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It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was unmistakably the end of time as we knew it. The twentieth century was down to its final ten breaths, its last flickering fax transmissions, and its remaining struts down the catwalk of history before the new millennium arrived with bleached tips, bug paranoia, and the eerie promise of global reinvention. 

In Silicon Valley, sleep-deprived engineers were building firewalls with one hand and praying to their pagers with the other. In London, banks rehearsed doomsday drills with the poise of a Shakespearean finale. In Tokyo, telecom ads squashed a cartoon Y2K Bug while Greek villagers prayed over livestock to outwit the glitch. China clutched paper bank slips like talismans, and an Australian bunker boasted a moat against digital doom. In South Africa, rumors flew of healers burning herbs to banish the bug. Prince’s 1999 blared anew, and Nostradamus fans swore his fiery quatrains foresaw it all. Even Jennifer Lopez had released a prophetic anthem, crooning from a glittering rooftop, Waiting for Tonight, as if she too wasn’t sure tomorrow would show up.

The Y2K bug wasn’t born out of malice but frugality. It was the human urge to save two digits now and pay for it with global hysteria later. No, it wasn’t a virus. It was time compression. A planet squashing its calendars to save memory, only to wake up one December wondering if 1900 would return like an unpaid loan. Still, Y2K became a reckoning. A fever dream where time itself might misfire and delete its own existence. If you knew Java, you were handed a plane ticket to America. If you didn’t, you were handed a sachet of turmeric and advised to attend a special archana at the temple on Thursday morning.

The world was split between those coding the future and those barricading themselves from it. Newspapers in America screamed in all caps about the impending collapse of civilization. Western psychics warned of a cosmic misalignment of Mars and mainframes. 

Closer to home, Tamil astrologers were predicting a fine year for Mesha Rasi, as though Rahu and Ketu had been fully briefed on timestamp overflows. Somewhere in that peculiar Indian limbo where the end of the world arrived like an afternoon train from Arakkonam, late, overfull, and still running, Madras was waking up to Thirupaavai recitals, to cow’s milk bubbling on gas stoves, to margazhi mornings perfumed by edible camphor and akkaravadisal. The Music Academy stage smelt of brass bells, printed schedules, and the unspoken rivalry between Aruna Sairam and Sudha Ragunathan. Saravana Bhavan had just introduced the revolutionary 14-idli sambar set, a culinary innovation so indulgent it made the newspaper. And in the flickering projector glow of Madras’ theatres, Sethu, a low-budget tragedy with zero expectations, had begun its slow, inevitable ascent into cult immortality. Vikram, the actor who had hitherto existed somewhere between B-grade movie and non-existence, was now the poster boy of every bus stop. Nobody knew it yet, but the next decade of Tamil cinema had just been kickstarted by a man named Chiyaan, smashing his head into a rock. That is, if there was another decade left. If the world didn’t end, Vikram might even win a National Award for it.

And in the middle of this cosmic stage, beneath the comets of paranoia and the fireworks of anticipation, was him.

He was supposed to be coding. He was, unquestionably and delusionally, in theory, the very backbone of India’s contribution to global millennial survival. He was not attending Y2K readiness summits. He was not saving civilization from semicolon-induced system failures. He was, instead, quietly panicking in a rented house in KK Nagar, Madras, over a sudden, sharp, unrelenting pain in the region known to medicine as the posterior and to poetry as the place the sun doesn’t shine.

While the world wondered whether satellites would fall and nuclear warheads would detonate at midnight, he was more concerned with whether he would ever sit on a bus again without wincing. His apocalypse had already arrived. It wore no cape, carried no laptop, and gave no press conference. It came silently, intimately, deep in the bowels of his being.

It was the final countdown, yes. But not just for mankind. It was literally the last days of the twentieth century. And the last days of this twentieth century man.

