It was in 1986, I think, that I first met Christopher. As a matter of fact, I have not changed his name, like many people do when narrating a past incident, when the protagonist is still around. In fact, if you promise not to laugh out loud, I will even give you his full name: Christopher Lee. He was neither a Caucasian or a Chinese as his name seems to suggest. He was just an ordinary old Indian in ordinary old Bangalore, which had yet to hit its fame as an outsourcing destination in a flat world. He was around 27 then and was working in the blood bank of a leading hospital. For convenience, I will call him Chris. He was probably named after the noted actor Christopher Lee, born Christopher Frank Carandini Lee in 1922. Fantasy movie buffs know the actor as Count Dooku in the Star Wars series, Saruman in the Lord of the Rings trilogy and as Jabberwocky in Alice in Wonderland. This actor is reported to consider his most important role as Jinnah in a movie by the same name. However, many old-timers remember this nearly six and half feet tall actor for his title role in the Bond movie ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’ as Scaramanga. And who can forget his role in a series of movies with Count Dracula as the central figure. Well, when the Bangalorean Christopher Lee was born in 1969, the actor had been famous only for one series of films, the one Hammer Films used to count upon for his battiness!
My maternal grandfather had been admitted to a hospital in Bangalore for removal of a cancerous kidney and required transfusion of copious amounts of blood. The quantities arranged for in advance ran out during surgery and we arranged for additional donation from some people who had been had lined up in case of need. One of these was me. Those days I was preparing for an examination and had to spend time in the hospital to be with grandpa and was therefore studying next to his hospital bed.
Seeing my interest and knowledge when I was a high school student, a leading doctor, who is today considered a pioneer of corporate medical services in India had asked me to take up medicine. So, though I had donated blood earlier, I observed the proceedings in the blood bank with interest. Blood banks in India had just switched over a few years ago to using plastic bags instead of glass bottles and use of the new anticoagulant CPDA-1. I had seen movies where the donor and the recipient are directly hooked up and had sniggered at this apparent folly of film makers. On enquiry, however, Chris told me that there had been equipment for this during the world war days but was not favoured now. In fact, he had heard of blood being drawn from arteries for direct link to the receiver, but nowadays only veins were punctured for drawing blood. My left median cubital vein was punctured with a 17 gauge needle, linked to a plastic bag containing anti-coags like trisodium citrate and I started pumping the little rubber ball I was given to hold in my fist. As we waited till for my 450 ml to flow into the bag, we got chatting, as he had nothing else to do. The chap, as expected was knowledgeable in his field and seeing my interest in the matter and hearing of the advice that I had received in my high school, he did not hesitate to tell me what else was in the bag and let me in on the processes that the blood passes through, for storage and transfusion. He, however, did not know of my true profession.
As you know, I had recently qualified as an auditor and was partly in an investigative bent of mind and somehow my thoughts strayed into quantitative analysis. He informed me that they kept the bags classified by blood groups and the Rh factor and separated the constituents into plasma and platelets for further storage. Arithmetically, there were 4 main groups along with the presence or absence of the Rh factor, leading to 8 permutations, and not counting the other subtypes, from the most common O+ve to the rarest AB-ve. I asked him whether he had any stock of AB-ve and he opened his stock register which showed 4 bags of 450 ml each, whereas his stock tray seemed to have 5 bags of 360 ml each. The total quantity was the same, but it seemed to be spread out in larger number of bags. He shrugged it off, saying that partly used bags must have been returned. I was curious and I later asked a nurse whether they did indeed return a partly used bag. I was informed that usually an entire bag was used for transfusion, unless of course, the patient stopped the transfusion in the middle, either by a rejection reaction or by checking out of the world. Both ways, the bag was discarded. So why was he lying about it, I pondered?
The doctors asked for some more blood, and we had to line up more donors. It was quite late in the evening when they turned up after finishing their office jobs and Chris started the drawing of blood. It was time for him to go, but his replacement had not arrived. I told him to go ahead and go saying, I would wait till his replacement came, and if required call the nurse. He packed his bags and left. After he went, I got busy with his lab. The bags discrepancy was there in some other blood groups too. But more surprisingly, the AB-ve was now only 4 bags of 360 ml; one having been issued during the day. The register now showed 3 bags, one having been issued during the day. I jotted down the patient number mentioned against the issue for further verification.
On enquiry at the patient registration counter the next day, I found that the patient number had been inactive for quite some time. Now fully suspecting foul play, I looked in his lunch bag just before he left and found a plastic bag of blood in it. Was he selling blood?, I thought. In those days there was a market of blood banks and few donors were available. I waited till the next day evening and when a doctor had come into the lab, I casually asked him, “Chris, I heard that you sell the blood from this lab to outsiders, is that true?”. The doctor perked up and asked me, “Why do you say that?” I said, “Look in his lunch bag and you will find a bag of blood in it, all ready to be taken out.”
