The Ragtime Blues

The Language of the Rag

Today, when the word ‘Web’ is no longer always understood to mean “something formed by, or as if by, weaving or interweaving,” as one dictionary defined it, and when ‘Mouse’ is not necessarily taken for granted as a rodent, we can sympathise with the uninitiated. Similarly, the terms ‘Pad’, ‘Net’, ‘Cookies’, or ‘Flash’ no longer conjure the meanings instilled in us through decades of English usage. In a similar vein, one can understand the confusion if someone fails to grasp that a ‘Rag,’for decades, has referred to the traditional initiation of a school-leaver into the exalted ranks of the Medical Student.

Origins and Inspirations

The unknown originators of the Rag must have understood the need for a proper induction ritual, one that would formally usher new entrants into the Medical College fold. The chronicler is convinced that the inspiration for these offensive, degrading, and often ridiculous acts was drawn from the elaborate initiation rites of African tribes. A little research reveals a clear similarity between the two protocols.

Describing African coming-of-age rituals, one source notes that they are “in most cases, group activities designed to build character, foster productive adult behaviour, and forge friendships and alliances among initiates who undergo the rites together.” These same claims have been used to justify the continuation of the Rag by successive batches of “Seniors,” as the established medical students were called. They themselves had undergone the harsh and debasing rituals in earlier years. Yet, the fact that these seniors chose to perpetuate this ignoble tradition rather than end it would be a worthy subject for research by social scientists, clinical psychologists, and students of sociopathy.

The Three Phases of Initiation

The same source explains that these tribal rituals unfold in three distinct phases. The first is a rite of ‘separation,’ where youths are physically and psychologically removed from their community and taken to a special enclosure. The second involves a change in clothing to reinforce their separation. After a few days, the final phase of ‘re-integration’ follows, where the initiate returns, ready to embrace the roles and responsibilities of adulthood. A closer look at these tribal practices only reinforces the aptness of comparing them to the Rag.

The Batch of Three Hundred

To make this anecdote exclusive to our batch, it’s worth noting that this was the first and the last time, a number as large as a little over three hundred men and women presented themselves for initiation to Medical College.

The Honourable Seniors

The perpetrators of the Rag, our seniors, showing remarkable similarity to the mindset of African tribal chiefs, separated us from the general body of medical students we were so eager to join. We were sternly warned: for the duration of the proceedings, all kinship, friendship, or prior familiarity with them was to be suspended. They were all to be addressed by us as “honourable seniors” (HS). Anyone who addressed them by their name or anything else did so at their own peril.

The Absurd Dress Code

We had been strictly ordered that the dress code should be as follows: White trousers with the right leg rolled up above the knee. A normal shoe on the right foot and a tennis shoe on the left. A white shirt worn the other way round with the collar buttoned behind simulating the ‘dog-collar’ worn by some clergymen, and a black tie knotted in front. A white coat with a red shoe flower as a button hole completed the ridiculous outfit.

Many, if not most of us, lived or boarded in the outskirts of Colombo and had to travel to medical college by train, bus, or both. Wearing such fancy dress on public transport would surely have landed us in the newspapers in the most unflattering light. Had social media existed then, photos of a horde of such absurdly attired youths would no doubt have gone viral. Consequently, we needed a place to stash the more conspicuous components of our costume, as they defied daily transport. Fortunately, people were far more trusting in those days. ‘Terrorism’ and ‘terrorists’ were not yet part of the everyday vocabulary. So our forced entry into nearby houses, strangers all, with requests to change into our bizarre attire and leave it overnight was met with ready acceptance, albeit accompanied by the barely concealed mirth of both children and adults. Their laughter did nothing to spare our already battered psyches.

The Ordeal Begins

What’s left to be described now is the hell we underwent through a working week, which, for medical students, included Saturday. This ordeal was later extended, at the popular demand of our honourable seniors, by a further three days, a demand granted unchallenged by the authorities.

Following the protocols used by the Xhosa, Ibos, Bakongo, and Samburu tribes of Africa, the field of operations, the special enclosure where the rituals were to take place, was designated. We later came to realise that this sacred ground was none other than the Men’s Common Room and its environs. The latter referred to the open space overlooking the Khan Clock Tower, well within the field of vision of the multitudes waiting to get into the wards of the General Hospital to visit their kith and kin incarcerated there.

What happened to the female entrants of our batch is not reviewed here, the chronicler being unaware of the events that might have taken place in the Women’s Common Room. What is recorded is merely a ball-by-ball commentary of what happened to the boys. The pun is unintentional.