It had started as an insignificant discomfort, a minor irritation that any self-respecting 23-year-old would choose to ignore. The body, after all, was an invincible machine at that age, a self-healing, indestructible miracle engineered to withstand bad college canteen food, dubious street-side bajjis, and a reckless adolescence fueled by Pepsi, Maggi noodles, and the mistaken belief that youth was permanent. Surely, this too would pass. Except it didn’t.

On the third day, there was blood. Bright, unmistakable, catastrophic red swirled in the toilet bowl like the opening credits of a Hitchcock thriller. He froze. He stared. Time didn’t just pause. It backed away, quietly. He stood motionless, pants around ankles, as the fluorescent light above hummed with municipal indifference. It wasn’t just pain now. It was betrayal. Proof that his trusted body, the once-reliable chassis of youth, had turned against him. That he was no longer invincible. Not even slightly. Somewhere a crow cawed. A pressure cooker hissed next door. Life carried on, smugly, while his gut twisted with ancient dread. He imagined hospital beds, whispered diagnoses, missed paychecks, and eventually, funeral pyres lit by distant cousins who would say, “He was a quiet boy. Mostly sat.”

The only thing more terrifying than seeing blood in the toilet was asking Google about it. At the time, Google was still a fledgling oracle. It was unreliable, unsympathetic, and seemingly designed to confirm that any symptom you had was terminal. Every search led to one of three inevitable conclusions:

A. You are definitely dying.

B. You were already dying before you Googled this.

C. You should have gone to the doctor six months ago.

“This was it,” he thought. This was how it started. Not with fever, not with chest pain, but with a red swirl and a question mark. He did the only rational thing a terrified man could do in 1999. He waited for it to go away. It did not. By the fourth day, his faith in miracles had been thoroughly shattered. He had to do something.

He did not know it yet, but inside him and outside in the wider world, a parallel drama was unfolding. Two crises, one cosmological and the other colorectal, danced on a shared timeline. One was discussed in White House briefings, the other in hushed tones near bathroom doors. Y2K and the you-too-kakkaa problem. What were they if not siblings born of poor planning and ignored warnings? He began to suspect that both disasters, the global and the deeply personal, were about to peak at the same time.

There was, of course, a small issue: work. It was his second job, and he had been there for just a few months. Taking leave was a delicate matter, fraught with the fear of being seen as unreliable. How exactly does one phrase such a request? “Mam, I need a day off.” Too vague. Suspicious. “Mam, I have a health issue.” Dangerous. IT managers were naturally paranoid. Any hint of illness, and suddenly you were marked as fragile, dispensable the human equivalent of buggy code. No, there was only one person who could solve this crisis his mother.

It was Sunday afternoon, and she was watching her Sun TV serial, an emotionally exhausting saga where a long-suffering daughter-in-law was accused of something absurd, probably stealing her mother-in-law’s betel leaves. He hesitated. One does not casually interrupt a Tamil mother during Sun TV time. “Amma,” he ventured cautiously. A grunt. “Amma, listen.” A sigh. The serial had gone into an ad break. The gods had granted him a small window. “I… uh… there’s blood in the toilet.”

She did not even blink. She had seen too much. This was a woman who had navigated the complex terrain of raising a wheezing child, applying Vicks VapoRub in industrial quantities, surviving the Chicken Pox Epidemic of ’87, and the infamous fall from a Belgian grill gate of ’90. Compared to that, this was an errand. She didn’t ask what kind of blood, or how much, or whether it had stopped. She simply said, “We’ll go to the doctor.” And so a proctologist was found.

A certain Dr. Ravi Some-Kumar in T Nagar. Or was it Raj Some-Kumar? Maybe even Kumar Some-Kumar? It didn’t matter. The middle name was always forgotten, like the supporting actor in a bad film. He was simply Some-Kumar, a name as vague as his own understanding of what was happening to his body. The clinic was behind Holy Angels Convent school, tucked away in a quiet residential lane. This was surprising because T Nagar was not known for quiet residential lanes. No. For all practical purposes, T Nagar was just Pondy Bazaar.

