THE THERAPIST

THE END

On the day of submission, Ranveer made his way, rather sluggishly, into the Mr Kalyan's cabin.

"Make yourself comfortable first. Then let me know what outcome you arrived at"

"It's a complicated case. He is, sort of, a psychopath"

"A Psychopath?" MrKalyan cried.

"Not really. I was unable to arrive at any conclusion"

"No diagnosis! Do you need another week for this?"

👇The angry old man👇

"No. I am out of it. Give me some other work"

"Give you other work! Talk about ..........!" Mr Kalyan was in rage but contained himself immediately on sensing another presence in the room. "Chief" a husky voice said "My apology for being early, but see I was way too curious. Here sir, are my findings". As Ranveer recognized the voice, the world seemed to go upside down. It was the man Ranveer had come to despise and fear at the same time, the man none other than the one he had spent a week's therapy on.

The smiling gentleman handed a visibly anxious Mr Kalyan a bundle of papers, "This is the complete statement of the case. Ranveer Raghav, as you suspected earlier, suffers from psychosis. Aha what I see here, perhaps I come at the wrong time. Hello Mr Ranveer Raghav how are you; it's a pleasure to see you again. Thank you and good morning to you too. I will not take any more of your time gentlemen, carry on. I come only to hand over these papers and I hope that my hard work will meet its needful appreciation. Give me leave. And farewell to you too, sir" and he was gone.

Ranveer took time to chew on this. From the last few days, he'd been having strange intuitions that something was wrong with him. Many times in the middle of night or at the peak of the day, he would sit bewildered wondering whether he was dreaming or living. Now he felt it again. "Who referred me to you"?

"I don't take employees on reference"

"I am not talking about employees. I am talking about patients"

Mr Kalyan giggled," You take a madcap's words so seriously? I thought you were a qualified therapist"

"Tell me straight. What is my problem and who am I?"

"If you press so much" explained Mr Kaylan, "then be ready to know. You have made a correct diagnosis, indeed the man is a psychopath, and yes you were correct, he is way too complicated even for a psychopath. I had the same speculations when I worked on him, to a certain length he seemed a psychopath but his mannerism and other traits left me deeply confused. To ascertain my suspicion, I sent you to this man without letting you know his apparent diagnosis, in fact slightly misguiding you with narcissism and psychosis, but my well guided misguidance worked good enough."

"How can he be a psychopath? Psychopaths have no self-control while this person was well contained; many times he was empathetic and he showed remorse too".

👇How can he be a psychopath 👇

"That, my friend, is why I sit on the chair you can only hope to. It requires a psychologist of my stature to understand a person of superior intelligence; a person who could apply his knowledge of comparative psychology and human history to veil his own psychopathic behavior and fool the best of you.The Man, he said to me, is a sophisticated animal, and he uses the same principle to hide the wolf within him, he does it with such perfection that the wolf survives the onslaught of most people around here. The survival of the fittest, Charles Darwin had once said"

"Why did he come with these papers to you today?"

"Another masterstroke of my brain", announced the chief psychiatrist, "To understand people like him, the foremost thing to do is to take them into confidence. I did so by making him believe that I had seen sparks of great promise in him and thereafter entrusted him to take an appointment on my behalf. All the while you were counselling him; this man believed that he was counselling you; and so he came to me to hand over his findings which I am going to throw away in the bin once I get the present cleared. You know, Ranveer, I was so surprised at myself when I didn't diagnose him in my first attempt, but now I am relieved. I was correct, right from the beginning."

"He tortured me mentally"

"Not surprising, he is a psychopath sophisticated enough to understand the advantage of mind over muscle. However I am surprised at you; a good therapist shouldn't have a client torture him. I would never have allowed that."

"You are a bloody narcissist", cried the therapist, banging his fists on the table," Keep your good therapists for yourself. I am going". Flinging the case's remaining documents on the chief psychiatrist's face he stormed out of his room and never came back.

Now that years have passed and that Ranveer Raghav has earned a place among the city's best psychiatrists, he still wakes up at nights and sits for long hours trying to calculate the possibility of his life being a dream, or while at office he sometimes shuts his cabin door and broods over the comparability of balance sheets and family trees. And all these years he dared not watch Raman Raghav 2.0, for he has more phobias of movies on psychopaths than psychopaths themselves.