On the contrary: Nurse Ratchett

The most annoying aspect of family reunions is when an elderly relative recapitulates in tiresome detail an embarrassing incident dating back to one's childhood that is best forgotten. Filled with the sap of youth, one has the capacity to grin and bear it but the passage of time serves to lower one's IQ: irritation quotient. Family holidays should be spent eating, drinking and casting a reflective eye over the brood for quality defects. So while anecdotes of a chequered infancy have their place, it's important that one aspires to more in life than low gossip. My family leaves no holds barred when it comes to entertaining themselves or spicing up the moments that make up a dull day.  "Matron and the Syringe" is one such low point, the endless recycling of which made me long to misplace Aunt B's dentures.

By way of introduction I should explain that I am no stoic: as Shylock said, albeit in a different context, "Prick me and I bleed." To which I could truthfully add that on the rare occasions I'm pricked, I don't merely bleed, I howl. I'd rather go three rounds with Mike Tyson than face a needle and the mere sight of one brings on gibbering terror. I am the sort of parent who is found cowering near the water-cooler when the children are getting their MMR shots.

Having established that I am not quite "Who-dares-wins" material", let's cut to the sixties and a Math tuition class in the sleepy town of Mysore. Aunt C, who had very firm views on the subject of rearing children, decided a tutor was just what a growing lad needed to come to grips with the arcane mysteries of trigonometry and Pythagoras. Before I could say a word, I was subject to the tutelage of Vadiyar, a hairy-eared ascetic, reeking of mothballs and asafoetida in equal proportions.

"The squeer rood," he would drone, while I looked longingly at the gooseberry tree outside, "is thee zum of the squeer on thee udder doo sides," or some such convoluted crap. Eventually light dawned and while I didn't exclaim "Eureka", I banged my fist on the table in a spirit of boyish exuberance straight on his upturned ballpoint pen which pierced the fleshy part of my palm. Aunt C came home for lunch and took a look at the wound, briskly dismissing it as "nothing" while she handed me a small vial. I nearly swallowed it then and there but she assured me it worked best in a hospital. Being young, innocent and unschooled in the crafty ways of adults, I sauntered into the Railway Hospital in Vontikoppal with a tra-la-la on my lips and the "mandoo" clutched tightly in my hot little hand.

Matron, a waddling Goan biddy of some sixty summers, who weighed in at about 120 kg without her uniform (this is a scientific phrase and should not be taken to mean I saw matron in her jimjams), took the vial from me with a kindly smile. After fussing around with it for a while she turned around and asked me to "pull down my chuddies." Now I'm as broadminded as the next guy, but my convent upbringing wouldn't allow me to sell myself so cheaply. Drawing myself up to my full height of four-feet, I coldly enquired whether she had an unsatisfactory sex life or words to that effect. To my horror, she laughed uproariously and clutching what to my fevered imagination looked like a huge enema syringe, drew the contents of the vial into it while clutching my shoulder in a vicelike grip. When the going got tough, I'm proud to say I got going. Pausing only to give her a nip on the wrist, I streaked through the hallway past several astonished patients in wheelchairs, vaulted over a stretcher bearing some unfortunate soul in for a hernia operation (I found that out later) and disappeared like the proverbial streak of lightning over the distant horizon.

Alas, I had reckoned without the orderlies who on Aunty's high-pitched urgings compounded by Matron's higher-pitched shrieks ran me to ground a mere two hundred metres from the hospital. I was hauled back unceremoniously to suffer the indignity of my body being pumped full of harmful chemicals on the LABOUR table. Not surprisingly, I developed a lifelong phobia for women in white bearing needles. When I think of the irreparable damage done to my psyche at that tender age, I smile grimly when Aunty complains bitterly about how embarrassed she was.