It was where the world came to shop, a place where sidewalks did not exist because they were occupied by commerce vendors selling sticker pottu, plastic bangles, fake Nike shoes, fake Adidas shoes, fake Puma shoes, and fake Lacoste T-shirts that were “imported” but somehow cost only a hundred rupees. Yet here, nestled behind the madness, was Some-Kumar’s clinic. The auto ride there was a journey of pain. Sitting in an auto, on a good day, was an exercise in core strength. Sitting in an auto with a bottom problem was torture. Every pothole, every sudden brake, every unexpected swerve was a fresh level of agony.

The auto driver, blissfully unaware, was conducting a one-man political debate with himself. “Amma should enter central politics, sir. Country needs it. Superpower it will become, sir.” He was in no mood to debate. He sat there, gripping the side handle, attempting to hover slightly above the seat, caught in the impossible physics of not-quite-sitting, not-quite-standing. The clinic, when they finally arrived, was a house-turned-hospital. A home that had been repurposed for medical emergencies. The waiting room smelled faintly of ginger tea and existential dread.

The receptionist was a woman of indeterminate age with the air of someone who had seen everything and judged all of it. She had the sharp, calculating look of a person who could extract unnecessary personal details from even the most tight-lipped visitors. “You first time here?” she asked, her pen poised above the appointment register. “Yes,” he mumbled, trying to avoid eye contact. “Where are you working?” “IT,” he replied, regretting it instantly. “Ah, IT people. Always stomach problem, gastric problem. Sitting too much, no?” “Uh… not really.” “Too much tea? Or skipping breakfast? That’s what it is. You young boys, no discipline.”

He smiled weakly, desperate to end the conversation. But she wasn’t done. “So what’s the problem?” she asked casually, flipping through papers as if she were asking about the weather. “Oh… just routine check-up.” His voice trailed off. She gave him a look. A long, knowing look. The kind that suggested she had seen a hundred “routine check-ups” walk in and limp out. Eventually, she waved him in.

Dr. Some-Kumar was affable. Mild-mannered. Hummed a tune from Dil Se as he scribbled something in a notebook. His coat was faintly stained with iodine. His stethoscope hung like an afterthought. “Lie down,” he said, already donning gloves. The humiliation was total. Just as he lowered himself onto the table, the receptionist walked in, uninvited but clearly summoned by telepathy. “Hold this light,” the doctor instructed. She did. She peered. He prayed for lightning to strike the clinic.

After what felt like a geological era, Some-Kumar stepped back, removed the gloves with grim finality, and announced: “It could be hemorrhoids. Or it could be piles.”

There was a pause. Then came the kicker.

“Surgery,” he said. Pause. “Soon.”

When he walked back to the front desk to settle the bill, she was waiting. “Ten thousand rupees for surgery,” she said, her face a masterclass in neutrality. He couldn’t meet her gaze. She had no such qualms. “And one thousand advance,” she added, flipping through receipts with the same fingers that had, moments ago, held a light over his most private embarrassment. His mother glanced at him. He glanced at his mother. They paid. And as they stepped out, one burning thought formed in his mind: Why was he about to get cut open without a second opinion?

It was his maternal uncle who floated the idea, as casually as one might recommend a new tea stall. “Why don’t you go check with Dr. Bhaskar Acharya?” Ah, Bhaskar Acharya, a name that didn’t just arrive. It echoed, ricocheting off the dusty corridors of memory, dragging with it an entire history wrapped in layers of faded medical charts, and that distinct smell of hospital corridors: part disinfectant, part despair.

Bhaskar Acharya wasn’t just any doctor. He was the son of Dr. Acharya Senior, the patriarchal physician whose name had been etched into the family’s collective medical history like a watermark, subtle, permanent, and impossible to ignore. And just like that, his mind spiraled backward, into the fabric of old Madras.

