose menu has a grand total of 5 breakfast items, I took her with me to the Audio-Visual room. With the exception of bathroom breaks and a small coffee break (again to the hospital restaurant), we didn't leave the room. Zamania sat there and talked to everyone, answering my many frantic questions about whether certain things were appropriate, and she answered patiently, even though certain questions, such as whether a certain sentence made sense in Tamil, she obviously couldn't answer. The editor also kept throwing vicious looks at me, and when I asked him to explain his behavior, he said, “how could you let your friend go hungry like this?” Zamania was a champ. We finished the video at 4.30, sent it off to other Aravind hospitals, and screened it at 5.30. I was satisfied with it, given the time we had for it, and also taking into consideration some of the editor's uncensored remarks like, “this video is going to be such a failure,” and “the music (composed by a staff member) is going to be the video's only redeeming factor.” When I finished the video, both the videographer and editor asked me eagerly when I was leaving, only to look a bit deflated when I told them that I would be working on different projects with them until August. Which makes me wonder why they walked all the way from the hospital, across the street to LAICO (which is where my office is), to say hi to me and ask me if I wanted to get coffee with them on Monday. Sindhuri-withdrawal I assume. Also, Zamania and I did get dinner at 7.30 pm – at Madurai's best Chinese restaurant. The fast was worth it.