Dr Manju Mendis, a Sri Lankan living in Australia, comes through medical school with first class honours and is chosen to intern in the much vaunted St Ivanhoe Hospital. But right from the word go, the author leaves the reader in no doubt that this is no mere diary of hospital life.
Even as Manju deals with the rigours of an exacting job, he finds himself in the midst of a series of ill-timed misadventures – from a prolonged case of priapism, to the ‘murder’ of a well-heeled ‘sugardaddiphile’, to a sudden encounter with a foul-mouthed braggart. Worse, his personal life is on the verge of being wrecked, what with an overbearing mother determined to set him up with a prosperous Sri Lankan girl, a father who fails to understand his disconnect from his homeland’s culture, and a sister inclined to saddle him with her young son.
In the span of a year, Manju must learn to confront fraudulent specialists, self-important clients, and an imperious set of immigrant relatives. Equally, he must find time to sustain his fledgling relationships – with patients, colleagues, celebrities, and most of all, a girl with a troubled past.
Join Manju as he skedaddles through a year of madness and hilarity, in a story replete with slapstick humour, puns, and starling insight!
About the Author :
Sanjaya Senanayake is one of the millions of South Asians who was born outside the revered continent and brought up in the West. In keeping with this inauspicious occidental origin, Sanjaya has spent his life rebelling against all that is South Asian. Indeed, despite his conservative parents’ pleadings to become a movie star, watch football and marry a bikiniclad blonde, he thumbed his nose at South Asian convention: Sanjaya is now a doctor who loves cricket and is married to a girl named Dilukshi.
When he is not writing, Sanjaya is an infectious diseases specialist and Associate Professor of Medicine in Australia’s capital city, Canberra.
