"doctor" taj -- the world's biggest loser

There’s this certain species of vermin who calls himself “Dr.” Taj (a pretentious title for an incompetent nincompoop) who was my grandmother’s physiotherapist until a while back. Under his ministrations, my grandmother’s physical condition went from bad to worse – to the point that it became necessary for her General Physician to intervene and advocate a replacement for this “Dr.” Taj. I was never fond of this “doctor” (the quotation marks should indicate which doctor I’m talking about), for various reasons, some of which include his odious tendency to act suave when his acute linguistic deficiencies should have ordinarily not allowed him to do so; his tendency to be ingratiating; the annoying fake accent he puts on whenever he says something in English; the dumb, vacant look on his abnormally large face; his mannerisms, which look incurably gay; the fact that he’s AWOL most of the time; the fact that he gets an exorbitant salary despite being AWOL most of the time; and the air of something that he has about him that naturally predisposes you to hate him. Once, for instance, I was playing the piano in abandon (as much as I could play, of course), and the living room door opened, and he walked in without invitation, oblivious of the fact that such an act would inevitably beg the question, “Shouldn’t you be working?” I didn’t condescend to notice him at first, but there came a time when his presence was too obvious to ignore. He had an ingratiating smile on his face that for some reason seemed to stimulate reverse peristalsis in my gullet. I asked him what he wanted, and I think I might have sounded a bit more inhospitable than I’d originally intended, but all the same, I didn’t regret it. He complimented my playing, and I accepted the compliment with a dignified nod and a cold “Thanks.” Apparently he was expecting me to go on playing, because he actually said, “Could you play me one note, please?” I refrained from striking a key defiantly and saying, “There. That was a note. Now could you please leave?” That would have been rude, but it would have given me immense satisfaction anyway. I played a random Grade 1 piece (one of the few pieces that I knew completely), made sure that my manner indicated my unwillingness to play anything else, stared him in the eye, willing him to leave the room, ignored the compliments he spewed, and resumed playing once he was safely gone. He did the same thing another time. Can you imagine the audacity?

It was a couple of years ago, I think, that he materialized out of nowhere when I was playing basketball and began smilingly staring at the basket. I continued playing, of course, but your aim is never the same if you know someone’s watching your every movement closely – especially someone who doesn’t know jack about what you’re doing and is very likely to express his obvious curiosity in the form of a stupid question at any point. And so after missing around ten consecutive shots I decided not to make a further fool out of myself in front of the Fool, and asked him what he wanted. Well, he did ask me a question: “Can I try?” I should have asked him – yeah – why he wasn’t working, and even if he had finished, why he still lingered, imposing himself on people. But being the good-natured, benevolent guy that I was, I gave him the basketball and watched him try repeatedly (and in vain) to score a basket. I guess it was satisfying enough watching how ridiculously he was throwing the ball, but still. This continued routinely for about another week or so, at the end of which I decided to tell him that I wanted to play on my own. Well, of course, after being told so unequivocally that his presence was not desired, only a fool would have come again the next day. I mean, he was a fool, of course, but he didn’t show up – possibly because my interest the sport (and therefore his) began to wane. Another example of his audacity.

Now let’s see how it was that he managed to get into my grandfather’s good books. (My grandfather’s a pretty imperious personality, and since the physiotherapist and nurses are for his wife anyway, he tends to decide who stays and who doesn’t.) My grandfather’s an old man (87 years old as of now), and at his age people naturally become idiosyncratic. He has several idiosyncrasies, of which one is his obsession with the alarm in the cell phone that my uncle gave him a few years ago. There are three different alarm settings in the phone, and my grandfather needs each to ring at a different time. I don’t know if it’s a pronounced obsession with knowing what time it is exactly, or a reminder that he’s awake and not drifting steadily into the afterlife, but that’s not the point right now. The point is that this “doctor” assigned himself the task of setting and resetting these three alarms every single day. Of course my grandfather’s happy with him and everything, and that means that Taj gets to stay. It was annoying, to say the least. I resigned myself to all kinds of violent thoughts that we don’t need to go into at this point. Suffice it to say that if my thoughts ever came true, Taj would have indubitably become the most miserable person on the planet.

Now to get to the point. You’re probably wondering why I’m wasting an entire entry on a physiotherapist, and a useless, moronic one at that. You see, he was replaced a few weeks ago by someone a lot better (at least from what we can see right now) and who has managed to significantly cure my grandmother of the backaches and the stiffness in her paralyzed limbs. He has incessantly been trying to contact my dad (even after my mom told him that it was entirely his fault that my grandmother had ended up like that in the first place, and none of it would have ever happened if she had a good physiotherapist) in an attempt to get himself exonerated from the blame placed on him by denying the charges. (Charges?) He sent my dad an email saying that he wanted to meet him to talk about this, and he didn’t want his “name to get spoild.” The typo was intentional. I was expecting my dad to reply mordantly, but he didn’t, so I got mad, and that brings us here.

On a final note, I sincerely hope “Dr.” Taj gets nowhere in life. I wish him all the worst, and if he’s reading this (that is, if he can, with an IQ like his), to tell him how much everyone hates him, and how unwelcome he is at our house. That aside, I hope he loses the miserable job he as at that hospital whose name I don’t remember. And I wonder if it would be too much to hope for him to flush himself down the toilet and get stuck in the city drains forever.