A search of his bag proved what I had stated. Facing the prospect of an enquiry and a dishonourable dismissal, he came out with the time honoured cliché: “I did it for my mother’s sake.” He went on to explain, “She requires this blood and I can’t get it from any other source. Her very life depends upon it”. The doctor, out of sympathy for a fellow medico, decided not to take it up further. However, when I told the doctor that it was different blood groups that he was taking home and his mother would not need different groups if she required transfusions, and challenged Chris with this fact, that the real story tumbled out. And it was amazing. I will not call it horrifying, for every creature has a right to live, whether a predator or a prey, as propounded by animal protectionists; and anyone who denied them this right, would be “blood-geoned” by the very same protectionists, rendering him instantaneously extinct.
Darwin’s theory had been finally been proved right. Not by laboratory tests, but by them, in real life. Adaptation and at a speed unforeseen by Darwin had been going on for some time now. Having been hounded across the earth, they had mutated into an entirely new species, externally human in appearance. For survival, they had adapted to being able to live in sunlight, using some sort of sunscreen they had developed. Their canines had been not been used for the past few generations and had morphed into the normal humanoid ones. Rarely, one of them regressed and had an abnormally long and protruding canine, which their community dentists subjected to extraction followed by prosthodontic treatment. But they still feared the argentum bullet and still needed blood. They had caught religion and did not fear the crucifix any more. In fact, they liked the cross now, especially in the form of the Red Cross, being one of the channels of regular blood supply they could bank on. They were quite modern now - they did not sink their teeth into jugular arteries or carotid veins - they simply used the marvel of modern packaging. And to top it all, they took up jobs in blood banks setting up new standards of food security. Packaged blood was even used in some discreet hotel joints, he told me, where a new style of cuisine had developed: blood-bath was served along with the locally popular khara-bath and kesri-bath, into which they could sink their teeth.
Their mutation had been relatively very fast. Chris’ mother still had some of problems their species had faced over the millennia. But his generation was fit enough to mingle with the humans unnoticed. She was now over 150 years old and frail and not fit to venture out of home and had to be bottle fed. She had married a human and he had died a natural death, if it could be called that. It had been triggered by the disbelief when he found out the truth about his wife: that she was old enough to be his grandmother. And hence, the hybrid had inherited some immunity from the problems that plagued his kind. And Christopher’s mother’s choice of her son’s name was the ultimate irony of it all: Her son playing out his life in the name of the person who played out their lives on the screen.
He also told me that he had recently met another of his kind when he had gone to a college during a blood donation camp and he had fallen for her. They had decided to hook-up. It was a blood-less coup, he said. Or was it? They had met up and decided to tie the knot. ‘I hope it will not be in vein’, he punned. He was introducing her to his mother this Sunday at a feast he had organised at home, a feast at which various choice varieties and vintages of the red fluid from his cellar would be available.
He ended it by saying that I was welcome to this feast, as a guest, if I could stomach it, and not as a part of the menu. I passed............. out.
I came to in a hospital bed surrounded by anxious relatives. They said that probably the blood donation I had given coupled with my sleepless nights spent for preparing for the exam and accompanied by the anxiety over my grandfather’s hospitalisation had taken their toll on my health. I was advised to take it easy for some time to recuperate. But I knew the real story behind my fainting and also that no one would believe it. Now that over30 years have passed and probably Chris has retired (not because he had aged, but because he had aged as per the hospital staff records), I decided to declassify the story from my chronicles and unleash it on the public.
Post-script
I had a sense of déjà vu recently when I heard a little girl exhorting her mother to buy ‘blood’ in a supermarket. I did a double take. Was she Chri's grand-daughter?, I wondered. I tried to see, as unobtrusively as possible, if there were any tell tale signs. Then, I realised she was lisping and wanted ‘bread’’. Yet, she served her purpose to jiggle my memories and remind me to put this story about mankind (?) in writing.
(A large part of this story is true, believe it or not, since I can actually vouch for it! I am sure that, if the hospital concerned is still having old records, it can even confirm the name of the blood bank technician, though I doubt whether the then Chennai based cardiologist, who has even been decorated with a Padma Bhushan, would remember a casual (though hour long) chat with a high school student at MM Hospital, Egmore, Chennai circa 1974.)
Copyright notice: The contents of this blog may not be used in any form without the express written consent of the blog owner, who may be contacted at kishoremrao@hotmail.com.
Copyright notice: The contents of this blog may not be used in any form without the express written consent of the blog owner, who may be contacted at kishoremrao@hotmail.com.