Packed In Like Battery Hens

En masse, a whole lot of us, randomly selected by the HS, were packed into the common room like unhappy battery hens (or cocks, if you’re a stickler for gender accuracy in metaphors—or is it similes?) being taken for slaughter. With many honourable seniors jostling us and hurling insulting and degrading remarks, some bordering on the obscene, a sense of foreboding gripped us all. The looks we exchanged might have mirrored those of Jews at Mauthausen or Auschwitz, awaiting the gas chambers. No one realised how close we were to re-enacting that sense of doomed obedience, until one HS, emulating a particularly depraved Gestapo commander, yelled: “Undress.”

In the mental state we were in, we’d have, if ordered, eaten our own socks, or each other’s, for that matter. To a man, we began undressing, tossing all clothing and underwear into one heap, as directed by the Gestapo chief. Soon, the whole landscape was a sea of testicles. Still not appeased, he barked again, “All you buggers, jump up and down shouting, ‘Hurrah for the seniors!’” And so we jumped, up and down, shouting, “Hurrah for the seniors.”

The Rambutan Tree

Have you ever seen a rambutan tree, heavy with fruit, caught in a mid-monsoon windstorm? The spectacle, when one looked around, was not too dissimilar. Our collective emotional state had sunk to an all-time low, and our bodies, in what seemed a tacit pact with the hypothalamus, had temporarily suspended all testosterone activity. The expected physiological response to all that bouncing male anatomy was, mercifully, absent. One was never so grateful for small mercies.

With all that animated jumping, the roomful of steaming bodies was throwing off an astonishing amount of heat. Sweat was pouring down from head to toe, and the Jews in the concentration camps, awaiting their oblivion, might have felt oddly at home with us. Perhaps for their own comfort, and certainly not ours, one HS opened the windows of the common room.

The noise and the obviously strange goings-on nearby soon caught the attention of the hospital visitors, who were desperate to relieve themselves of the boredom of standing around the clock tower, blankly staring at each other until the gates opened. They rushed into the compound to investigate and lined up outside the walls of the common room, like marginating leucocytes on the vessel walls of an inflamed organ.

The scene shocked even the most impious and ungodly among them. Young girls, wide-eyed at their inaugural view of male genitalia, were unceremoniously pushed away by their parents, while the mothers lingered behind for a second look. The older girls and women of childbearing age, on the other hand, were pushing their parents aside in a determined effort to remain as keen observers of this once-in-a-lifetime spectacle of a throng of nude males.

The Benevolent Senior

It is said that even among the cruelest of African tribal chiefs, there are some less brutal ones who feel sympathy for young boys undergoing horrific rites, like the facial scarification practiced by the Sepik of Papua New Guinea. One such benign HS, whose heart was clearly lodged in his pericardium rather than in his gluteal region, noticed our extreme exhaustion and shouted, “Stop jumping, you silly buggers.” Never had that insulting word sounded more like a benediction. We stopped at once, like a platoon of bone-weary soldiers responding to a fierce sergeant major’s bark of  ‘stand at ease.’ The windstorm had finally passed over the rambutan tree.

Ping Pong Au Naturel

If the reader thinks our ordeal had at last ended, he is deceived. One HS, the older of the Olivel twins, who closely resembled a particularly brutal tribal chief, spotted my brother and me, and shouted, “There, there, these are the buggers who sing!” All eyes turned toward us.

Close to where we were panting was the ping pong table. We were ordered to play what was most likely the only game of ping pong played in the nude since the history of that sport came to be documented. Apart perhaps from the games of ping pong possibly played in the sports area of a nudist colony. We took up the racquets and got to the sides of the table. One of our fellow-initiates, Seyed Ahamed, couldn’t help giving out a rather loud yelp at this admittedly most hilarious spectacle. This angered the HS who promptly took the net off, and had Seyed Ahamed lie across the ping pong table looking at the ceiling, stark naked, while we played over him, much to the merriment of the honourable seniors, and I dare say, also of my fellow sufferers!

The Ritual Libation

In saying that the Rag has considerable comparability to the African rites of passage, the chronicler is not erroneous or misguided. Earlier, he has indicated that the African tribes have a final rite of 're-integration' of the initiates to the fold from which they were segregated. In our case, never having been in the fold in the first place, this being our initial association with the members of the medical tribe, it was a matter of 'integration.'

The initiates of the Basari tribe in Senegal, before they are finally assimilated into the tribe as full members, have to drink from the Ritual Calabash, a variety of bottle gourd. As to what the contents were that they drank off that dried vegetable receptacle, this writer is unaware. In the final act of our Rag we too had to partake of a ritual drinking episode. This libation took place in the open area outside the common room. In their perverted idea of informed consent, an honourable senior made sure we knew what we were drinking.

