Living in the Fugue: Critical Care Doctor and Photographer is Boatman

between worlds

by

Julie Banerjee Mehta

When dawn blushes at night’s heels, while the tides are turning on the Ganga, a stone’s throw from the hospital where he is standing, a doctor watches with narrowing eyes, the rise and fall of the chest in front of him. He has played this game thousands of times – being the Warrior Prince, who stands between the body in his care that Death, the harvester of souls,  must wrest from himto reap. He thinks of the water that flows in the blood of the veins of his patient, and the waterthat makes tumultuous waves on the lakes and rivers that he loves so much to photograph. Likethe blood he handles every day, he knows only too well as a photographer, in the other life thathe leads, who captures waterscapes with a primordial passion, that water is chimeral,unpredictable, indomitable and incredibly powerful. Like Life. And like Death.

“Nature is so incredibly beautiful. I believe photography connects me to that beauty andenergy and ecstasy of the living world. When I leave the hospital I find a great affinity forNature. This love for Nature is what drove me to photography. It grows within me”. The doctor finds he gravitates towards the energy, the beauty, the life force that has a magnetic pull on him. 

Dr. Milan Banerjee is a renowned Registrar at the Intensive Treatment Unit at Woodlands Speciality Hospital, and at the Fortis Kidney Hospital, in Calcutta. He wears his skill as an intensivist (the term describes an internal care specialist) with effortless ease. Frequently, he works the graveyard shift at Fortis Kidney Hospital at Rashbehari Avenue and then rushes to Woodlands, Alipore, to work a gruelling 24-hour shift. Once a month he runs the marathon for sixty straight hours from Friday night till Monday morning, encountering patients who are wheeled in with urgent requirements of life saving drugs that need to be ministered through either the jugular or the femoral blood vessels. He is the Doctor with Magic Fingers, and his reputation precedes him. He sets new records and then breaks them with new records. A right jugular central venous access, which takes an average of fifteen minutes, skin to skin, takes him three minutes and thirty seconds. With every new patient that needs a channel to be made, so the medication may be pumped in, or a patient who requires haemodialysis, for those patients who come in with nephrological problems, Dr. Banerjee is ushered in with the quiet dignity afforded to a genius. The nurses and colleagues from other intensive care facilities often seek his prowess. Little wonder then, his colleagues defer to him as the best channel creator in the town. Often he

completes three of the most challenging procedures in the intensive treatment business in less than thirty minutes: He intubates, ventilates, and completes a bloodless ijv central venous access all in the time that we would take to chomp through a working lunch sandwich and down a coffee .

Dr. Banerjee’s tryst begins often with terminal patients, who come with myriad complications.  And he has learnt that his tryst with the Lord of Death is an ongoing game of chance. At forty, he has seen and touched and gone into places that most of humankind do not get a glimpse of in an entire lifetime. And as he watches the monitor that reveals the multitude parameters of the patient, dancing on the screen, he remembers the countless corridors he has traversed with patients with whom he has walked back from the brink. The frames of those events have made him a camera obscura – an observer who is a repository, an archive of the multitudinous moments when he has either been able to fight with all his medical knowledge to keep the soul on this side of Lethe, or helped the soul traverse the crossing, making the journey easier, to the other shore. The doctor then, might appear as a Boatman, a fighter in the process of fugue, which literally translates into the word flight, a resident in the hyphen. Between this world and the one we know nothing about.

What is the most difficult part about dealing with a patient on Death Row?

“Before Death, the patient is often in a state of Coma. This is the most difficult stage. The trick is to find a fine balance between how much to give in order to revive the patient and how much to withhold expectations of the patient. Death is the ultimate moment. It is irretrievable, momentous, and momentary. Nature, on the other hand is always viable. Nature has two components: The object - such as the Mountains and the seas-- and the subject -- such as animals and trees. They are two sides of the same coin.”

How does he perform as the healer, the agent who minimizes pain and administers the cutting technology to improve the suffering of the patients who fill his days and nights?

“I play the role whenever applicable. When I am playing the role, I try to ensure the patient undergoes the least suffering. My goal is to do all I can to see that the patient survives. If I see the patient’s condition is reversible, I will do everything in my power, apply everything I have learnt and know. In terminal cases, my first motive is to cause minimal pain and give comfort to the soul. But there are cases where the patient’s suffering is prolonged and gives no comfort. Those are the difficult cases.  There are times when you know that the patient is struggling and you need to let the soul go.”