Dr. Acharya Senior’s clinic wasn’t merely a building. It was an institution, a living, breathing organism nestled opposite the sprawling Purasawalkam tank, a structure so intertwined with the city’s pulse that you’d think it had been there since the Chola dynasty. To reach this bastion of healing, one had to ascend a narrow staircase that existed not for convenience, but as a test of character, an act of pilgrimage before the ritual of diagnosis.

Inside, the clinic was less of a waiting room and more of an anthology of ailments. This was early ’80s Madras, and the waiting area was a microcosm of human suffering and stubbornness. 

Shirtless men who had been dragged in after snake bites, their arms tied with cloth as makeshift tourniquets. Elderly women in faded saris fanned themselves furiously, their foreheads glistening with beads of sweat and kungumam. A man perched precariously on the hood of an Ambassador car outside because chairs were for the weak. Children with snotty noses wailed in chorus, competing with the distant honking symphony of Purasawalkam High Road traffic.

Presiding over the controlled chaos was Acharya Senior himself. Tall, lean, and perpetually upright, with a slight forward tilt, as if always bracing for life’s next crisis. His shoes shone in quiet defiance of Madras dust, his trousers were ironed sharp enough to slice bread, and his full-sleeved white shirt was rolled up exactly three folds. No more, no less. Even sleeves followed orders.

But it was the glasses that made him unforgettable. Thick, black, rectangular frames that weren’t just lenses but judgment amplifiers, magnifying both his vision and his quiet disapproval of poor diets, late-night television, and the general foolishness of mankind. He moved quickly, cutting through the waiting room like a man late to an appointment only he knew existed. His walk, a slightly forward-leaning glide, could have made even Steve Jobs pause mid-stride and reconsider posture. The Acharya Walk, as he liked to call it in his mind, was a family heirloom.

And with that walk came a legacy, a philosophy of medicine passed down like family jewellery. The tonic trinity. No matter the ailment—fever, headache, a cough that could dislodge ceiling tiles, or vague metaphysical complaints like sulphur forming in the chest or vaayu entering the knee, the prescription was always the same. Three mysterious liquids, poured with ceremonial gravity into unlabelled glass bottles from unmarked jars.

One, deep red, the colour of Rasna gone rogue. Two, murky blue, suspiciously like diluted fountain pen ink. And three, a terrifying cream-ish sludge, somewhere between expired coconut chutney and cement water, the kind of hue that made you question your will to live. Each tonic promised miraculous recovery, provided you could survive the taste. The true genius, of course, lay in never knowing what was in them. They worked, or they didn’t. But the ritual worked. That was the point. It was medicine by mystique, less science and more surrender. And somehow, it worked. People got better. Or at least they stopped complaining. Which, in Indian healthcare, is basically a full recovery.

Because years later, in the more sterile, modern corridors of his son Dr. Bhaskar Acharya’s clinic, he would see it again. That same forward tilt, the same sense of urgency balanced with casual indifference. Bhaskar was taller, with a faint stoop at the upper back not quite a hunch, but a subtle architectural flaw gifted by either genetics or the weight of medical degrees. And Bhaskar wasn’t just some distant family doctor. No. He had history. Personal history.

At the age of five, he had already been on Bhaskar’s operating table. It was a simple ear procedure, the kind doctors forget by lunch. But to a frightened child, it felt like open-heart surgery.

He remembered the sterile brightness of the surgical room, the metallic gleam of unfamiliar instruments, and the ominous object they placed over his face, a sieve-like contraption, the kind his aunt used to sift flour before making chapatis. Except this wasn’t for flour. This was for chloroform.

“Amma! Ammamma! Amma! Ammamma!” he had cried, his voice trailing into unconsciousness like a radio signal fading into static.

When he woke up, groggy and confused, he heard the tale that would become family folklore. His maternal grandmother, Ammamma, had spent the entire surgery knocking on the operating room door, demanding updates withthe persistence of a LIC agent. It was less a medical procedure and more a joint operation between surgeons and an emotionally overwrought grandmother trying to breach sterile protocol. But Bhaskar’s medical portfolio didn’t end there.

