You Never Know What’s Going to Happen, to Whom, From One Day to The Next!

Practical and hardworking, my hostel “mom” bossed me around.

Two second-year dental students: me, new to hostel life, and she, an old hand

Prasanna was my roomie for our second year in the dental college hostel in Mysore. My first year had been spent luxuriously at home with my parents, who moved to Calcutta in my second year, dumping me into the college hostel as they left.

I hated the mass-cooked food and the timings of the dining hall where it was literally dished out. I tried to live on Five Star chocolate bars, bread, boiled eggs, and Nestle’s Maggi instant noodles, avoiding the gruel-like mess food.

Prasanna, on the other hand, had moved into the hostel in her first year and was well-adjusted there.

She was a good girl! She ate the mess food in the mess, during meal timings. She never brought it up to our room to swallow down past midnight as I did.

Once, frustrated by my “lazy breakfast of boiled eggs” she suggested that I should at least eat them while they were still warm. (Or go downstairs and eat the dining hall’s breakfast, it wasn’t that bad today.)

When she cooked in our room, she would cook complicated chicken or vegetarian Manchurian, aromatic dishes which would beckon all our neighboring hostel mates to come over and eat with us.

Half-Christian, half-Hindu

Prasanna would invite the girls who had followed their noses into our room, number 120. She’d laugh, sit cross-legged with an elbow against a knee, head propped up against her palm, and talk about her Christian mom and Hindu dad. She could choose to pray to Jesus or to Lord Krishna, she’d say, with an expansive clapping namaste followed by a sweeping sign of the cross.

Then she would raise an eyebrow at me. Even when I visited Mysore’s Chamundi Temple, I would climb up the thousand steps for exercise, and turn back and run down without visiting the deity. I was almost an atheist, in her eyes.

Presentable, not westernized, for church

She, on the other hand, would visit Mysore’s Philomena Church on Sundays. She would wake and dress early. She wore cream-colored salwar kameezes to church. I had always imagined that you needed to wear skirts to attend church, having studied in missionary schools where the Anglo-Indian teachers wore skirts. Prasanna said, “No, you need to be presentable, not westernized.”

To her, food was a form of God, and by not consuming the mess meals my parents had paid up for, I was committing a grievous sin.

On one occasion, my mother visited us, and I told her about how Prasanna was crazy about God and food.

She said to me, “Finish what’s on your plate, ingrate!”

I related a story to my mother about when I had served myself a plate of dining hall food and then hadn’t eaten it. I had carried the food to my room only to leave it languishing, uneaten.

Prasanna had lost her temper at the plate of exposed food on my study table and had forcibly spoon-fed me, claiming that if I had served it out of the giant dining hall canisters onto my plate to eat it, I jolly well would.

Her forced spoon-feeding made me feel loved, and I told my mother that Prasanna was my hostel “mom”. From that day on, Prasanna was a favorite with my mother and father. My parents would ask after her and enquire about her health and grades on every college vacation.

My parents’ continued interest in her embarrassed me because Prasanna left my room in our third year

Prasanna abandoned room 120 to bunk with a final year student, a girl from her own state, who spoke her mother tongue.

Prasanna didn’t like me! If she did, she wouldn’t have switched rooms to be away from me. The day she told me she was leaving, she didn’t tell me why she was leaving. She had packed all her things, and I walked into the room to see her mattress and stuff missing, shifted already to the room and room-mate that had enticed her away from me.

I can only guess why she left. She never let on in the entire year that she was my roomie, that she didn’t like me, enough to switch rooms away from me.

Once, she asked, why do you talk as soon as you wake up? Mornings should be quiet.

Once. How can someone give so little indication that they don’t enjoy being your roommate? How could I have been so insensitive and blind?

Though her leaving the room rankled, we stayed friends.

College and exams, trips and excursions with friends made me forget that my best-ever roomie had hated rooming with me.

We graduated and threw our caps in the air.

Now, we were dental doctors! Now interns with no more exams to worry about, we all started accepting invitations to travel and attend out-of-town weddings. Prasanna attended a wedding back home, where she fell in love with the man she would eventually marry.

Vamsi Krishna, unlike Prasanna, was all Hindu.

