Like It Happened Yesterday (3 page)

If there was anything that I was afraid of as a child, it was the hospital in our town. The hospital building was the biggest structure of brick and concrete in Burla—a light pink colour, and surrounded by tall green deodars and gulmohar trees, with seasonal orange flowers in them. A never-ending row of bicycles and motorcycles would make a serpentine line in the shade of the trees.

Every time I crossed that building, I used to feel a chill run down my spine. From the outside, everything was just so quiet and normal. But only the people who would have walked into it would know about what happened inside. I had walked into it a couple of times.

I was made to do so, against my will, by my father.

So I knew what went on inside.

My brother and I had not been given our inoculations at birth or in the few months afterwards, as was the usual practice. Our tragedy was that by the time our parents realized the importance of those injections, we were old enough to understand that injections hurt. Therefore, we used to run away from them.

But they were necessary.

So Dad, very cunningly, never told us when he was taking us to the hospital. He would make the two of us sit on his bicycle and tell us that we were going out for a nice ride. Tinku, as usual, would occupy the front bar while I would sit on the carrier, holding on to the front seat, on which Dad would be sitting. Only when he would miss the right turn towards the Pakka Market and continue to go straight, where the road led to nothing but the hospital, we would be clear of his ill intentions.

And then suddenly my brother and I would start squirming on our seats, knowing what was coming our way.

‘Daddy, assi kitthey jaa rahe hain?’ [Daddy, where are we going?] one of us would ask in a terrified tone, very much aware of the answer.

It was quite common for our father to not provide an answer to that one. So I would tell my brother, ‘Tinku, Daddy saanu injection lagvaan lae ke jaa rahe hai.’ [Tinku, Daddy is taking us for our injections.]

And then my brother would ask, ‘But Daddy had told us that we were going for a ride?’

So I would tell him, ‘Daddy ne jhutt boleya si.’ [Daddy had lied to us.]

‘Rinku Veer, Daddy ne jhutt kyun boleya si?’ [Why did Daddy lie?] he would ask again, trying to reconfirm the unbelievable.

The bicycle would keep moving. The two of us would keep talking. I always wanted to hold my brother’s hand then. He too would want to see me. But the two of us used to be separated by our father.

Right at the registration counter, our fear would take a mammoth shape. The clerk at the registration desk knew our father very well. He would smile and fill in half the details on his own. Our father would take two slips, one for each of us, and we would walk with him, holding his hands on either side—the two of us in our half-pants and T-shirts, ready to be poked!

As we walked up the staircase, I would realize how close we were to the terrible process. The peculiar smell of disinfectant would fill my nostrils and virtually choke me. The dark galleries of the hospital’s outdoor wards would terrorize me. The sight of the green curtains, the nurses in white and the number of sick people around would make me also feel sick. The whole atmosphere in that government hospital was that of a horror story.

That horror multiplied by several times the moment we would reach our ward. As usual, there would be a vampire-like nurse whose business it was to draw blood from people’s
fingers or arms, besides injecting poor little kids like us. We knew her well. She was acquainted with us too. We were a challenge for her. Many times, we had created a scene in front of her and the rest of the hospital, crying, screaming and running out without our pants!

Knowing our desperation to escape, Dad never forgot to lure us with items of our interest. Most of the times, he would tempt us by saying that he was going to treat us to Frooti—a popular mango drink—if only we agreed to take the shots.

We were madly in love with that three-rupee drink, which came packaged in a square green Tetra Pak. The front of the packet had an image of two ripe, yellow mangoes, with droplets of chilled water sliding down them. Dad knew very well how much we loved this particular drink. Insane as it might sound, our deep love for Frooti overcame our fear of the injections, and our father knew how to use that.

We would willingly lie down on our stomachs on the medical bed, baring our bottoms for the injections. In our minds, we would see the shopkeeper taking the chilled packets of Frooti out of his freezer, just for us. In the meantime, the nurse would take out the needle from the boiling water over the electric heater. Our dreams would progress, and we would now be holding our coveted drink in our hands. The nurse was constantly in the process of preparing the injection, pushing in the nozzle to flush the air
out of the syringe. And, as we imagined piercing the tiny round foil at the upper corner of the Tetra Pak with our pointed straws, the nurse would pierce our behinds with that injection.