There was his uncle, the proud owner of a hernia that had been operated on three times. By none other than Bhaskar himself. Whether this was a testament to the hernia’s resilience or Bhaskar’s optimism remained an unsolved medical mystery. And then there was the time he broke his arm in ninth grade. They had rushed to Dr. Bhaskar’s clinic in Kilpauk, only to find the nurse asleep in the middle of the room, snoring softly like a background soundtrack to his fractured dignity. “Excuse me… I think my hand is broken.” The nurse had blinked, yawned, and said, without missing a beat, “Oh, the doctor doesn’t handle fractures here. You’ll have to go somewhere else.” Since that day, he had never returned. Until now.

But this time, he decided not to take his mother. This wasn’t the kind of humiliation that required parental supervision. Instead, he enlisted Senthil, college mate, confidant, and owner of a Suzuki Samurai that had seen better days. “Machi, I’m ready. Let’s go.”

The Suzuki Samurai arrived with the mechanical enthusiasm of a dying mosquito. Riding pillion with a backside problem was a fresh circle of hell. Every pothole felt like an act of violence, every speed bump a personal vendetta. He held on with his teeth clenched as Senthil weaved through traffic with the casual elegance of a man who had never known rectal fear. But for him, the pain had become a kind of private opera, sharp, rhythmic, and inescapable. With every bounce of the shock absorber, he imagined nerve endings firing distress signals, and an internal mutiny he could neither see nor soothe. He still didn’t know what it was, only that it lurked back there with the silent menace of a bomb not yet triggered.

It was December 31st. The last day. The final sunrise of a century that had seen world wars, moon landings, and Sony Walkman. But here he was, riding pillion on a trembling Suzuki Samurai, wincing at every pothole, haunted not by the collapse of civilization but by the quiet revolt inside his own colon. While Americans stockpiled batteries and Canadians whispered prayers to their modems, India smirked politely. Bureaucrats shrugged, “Not our problem. We never upgraded anyway.” Our servers ran on jugaad and incense. Our banks used punch cards. And on Raj TV, the morning astrologers continued unfazed. Mesha Rasi, they assured us, was headed for a golden year, particularly in health, wealth, and unspecified rectal resilience.

The newspapers weren’t helping. “World Waits as Clocks Tickle Toward Chaos,” screamed The Hindu. “Pentagon Unplugs Coffee Machines as Precaution,” warned an American daily that probably meant it. “Village Recipes Lost in Software Backup Crisis,” claimed a Tamil magazine with alarming specificity. But it was The New York Times, urbane, grave, and tragically unaware of Madras that captured the moment best: “Midnight Nears. Nobody Knows Anything”. As the bike bumped forward through the Kilpauk evening, he clutched the side handle like a man trying to hold the world together. Senthil’s confidence steered them into the city’s underbelly while his own backside screamed from behind. You are not okay. You are absolutely, catastrophically not okay.

But Kilpauk was waiting. Kilpauk, that stubborn neighborhood, had refused to change. The roads were the same, the houses the same, the air thick with the familiar blend of nostalgia and dust. Dr. Bhaskar’s clinic, too, remained untouched by time, the broad house with its lazy ceiling fan, the cane chairs with their dignified creaks bearing the collective weight of countless anxious bottoms.

They waited. And then his name was called. Dr. Bhaskar Acharya hadn’t changed much: the faint stoop, the forward-tilted walk, the same no-nonsense demeanor, like a man perpetually two steps away from being late to something important. “Doctor, do you remember me? I used to be your patient years ago,” he asked, unsure whether this counted as a reunion or a confession. Bhaskar peered over his glasses, his expression somewhere between vague recognition and the polite indifference reserved for old acquaintances whose names you’ve forgotten. Unlike the mortifying ordeal with Some-Kumar, here he felt… comfortable. Maybe it was nostalgia. Maybe it was the fact that Bhaskar had already seen his insides, under brighter lights and more dramatic circumstances. Whatever it was, he spoke plainly, without preamble or pride. “Doctor, I want you to check it out.”