Dr. Banerjee’s meticulousness in the Intensive Treatment Unit is reflected in much of his life and certainly in his photographic skills. His attention to detail, his respect for patients under his care, even the way he folds up a manual blood pressure instrument, neatly packing the gangly tubes into a perfect package, or the effortless ease that comes from hundreds of thousands of procedures he has performed in his ten year career as an internal medical specialist, reflect the seriousness with which he imbibed his father’s traits. His father began his career as an engineer in the Department of Telecommunications, in Kharagpur, a large city in West Bengal. And in the tour of duty, the engineer travelled widely -- he was posted to Katihar, Kolkata, Guwahati, Kolkata, and then came back to Kharagpur with his last posting, before he died suddenly of a cardiac arrest, sixteen years ago. Dr. Banerjee recalls: “I didn’t get to spend too much time with him because he had far ranging responsibilities and travelled constantly. But I remember how humble he was and how hardworking and modest. He was also meticulous. I remember the perfect creases he had on his shirts and trousers which he neatly put in his cupboard every other day. He had orderlies and two cars and two drivers always at his command. But he washed his own clothes, folded them, even polished his own shoes. My father never forgot his roots, even when he had the wings he had earned, to fly. When I was young, I noticed how highly he was regarded by orderlies and drivers. He had a soft spoken, soft-hearted approach to life, but stood tall with principles he held as unbreakable covenants. He was ramrod straight, honest to the last penny. He ended his career as Deputy General Manager of Kharagpur Telecom District, the same spot he began his career. He was all in all of his District, but was an introvert, unspoilt, incorruptible and gentle . A white ambassador and a Bolero with two drivers would be waiting at the door, but my father never pulled rank nor had a rough word for anyone.”

His son, the doctor too, is stamped by a soft spoken, understated presence through both hospitals and has earned himself a reputation as a prodigious talent, and a hands-on genius who is an Iacocca from Chrysler, of sorts, turning the most critical impossibilities into hopeful

tomorrows. Praised for his calmness and grace, his kindness and team spirit and patience with a remarkable ability to turn the tide, when he is under fire with the most difficult patients, fighting for survival, Dr. Banerjee is a cat lover and a substantial magnet for stray dogs who sniff him out miles away. When he vrooms on his motorbike into the site of the beautiful home he is building by a lake, with a garden bursting with young mango trees and areca nut palms and hibiscus and drumstick, which he tends to and waters and photographs when he has hours off, two strays run behind him like long lost friends. For the past sixteen years, his mother has been his anchor and his love of gardening and animals was planted in him by her. A woman of substance, who has moulded him, she travels with the doctor, and encourages his interest in photography.

What began as a passing curiosity and an affinity in 2010, with the purchase of a digital camera, has now turned into a serious concern. “There is limitless joy in pursuing this art. All frames need not be preferred – there is beauty in the forest, mountain and plateau, and then there is the beauty of the seashore, the rivers, the waterfalls, the backwaters. Each frame I look at has a specific beauty. I particularly like the water-sky frames. There is the feeling of infinity. The idea of Ananta, the endless sense of the horizon, and the immense imaginary of what happens if I

reach it? We know we cannot reach infinity in terms of reality. But as I look through the lens, the imagination comes into its own and there is great excitement in capturing that matchless moment. And then retrieving it, at leisure, and letting the moment cross over from the past into

the present.” Once again, the doctor, the boatman and the photographer have intersected in the quest for Life.

Most people find a hobby as a means to a destination. For Dr. Banerjee, “Nature is my recharger, my restorer . Photography is my route map to Nature. Photography is a means to perceiving Nature with a new pair of eyes every time. Photography is my window to recreation, healing and restoration. “

“I prefer the inspirational forces of nature and the quietude and tranquility of her beauty to revive me, instead of the noise and discotheque, the clubs and places that are noisy and full of anxiety and movement. After the long hours with the frenetic activity that must be a part of the

ambience of an intensive care unit, what I gravitate towards is a place which restores me and provides me an opportunity for quiet contemplation. Where could be a better place than Nature for this kind of stilling the mind? After the kind of highly pressurized environment I work in, Object and subject become the opposite sides of the same coin.

“Photography connects me to the world of the living, and becomes a door to enter Nature,” he observes. So it becomes a fugue, a flight of sorts from one world to another. Whereas he works mostly in the world of the dying, and departing, photography is his world of the living. And perhaps photography is a method by which he often straddles both worlds, or provides a means to cross over from the dead and dying to the world of breath and wakefulness, fecundity and nurture. So Dr. Banerjee might also be perceived as the Ferryman who ferries souls between two worlds.

The technicality of the Science of photography arrests him. And when I suggest that photography is perceived to be an art, he laughs and says, “It is indeed an art.” He looks forward to learning the science and techniques, being a medical man, by taking a course in photography. Why Nature? His response is as shiny and clear as the marble slabs that await to adorn the home he is building in the midst of waterscapes and wetlands, near Pailan, a stone’s throw from Indian Institute of Management at Joka. “I have always been attracted to waterways – lakes,

rivers, waterfalls, streams, ponds, and the oceans, of course. Nature photography reduces mental stress. It is a great force that rejuvenates. If you take it up as a hobby, it is holistic, divine and helps you get a centering of yourself. Nature cannot speak, it manifests her beauty through her visual frames, which are repositories of good memories, which I store and record, and when I need to, I retrieve.” Sourcing for joy is a finger tap away: “With the retrieval of good memory, the closeness I shared with Nature when I clicked those pictures, comes right back. And there is

a renewed bond that is forged with Nature all over again in that moment of recall.”

On his rare days off, the doctor becomes the motorbike rider and can be spotted in his orange Honda riding along the narrow roads between paddy fields as green as the first shoots of grass, the sunlight bouncing off his polished orange bike, the colour of a saffron sunset.