His mother didn’t like the idea of a half-Christian daughter-in-law. Vamsi had a cousin who convinced Vamsi’s mom that Prasanna was a great fit for her son.

Vamsi and Prasanna had a love marriage that was “arranged” by a helpful cousin.

Prasanna and I got married around the same time, and we didn’t attend each other’s weddings. I moved to Jamshedpur, to my home and clinic, and started work. I lost touch with most of my friends, but especially with Prasanna. She moved so far away.

Prasanna left for the USA with Vamsi, who lived and worked there.

He was one of India’s tech guys who had a successful life and career in the US. Prasanna was living the dream, in the first year of a Doctor of Dental Surgery degree that her husband was sponsoring. If she had been on Medium, she would not have hidden her Bachelor of Dental Surgery degree behind Tooth Truth as I have. She would have called herself Dr. Prasanna Kalahasthi, DDS.*

On 11 September 2001, it was evening in India as the first plane hit the North Tower.

My brother, who lived in Kansas then, had been flying that day. It wasn’t until eleven-thirty at night that he managed to return our calls and tell us that he was safe. We had spent five hours wondering if he had been in any of the planes that kept crashing into buildings. When he called, we were relieved and exhausted and went to bed for an uneasy rest well past midnight.

I didn’t know then that my old roomie’s husband, Vamsi, was on the very first plane, the one that flew into the North Tower.

Prasanna must have watched over and over as the deaths of the passengers on the plane were confirmed and the tragedy unfolded, with no hope at all for her husband. He wasn’t a faller or someone on the towers who made it downstairs, dusty and bewildered, but safe. He wasn’t a firefighter who gave up his life, saving someone else. He wasn’t one of the people confirmed dead a day later.

He was gone the minute the plane hit the tower.

She followed him.

On 28 October 2001 Prasanna committed suicide.

She didn’t kill herself at the sight of the television screen on the eleventh day of September 2001. She waited for forty-seven days. Why?

Here, I pass into the realm of conjecture. Maybe she died because she loved him too much to live without him. Otherwise, I do not understand why somebody who wouldn’t allow even food to be wasted would waste her entire life, choosing to kill herself.

Later, my mother would hold me close, and tell me that if somebody like Prasanna couldn’t make it in a mental game, then she had no way to predict what would happen next for me.

Parents don’t know what happens next.

Prasanna’s death changed my own parenting.

I couldn’t bring myself to be hard on my own kids for every little thing. Sure, I try to make them finish the food on their plates, be tidy and learn how to cook.

My eighteen-year-old daughter can cook more at eighteen than I could at her age. She prays even less than I do.

I know that being able to cook, or having faith in a God isn’t enough to protect my daughters against what might happen or how they perceive it.

I felt that if Prasanna had had more support, as she would certainly have had in India, the suicide wouldn’t have happened. If your child doesn’t have support, you never know when the wind will be taken out of your immigrant child’s sails and she becomes an unlisted victim of Osama bin Laden.

If Vamsi Krishna had lived, Dr. Prasanna Kalahasthi would have, too. She was particularly good at crowns and bridges. I wonder if any of the crowns she did as a student at the college in India are still around in patients’ mouths.

Vamsi Krishna has his name on the plaques at Ground Zero. Prasanna has nothing. Osama bin Laden did not pay for her to be murdered. She died for free.

I avoid using “Dr.” in front of my name on Medium because I know that there is an $80,000 and a four-year course gap between the American DDS and the Indian BDS. The Indian BDS which Prasanna and I had both worked for in college isn’t recognized in the US. She was qualifying to be an internationally certified dentist. I practice in my own country, where my degree is recognized. The American dental degree enticed me as much as the price tag scorched any desire of my getting one.

I respect and envy my classmates like Dr. Venigalla, DDS. He not only did a four-year BDS course in India, but went on to do the American course. American dentists charge patients and buy instruments in dollars, while I buy instruments in dollars but have to charge patients in a weaker rupee.

Dr. Venigalla also administered the COVID vaccine to his patients, while I had to stand in line for one. Prasanna would have been like him. She would have been American, she would have had a voice before Medium even existed.

It is unfair that I get to live, and she had to die. Why did she kill herself? I will never know for sure.