No mention of Some-Kumar. No tales of auto rides and existential dread. This was day one, as far as Bhaskar was concerned. The doctor rose, leading him to the familiar inspection room, its walls indifferent to human suffering. “Lie down,” Bhaskar instructed. So he did.

Bhaskar leaned in, adjusted his spectacles with the gravity of a man about to announce a Nobel Prize, and examined the area in question. There was a pause a thoughtful silence, not the ominous kind, but the kind that precedes a verdict you probably won’t like, delivered with the effortless confidence of someone who has seen far worse.

“Are you drinking enough water?” Bhaskar asked, his tone carrying the faint disapproval of a school principal inspecting an unfinished homework assignment. “Too much tea? Coffee? Ah, of course. You IT boys think hydration is for plants. Constipated, were you? Straining like it’s an Olympic event? That’s all it takes a little pressure, a small tear. A fissure.” He snapped off his gloves with the finality of a man who had seen enough. “Simple thing. I’ll make a small nick to relieve it, and you’ll be fine. This isn’t piles, not hemorrhoids just your backside protesting against bad life choices. A small fissure. I’ll make a tiny nick, slap on a bandage, and congratulations you’ll survive the millennium.”

A small fissure. Not piles. Not hemorrhoids. Not the catastrophic, organ-failing, surgery-requiring apocalypse that Some-Kumar had predicted. Just a cut. Bhaskar did exactly that. A small, efficient procedure, followed by antiseptic, a bandage, and a casual, “You’re good to go.” Just like that.

The medical saga that had consumed his mind, wrecked his sleep, and nearly drained his wallet was over in less time than it takes to boil an egg. There were no dramatic hospital admissions, no terrifying bills, and no Ammamma pounding on surgical theater doors. It ended with a quick, painless snip. Like trimming an overgrown fingernail. More intimate. With no bragging rights.

As he stepped out of the clinic, the December sun felt warmer. The air lighter. The world, less apocalyptic. Kilpauk looked exactly the same. Rickety autos rattled past. Elderly men in veshtis squatted like philosophers on street corners. The scent of roasted peanuts, wrapped in yesterday’s Dina Thanthi, floated upward like incense to no god in particular. The world hadn’t changed. But he had.

For ten days, he had lived beneath a medical doomsday clock, convinced that his backside was plotting a quiet, treacherous mutiny. Now, with Bhaskar’s offhand diagnosis and casual procedure, he realized that all that terror had sprung from an over-hydrated imagination and an under-hydrated colon. Perhaps that was life. One false alarm after another, followed by a sigh of relief and a smear of antiseptic.

Elsewhere, the clock struck midnight.

In Times Square, champagne sprayed in bursts of confetti-staged euphoria. In Paris, lovers kissed beneath binary fireworks painted across the Seine. In Tokyo, LED mascots danced on backup power. In Coimbatore, crackers exploded five minutes early, just to be safe. And in a modest house in KK Nagar, a man with gauze on his rear sat down gently for the first time in ten days and whispered, “Okay.”

The end of the world had failed to arrive.

And he too had survived. Bruised. Bandaged. Slightly violated. But intact. The crisis that had devoured his sleep, his spine, and his self-respect had resolved not with fanfare, but with Dettol and a plastic chair. No headlines. No helplines. Just a nick, a bill, and the quiet miracle of sitting without flinching. A modest epilogue to a tale told entirely between two cheeks.

And isn’t that just how it goes? We imagine our endings in operas and mushroom clouds. We expect hellfire, reckonings, and the undoing of logic and light. But more often, it’s a glitch. A sneeze. A missed call. A line of bad code. Or a red swirl in porcelain.

Sometimes, the apocalypse is not a bang. It is a fissure.

A fissure in the code.

A fissure in the plan.

A fissure in the butt.

And yet, we heal. We always do.

(to be continued…)