6. Dr. Amiruddin

to have a crush, Aditi, is to submit to the truth that man deliberately seeks out sufferance. And, well, sex

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Dr. Amiruddin's dusty lawn and bright orange house (less house and more shack, really) stuck out wildly in the row of neat houses with neat picket fences and neatly planted flowerbeds. A pentagon-shaped garage constructed of pine wood and a tin roof stood at an odd angle on one side of the lawn, inside which was a car nobody had ever seen being driven in. Half a helmet and a pile of misshapen wood lay haphazardly on the other side. Beside the house, two ash trees stood forlornly, shrivelled but tall, a hammock dangling between them.

Frowning, I halted at the gate, because the gate wasn't there. Immediately afterwards, I noticed it hovering in the air a few metres away. I jumped in surprise.

Skeptical, I walked over to it and gingerly poked the rusty gate hovering a foot above my height, but it didn't so much as wobble. I found a thin, horribly uneven translucent stick of glue supporting it from the bottom, stuck to a single blade of grass that poked out bravely from the dirt in the barren yard.

Shaking my head lightly, I walked over to the porch. The porch itself was not ordinary, either. From the roof of the one-storied house, a slide painted in neon green descended onto it and it was cushioned with brown puffs of coconut husk to avoid injuries from skidding off the slide.

I rapped my knuckles on the bright blue door twice. When no response was heard, I twisted the knob and peered inside. As usual, the room was stuffed with an array of peculiar objects (a half-destroyed harmonium, large tubs of god-knows-what, a few bales of hay, several piles of books threatening to topple over, a hammock tied to the window grill and a table leg, etc.). The only clean section of this room was what had originally been a kitchen counter but had now been converted to a lab.

When I, reluctant to walk over to him lest I knocked something over, piped up with a 'hi, Doc', Dr. Amiruddin looked up from behind the flasks and test tubes filled to various depths with lavender fluids.

Putting his safety goggles and gloves aside, Doc made his way over to me with half a smile. He must've returned from the hospital, because his baby pink shirt, having been rolled up to his elbows, was crisp and pressed, and he was wearing formal trousers instead of the usual baggy tee and sweatpants. His carefully combed black hair had silvered above his ears, and even though Doc's skin was beginning to slacken from his sharp features with age, I knew that Bapi was jealous of his tall firm figure.

"How's life, Aditi?" He kissed the tip of my forehead, and before I could answer, he ushered me out. "Come on outside, let's have a cup of tea."

Dr. Amiruddin and I had the kind of relationship where he treated me as an equal in emotional maturity, and I in return filled him in on every bit of Edelweiss gossip I knew. We bonded over Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Ross' 'WE WERE ON A BREAK', and the general irrationality of other teens and adults. And I used to have a bit of a crush on him until very recently. It made my friends call me demented, but it was really hard not to - he was amazingly cool. He knew it, and he wasn't a bitch about it. Sometimes, he said with Shakespearean wisdom, "To have a crush, Aditi, is to submit to the truth that man deliberately seeks out sufferance. And, well, sex."

Spotting the gate again as we stepped outside, I asked, "What's with the gate?"

Doc, busy with diligently lighting the small kerosene stove outside with a lighter, glanced at the gate once before returning to the burner. "Oh, I, uh, wrenched it open with the wire-cutter thing."

"No, I mean," I laughed lightly, making my way over to the hammock. Doc loves hammocks. There used to be more of them all around the lawn, but he'd chopped the trees down once for some weird experiment. "Why's it floating?"

"Oh, that. Behold my latest invention — Super Strong Nearly Invisible Adhesive, Suh-suh-nya. Don't judge." Doc chuckled, getting up from the stove, where a steel kettle was now perched.

"What even?"I laughed again, glad that I'd decided to come over. My phone pinged with a text and I pulled it out from the pocket of my denims to find Ever's number on the screen.

-Hey, you alright yet?

I quickly typed in the reply.

-I already told you last night, I'm fine

-Chill, mah dude

My legs dangling from the hammock, I invited Doc to sit next to me.  We peacefully sipped on the tea as the evening light reflected off it in the china cups, giving it a beautiful pale yellow hue. "Hey Doc, weren't you supposed to ask out that guy from work?"

He smiled sheepishly as he put the cup to his lips. "I was, wasn't I? Because he absolutely radiates rainbow vibes. But apparently he told Dr. Winchester that he hates gay people," Doc shrugged, his smile dissolving into solemnity.

"Aw, that sucks. But as Jake Peralta said, all homophobes are secretly gay," I comforted, squeezing his free hand. Doc grinned at the reference, displaying his perfectly aligned teeth.

"You know something, Aditi? There's this weird thing. You know opium poppies?"

"Flowers that make you high, that's cool as fuck," I said, lifting the corner of my lips in appreciation, and Doc gave me a pointed look. I rolled my eyes in return. "You can't handle curse words but tell little girls, aka me, that you have a schoolgirl crush on their father?"

"You're never gonna let me live that down, are you?" He stated drily, making me grin more widely in return. I wondered how much longer I'd be able to keep the secret from Bapi.

"You were saying something about poppies?" I probed, finishing off the tea and placing the cup on the ground.

"Oh, yes. So, I went on a walk, last night, and I found a few poppy flowers in the poppy fields out at the edge of the town," he said, the usual playfulness in him mitigated.

"You're drunk, aren't you?"

He shook his head, chuckling. "No, you don't understand! I saw opium poppies."

"But—  isn't that banned?" It was in the TV a few summers back. After news spread that the opium was being smuggled from Edelweiss, the government banned opium poppy farming here. Some families decided to suck it and cultivate California poppies instead, which somehow grew remarkably in Edelweiss' climate.

"Exactly. But there were very few of them. What if someone's growing them, somewhere close?"

"Wicked," I whispered absent-mindedly. "Poppy? Nicotine, heroine, morphine?"

"Yes, Camila Cabello. And what's more, this is not even the season for poppies to bloom," Doc stated with a hint of conspiracy in his voice.

"Really? But then, what are you suggesting?"

Doc's voice dramatically dropped to a whisper, "I'm suggesting...genetically modified opium poppies."

"Wouldn't you need a lab for that, though?" I asked thoughtfully, scratching my knee, where a mosquito had just bitten. There were a lot of mosquitoes on Doc's land.

"The nearest lab with the required technology is in London, and even then, you'd need permission to use those facilities. I don't know, Aditi. Something awfully wrong is going on in here."

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