The reality of that moment, for the next few seconds, would break our reverie and leave us in great pain. But, we knew, the key for us was to keep holding on to our thoughts, to relish them enough to be able to overlook reality. Soon it would all be over, yet we continued to lie there, exactly in the same posture, happily imagining sipping our Frootis, smiling! Two brothers, lying half-naked on their stomach, with their eyes glued to a daydream and smiles pasted on their faces!

And that’s when the nurse would shout, ‘Utth jaao. Ho gaya!’ [Get up. It’s done!]

In the next half an hour, we would make our dreams come true—with a bang. Our experience of drinking Frooti would not just end there at the shop. It was a ritual for us to bring that empty Tetra Pak back home with us. We would blow as much air as possible into it with the straw, place the inflated packet on the ground and ask everyone around us to watch as we jumped over our packets.
Bang!
—It would burst like a cracker. That would mark the completion of our Frooti adventure!

If, by any chance, the packet didn’t burst at the first go, we would not shy away from picking it up and going on and on, until it finally gave way.

One day, Dad took me for a visit to the hospital again. He told me that my injection course had been completed, and so I could relax.
But how could I relax—when I was being taken into that same building?
I was only convinced when he took a different staircase this time, leading to a different wing. I had never been to this part of the hospital earlier. Yet, I was sceptical. After all, injections weren’t the only thing I hated, it was the entire hospital.

Dad took me straight to the dental outdoor ward. There was already a long queue there. Dad handed over the ticket to the compounder, who placed it underneath the stack of tickets on the doctor’s table. He then placed a paperweight over the pile, and went back to relax on the stool by the door.

I wondered why we were there. I looked at the people around me. They all had their mouths closed, so I could not get to know what sort of dental problems they had. Which made me wonder—
What sort of a problem did I have?
Everything was fine with me. I had neither complained of any toothache, nor did I have foul breath.

So I asked my father, ‘Daddy, you have a problem with your teeth?’

‘Ki?’ [What?] he asked, absent-mindedly.

‘Tuhadde dand kharaab hain?’ [Something is wrong with your teeth?] I asked him in Punjabi this time.

He laughed and shook his head, ‘Nahi, nahi!’

‘Taa fer assi aithe kyun aaye, haan?’ I asked, wondering why we were there, in that case.

My father sat me down and told me the reason why we were in the dental ward. My front two milk teeth had fallen a few months back. The gap should ideally have been filled up by a pair of brand new, permanent teeth. My family kept expecting this act of nature to happen by itself. But nature had been probably too busy with other things, and forgotten me. So we needed a doctor, who could become nature’s proxy for me.

About half an hour later the doctor called my name: ‘Ravinder Singh!’

My father flung into action. He asked me to quickly put back on the rubber slippers that had fallen off my hanging feet. Together, we rushed inside the room. The room was
bright with sunrays, which flooded into it from a spacious window behind the dentist. There was a person sitting next to the dentist, with a black bag on his lap. Once in a while, he pulled out a medicine from it and kept talking about it to the dentist.

Dad told me that this man was a medical representative. I don’t know what exactly he wanted, but the dentist did not seem even a bit interested in his talk. The only time the dentist looked at him was when he placed a nice-looking pen set, a diary and a calendar on his table.

Looking at them, the dentist asked, ‘The same things again?’

The medical representative slipped his hand inside his bag again and brought out a plastic torch, which he placed on the table with a huge smile. Soon after this, he left. I wondered why he’d spent so much time explaining about the medicines when the real thing the dentist was interested in was that torch!

I looked around. The walls around me had neatly labelled diagrams of jaws and teeth. The words ‘incisor’, ‘canine’, ‘molar’ and ‘pre-molar’ in one of the pictures appeared familiar to me. I had read about them in my science class. I wanted to show my father my brilliance. So I tugged at his hand, wanting to tell him that we should tell the dentist that my incisors had failed to develop. But he ignored me and continued to explain the problem himself.

I continued to look at the decorated walls. There was a
poster of a beautiful lady with glittering white teeth. She had a tube of white-and-red striped toothpaste in her hand. She had a beautiful smile. Now, finally, the dentist looked at me, and asked me to open my mouth. I smiled, imitating the smile of the lady in the poster. The dentist, unimpressed, asked me to look towards him and not towards the poster.

‘Don’t smile, Ravinder, open your mouth. Like this—aaaaaaaa!’ he showed me how to do it. He looked funny.