This final ceremony was held at the end of the academic day, around 1:30 on a Saturday afternoon. In the centre of the square outside the Common Room, placed prominently on a bench, stood our Honourable Seniors’ version of a punch bowl, a large dishwashing receptacle borrowed from a ward, filled with water. For all to see, and narrating the ingredients as he added them, one HS stirred in a generous amount of Epsom salts, a potent laxative. Perhaps for added flavour, another tossed in handfuls of quinine tablets, one of the most bitter substances known, and plentifully available in those malaria-ridden days of our student era.

Those of you with a culinary interest would no doubt have seen the popular television celebrity chef, Nigella Lawson, stirring a bowl of soup with a silver ladle. The decoction meant for our consumption was also stirred by an HS. This time the implement used for that purpose was a femur that had once belonged to some able-bodied citizen of the land, courtesy of the Department of Anatomy. We were asked to form two lines, one on each side of the table. To each pair an HS called out, “Come, you buggers,” and handed each of us a full portion of the beverage, scooped out not from a Calabash but from a calvarium, perhaps in tribute to the Scythian warmongers who ritually drank from the skulls of their victims.

I had never tasted wormwood in my life, except in homeopathic quantities as an ingredient of Vermouth. But what I had just consumed exceeded anything I had ever imagined as the bitterest, most disagreeable, and acrimonious liquid to pass the human tonsils.

Vaseline and Colours

Terrible as it was, this was not the end of the closing ceremony, which, quite literally, was about to become a colourful one.

A few feet away from the punch bowl was a basin filled to the brim with Vaseline, and two other receptacles, one with Gentian Violet and the other with Congo Red, this time, courtesy of the Department of Pathology. These, as we were to learn later, were dyes used for staining specimens for the pathology slides. After drinking the gall, two of us at a time were to rub a handful of Vaseline on the other one’s head, while another fellow sufferer was ordered to garnish the Vaselined heads with a quantity of the violet-red mixture using a parietal bone kindly provided by the organisers.

The Colourful Finale

That, we realised, was finally the conclusion of the Rag as an HS bellowed, “Get out, you silly bastards.”

Dispirited and crestfallen, we paraded in single file like colourful but dejected cockatoos, cockatoos who had first got into a brawl in a batik factory, and then been messed up in a particularly substantial oil spill.

The rag was officially over. We walked, for the final time, to our separate foster homes to deposit our fancy dress, now, supposedly, as fully fledged medical students. There was, no doubt, a personal sense of relief. But the guffaws from passers-by were particularly hard to bear.

Even after ridding ourselves of the fancy dress and donning our normal garb, many of us had to trudge to the railway stations and bus stops to get home. The recent traumatic events had left us confused and somewhat psychologically deranged. So much so, in fact, that our colleagues, with their coloured hair gelled into bizarre shapes like rock music fans, and faces resembling Native American warriors in war paint, did not strike us as peculiar in the least.

The effect on the unsuspecting public, however, was startling. They stopped in their tracks, gawking incredulously. As a group of us walked opposite St. Bridget’s Convent, a nun taking the boarders for a walk made the sign of the cross and commanded the girls to recite the Hail Mary, one girl even spontaneously dropped to her knees.

Every mother and even a child on whom it had been tested would know how powerful a laxative just a modest potion of Epsom salts can be. The dose forced on us would have caused apoplexy in the authors of the ‘Prescriber’ had they heard about it. Due to our extreme exhaustion, our weary brains had forgotten that we ever consumed the stuff. In the meantime, however, the salts had been uncompromisingly doing their bit on our guts. The resulting urge to purge made many of us enter into unknown households, search out the toilets with permission provided or not, and relieve ourselves. A few, for combined pharmacological and physiological reasons, could not ward off certain unpleasant accidents that were impossible to avoid despite the earnest efforts of their sphincters. They simulated walking, malodorous cesspits.

Homeward Bound

Travelling back home in the bus or railway carriage, we looked like a group of battered crested parrots, enough by itself to cause visible discomfort and gigglig among the other passengers. But the distinctly faeculent odour that accompanied us, suggesting to their minds that we were a band of coprophagic degenerates, soon drove them to scatter and take up positions as far away from us as the compartment would allow.

This led to the only good thing that happened to us that day: as a kind of gratuitous compensation, we each got a seat for the entire duration of the trip, an unimaginable bonus during peak hour travel.