Foray into Forensics

Forgive me for sounding like little Miss Sunshine but what a lousy, lousy day to start a blog. No, really. At the risk of  coming across as a bit too  Chandler-isque…. Could it have been any worse? First there is the Pathology test that I totally believed I had cleared. I was of course way off base. It appears the only remotely positive thing about the farkin’ paper was the short note we were supposed to write on Gram Bacteria (you know those….ahem….Positive ones) which judging by the marks I scored did not turn out that positive as well.

An hour and an exhilarating Microbiology lecture (Yeah Yeah Yawn Yawn) later, the Forensic dude comes up and it turns out there is this body in the  mortuary waiting for an autopsy to be performed on it and he wanted us third year students to observe it. So down the three floors we went, about thirty of us in all, and trudged towards the mortuary which is right next door to the college. Now a career in Forensic medicine is definitely not the glitz and glamour that CSI purports it to be. At least not here in Pakistan. About this mortuary, the facilities provided here to the Forensic experts are positively archaic. The huge tree present to the right as we enter the dank interior is at least about a hundred years old and probably haunted by the spirits of the thousands who have occupied the autopsy table inside. It definitely has the eerie, haunted tree thing going for it. To the left is an old broken bookshelf with some cracked pots. What purpose those serve in these glum surroundings  eludes me, except lend a dilapidated air to the already morose atmosphere. The autopsy room inside was actually a small area with a raised platform with an autopsy table in the middle and surrounded on three sides by two elevated steps where we stood to observe and be initiated into the “art” of Forensic Medicine. It was not a pretty sight.The size of the bag present at the foot of the table kind of gave me an inkling of what was in store for us.

It was a young woman of about 20-25. Or whatever there was left of her. The limbs had been chopped off along with the head and the only thing that was there was her trunk and her legs up to her knees. From my vantage point, I could make out the condyles of her femur.  It was surreal I tell you. According to Pakistani medical jurisprudence, a male Forensic surgeon cannot perform an autopsy on a female body. So while we all waited for the female doctor to arrive, with the Forensic dude droning on about what he thought might have  happened, I stared with some kind of morbid fascination at the depth of depravity a human being is capable of. Unfortunately, we had to leave before the autopsy was performed because the police-wala would not let us stay. So the only thing I gained from this bizarre experience was an aversion to food which lasted the whole day, and maybe the first hand knowledge that a rapist and killer was loose on the streets of Karachi,  which by the way is not a very comforting thought.  

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