I’d guessed the smile was a nice way to reveal my teeth, including the absent ones. However, this time I opened my mouth as wide as possible and sang, ‘Aaaaaaaaa!’ as loud as possible. I made my tongue dance to the sound.

As I held my mouth wide open for the longest time, my eyes seemed to shrink and my cheeks were stretched. I had invested a lot of energy in sustaining that show. Everyone around me was looking at me.

‘Okay, okay, this is enough,’ the dentist finally said.

I closed my mouth and turned my attention back to the smiling lady with the toothpaste. The dentist explained a few things to my father, which I completely ignored. He prescribed some medicine for me and asked us to visit him again after two days. The last thing I heard him saying was that the procedure would take an hour when we visited next, so I would have to miss a period or two at school.

I checked with Dad if he was going to do anything to me, and whether it was going to be painful. Dad shook his head—all I had to do was to take the medicines and come
and show the doctor my teeth, the way I’d done today. I realized that after two days I could legitimately bunk school!

For the next two days, each meal I ate was followed by a medicine.

On Day Three, I looked at myself in the mirror while brushing my teeth to see if, by any chance, the medicines had worked and I had new teeth.

Nothing! The inside of my mouth appeared, more or less, just as it had two days back.
Paagal dentist
, I told myself in the mirror.

At school, I proudly told all my friends that I would be there for only half the day. I was going to bunk the second half! Dad was there right on time to pick me up, and, as my classmates watched with envy, I quickly put my schoolbag on my shoulders and ran to Dad.

It all started exactly the way it had started the other day. We first got a slip made, took the other staircase and walked through the other wing and arrived at the outdoor dental ward, where a lot of people were waiting in the queue. I peeped inside the dentist’s room to see if the lady with that glittering smile was still there on the wall. Yep, she was right there!—still smiling and still holding that toothpaste.

‘Shall we start, then?’ the doctor looked at my father and asked, after they had discussed a few things.

Dad nodded, without looking at me.

The dentist called for a nurse and asked me to follow her. I looked at Dad’s face. His silence rang a warning bell in my
head. Though I followed the nurse, there were a lot of thoughts in my mind. She led me to a vacant cabin on the extreme right of the dental ward.

In no time, I found myself sitting on a long reclining chair. The nurse referred to it as the dentist’s chair, and adjusted it for me. She pulled a lever, it leant back. She pulled another one, and I was above the ground. I asked her what was on her mind. She didn’t say a single extra word.

Meanwhile, the dentist appeared. As he came closer to me, I watched him slip his hands into a pair of gloves. He then strapped on a mask. Watching that made me sure that something terrible was in store for me. I was trapped in that elevated reclining chair. I asked the dentist what was going to happen.

‘We are going to bring your teeth out of your gums,’ he replied.

‘What?!’ I asked. And, when no one answered, I asked again, ‘How?’

‘We will have to make a small cut in your gums.’

And he dropped a bomb into my open mouth.

‘You are going to cut my gums? No! Please! It’s going to hurt!’ I yelled.

The dentist and the nurse ignored me.

I asked them to call my father. They still ignored me.

The dentist and the nurse were now almost ready to dissect my tiny, pink gums. The nurse adjusted the overhead light so that it fell right on my face. It blurred my vision for
a second. The dentist picked up his tools and asked me to open my mouth.

I was petrified.

‘No, no! It’s going to hurt!’ I kept repeating. My legs trembled. I wanted to get off that reclining chair and escape, but it was impossible to get off.

The dentist said it wouldn’t hurt, because he was going to give me anaesthesia. As he mentioned that, he picked up a large injection. It had a long needle that would have been around four inches, if not five. He brandished that horrible thing right in front of my scared eyes.

I froze. I couldn’t utter a single thing. I was staring at the injection.

‘Daddyyyyyyyy!’ I cried out. No, I screamed!

It was probably the loudest and the longest scream of my entire life. I’m quite sure it could be heard much beyond that small cabin, the dental ward, travelling down the staircase right into the parking lot. In its long journey, my scream must have announced my panic to almost everyone present in that hospital, including my father.

In no time, Dad came running into the cabin. He looked at the dentist and the nurse. They had left whatever they had been holding so far. Their hands were on their ears. It was all only too clear.

The dentist looked at my father and didn’t feel the need to say anything. My father apologized on my behalf. I looked at my father and begged him to take me away. He patted my
back and told me that it was important that I allow the dentist to operate on my mouth. He explained that if this was not done, I would be left toothless for the rest of my life.

‘I am fine with that! I don’t want this! Please, Daddy!’ I had begun to cry.

‘You won’t even get to know. It won’t hurt at all after you take this anaesthesia,’ the dentist pitched in.

It took me a minute to frame my answer. ‘Oh God! How dumb! This anaesthesia injection itself is going to hurt, na!’

The nurse smiled. The dentist looked angrily at her.

The dentist turned to Dad and announced, ‘If you can’t convince him now, you will have to bring him next week, as I have other cases to look after.’

I thought of telling him to postpone it. But, right then, Dad recalled that next week he would be out of station. So the operation had to be done that day itself.

Half an hour later, with me on that dentist’s chair, our negotiations and peace talks had failed. The outcome of this failure was simple. We were at war!

United, they stood. Alone, I sat.

Dad asked the dentist to proceed with my operation. The dentist again picked up his syringe and filled it. I took up my attacking position. The moment the dentist came close to me, I punched into the air between us, narrowly missing the injection. Dad shouted at me and asked the nurse to pin down one of my arms. He then grabbed my other arm.

The goddamn chair didn’t even allow me to jump off!

I wildly paddled my legs in the air. A few cotton balls, along with a few dental instruments, fell over the big arm of the chair. And I screamed my lungs out. It was not only difficult, but almost impossible, for the dentist to inject me. He kept shouting that if I didn’t stop, my struggling might end up in the needle breaking and getting stuck somewhere inside my gum. But that didn’t bother me. I screamed out louder in response. We were caught in a tussle. It was three versus one—the little me, to be precise.

The three of them were shouting too, telling each other what to do.

Dad then asked the nurse to pin down both my hands. He twisted my arms and brought my hands together, behind the back of the chair, and asked the nurse to hold them down in that position. He then went to the other side of the reclining chair, to hold down my legs. He sat on my knees and weighed down my thighs. My legs were now in his full control.

I gathered up all my energy and continued to protest. The tight grip of the nurse had almost stopped the blood circulation in my wrists. I was now sweating. I felt suffocated—but I didn’t give up. My eyes had grown big and red. But my idea was not to settle down, and keep continuing my fight. But in no time, I was exhausted. I was breathing heavily. The three of them knew this. They could see that, every moment, I was getting a little more tired. When my revolt was reduced to intermittent screams, the dentist came closer to me.

My father and the nurse continued to hold me tight. The dentist told them that he was finally going to inject me. I collected all my leftover energy and, now, instead of moving my body, I started shaking my head left and right.

The dentist was now extremely irritated. So was my father. The nurse kept shouting, just out of my line of sight, ‘Kya kar rahe ho, beta! Aise mat karo.’ [What are you doing, son! Don’t act like this.]

The dentist went out for a moment and brought his compounder with him. Mercilessly, he commanded the compounder to hold my head and restrain any sort of movement. He also instructed him to hold my face in such a way that my jaws would remain wide apart. So this was now four versus one.

The compounder attempted to do what he was told. But the moment his hands crawled on to my jaw, I bit him hard. His hands tasted of Dettol, the disinfectant. I immediately spat out, and the spit landed on the dentist’s apron. The compounder yelled in pain. The dentist shrieked out of frustration. Dad continued to shout at me. The nurse kept saying, ‘Beta, beta …’

After a half-an-hour-long battle, my body gave up. I wanted air to breathe, a lot of it. I had fought like a braveheart. But I was now exhausted and had resigned myself to fate. I closed my eyes when I saw the syringe inches away from me. I felt the tears from my eyes and the sweat on my face mingling together.

The next thing I felt was an intense pain that surged up from my gums to somewhere behind my nose. I could feel the dentist emptying his syringe somewhere inside the tissues and nerves behind my nostrils. There was pin-drop silence in the cabin. After taking the injection out of my mouth, the doctor wrapped a plastic body cover around me.

I remained calm. Two streams of tears rolled down my cheeks.

The anaesthesia was quick in its work. I could soon feel a heaviness in my gums. I opened my eyes and looked at Dad. He told me it was all fine. I looked at his hands. They were still pinning down my thighs. I looked back into his eyes. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to say anything.

I closed my wet eyes and remained calm for the rest of the procedure.