Wayand, Western Ghats, Kerala. Fern. House. Cowboy guide. Fresh blood - tiger attack? Cardamom.
Sunday, May 10, 2009
A weekend trip
Begin in an airplane.
Familiar enough, but the plane in question has no air-conditioning. We have eaten sandwiches, quickly in a dark car, because the plane is an hour and a half late which means we are late and hungry. Dinner time has come and gone, just as the time for sleep will come and go and still we will not have slept. Because this is travel.
A decision is taken to fly the plane without air-conditioning. Repairing the air-conditioning would take another three and a half hours _ though it is said to be only a minor mechanical problem _ and who wants to wait three and a half hours? It’s not like you can just up and get another plane. Airplanes have commitments. They have schedules. There are not extra ones lying around. The captain doesn’t say the air-conditioning is broken. He says it is “degraded.”
Degraded is OK, though, because we will get water and icky lemon drinks and, soon enough, rise high into the stratosphere, where there air is thin and the molecules move slowly and there is no need for air-conditioning. We can just press our hands to the cold black windows and the world will give us exactly what we want.
What do we want?
We want to get lost.
We want peace.
We want tigers and leeches and stars and strange animal cries in the night. We want fires. We want to stand naked under waterfalls. We want phantasmagoric butterflies. We want to come upon a wounded guar. We want to find fresh blood, bright and bubbling on a dry leaf. We want to see what tiger scat looks like (thoroughly unimpressive). We want to hear the suffering call of the brain fever bird, so pained by his desire for love that he cries and cries and cries. We want to rub the shiny green pods of fresh cardamom between our fingers. We want to taste a bitter wild orange. We want to smell fresh crushed lemongrass and eat berries whose name we will never know. We want someone else to cook for us.
We want to go to the jungle.
For all of this we are willing to suffer some.
Not much, but a little. We will drive behind belching trucks and wait on clogged roads. We will turn into strange villages and ask one two three people which way we must go to find Mananithwadi and they will tell us left, you must go left, all the while waving their certain hands to the right.
Thus we will proceed, fearless and full of wrong confidence. We will drive for hours through dull landscapes, passing dense little towns and rubble and forgettable trees. We will ford ditches to piss in hot fields. Then we will return to our red Suzuki Swift and continue our slow battle with the universe. Time will stack up like plates, higher and higher until we are sure they will all come crashing down: five hours, six hours, seven hours, eight hours, nine hours.
And then we will find the man we are looking for. He is skinny. He wears a jacket even though the temperature is above 100 degrees. He wears a floppy hat that seems to tell us that even though he was born in these far hills he is not of them. He is not knit into the stern, protective fabric of fathers and mothers and wives and babies. He is a cowboy. He will get us liquor and grass and we will follow him around a sharp right turn from a small road to a smaller road cut into the red dirt of a mountain. And then he will vanish on his motorbike, jacket billowing, around tight corners. The trees will grow dense and tight around us.
We will pause at the fork in the road, and convince ourselves that we should go to the right, though we could just as easily turn left. And then we will crest a hill and we will find our cowboy, straddling his bike next to three other men, also straddling motorbikes, as they look out across the valley and point to a patch of trees where five wild elephants have just been feeding.
It will be so quiet.
Then we will proceed, pressing on past a gate where a dead tiger was recently found, poisoned by some wronged farmer. And we will soon enough reach a clearing where there is a stone bungalow with a red tile roof and purple hyacinths and fresh lemonade. There will be lanterns and candles for the night and silk pillowcases with brown embroidered flowers.
Someone will cook for us. And then we will sleep.
In the morning, we will wake in darkness and drink sweet milky tea and eat oily cashew biscuits and follow our cowboy down a track through the woods, where it is quiet except for the insect hum. There should be no cell phone reception here and no cell phones, but there are two people so swell they have both cell phones and reception. So they walk along, scaring away the animals in the early light, saying to some important person somewhere else: “Yes, yes, I am on a jungle walk.”
We will find pools of white petals fallen around our feet but we will see no flowers. We will look up and follow the huge trees all the way to the sky. We must presume that in the soaring canopy of this place there are secret white flowers which having grown tired, sigh and let go. We will hear whistling thrushes. We will walk along the flat ground with our smooth walking sticks and think how many people in how many epochs have held smooth walking sticks and strode silently down this path. There was at least one Englishman, whose bungalow we are now staying in and whose name has been temporarily misplaced, who used to manage a cardamom plantation in the area. This used to be his road, which we are now borrowing and which people in the years to come will borrow too. We are part of a great long walk, which began before us and will continue after us. We are the least important entity in this place. The jungle is buzzing with its own industry. All the animals and plants are calling out to each other in love and death, and we have no idea how to listen. We are deaf and dumb and blind because we have not learned to see the important things and we cannot speak any of these small, miraculous languages. But, even crippled in this way, we know beauty.
Then the cell phones will stop and we will come to a waterfall. All the other animals gather here, but we have risen too late and arrived with the sun, and so have missed them all. The water comes down fast and hard over the rocks and we stand under it on slippery stones and drink if we must.
Then we will run home through the jungle, because this is the best way to lose ourselves, the closest we can come to animal calculation.
Soon enough, after naps and books and dinner and drinks, the direction of things will shift. One Sunday, we will get up early, slam the trunk shut and take a different, even more terrible road home.
We will keep asking for animals: “Are there animals?” we will say. “Have you seen any animals this way?” We have nothing to do but look for animals, but none will come. So we begin to fancy ourselves animals _ why not? we must do something to fill our time _ and we become snails crawling along over rocks and holes and ruts that we were not built to handle.
Similarly imperiled cars will come inching along in the other direction and we will stop shoulder to shoulder, with windows rolled down and ask: “How is the road?”
And they will say: “Bad. Bad for 40km.”
Then they will ask us: “How is the road?”
And we will say: “Bad. Bad for 40km.”
And then we will inch off in opposite directions, laughing at each other, laughing at ourselves, laughing at our great and mutual folly. We say to ourselves: “We are living the Hindu rate of growth.” And then we laugh some more. We are sure the monkeys are laughing at us too. And the birds. And the mosquitoes in the car, they are getting fat and laughing at the same time. The elephants hidden in the deep grasses are laughing but they won’t let us see. The tigers would laugh if they cared. God is laughing. Time is laughing hardest of all.
This eventually makes us sad and cranky. We are tired of laughter. We are tired of listening and tired of talking. We are tired of each other. We are tired of our brains. We are tired of all the songs on our iPods. All the snacks are gone. We are tired of being hungry and tired of eating. We are tired of being not-a-wife and not-a-mother, even though we sometimes hate our mothers. We are tired of being just a self. We are tired of our apartments, tired of our clothes, tired of throwing ourselves at this weary world. We are tired of being tired. We are trapped. We begin to wonder: Which is home and which is the jungle?
But we keep going in the direction we have set out in because at some point we must stop asking questions and simply proceed. Also, we must catch our plane.
We must go home. And we know in our hearts that home lies before us. We will ask people which is the way home and they will tell us that home is to the right, while urging us on with pointed fingers to the left. And the next person will say home is straight or home is just around that corner there. And thus we will proceed forward _ brave, dumb and hopeful.
Familiar enough, but the plane in question has no air-conditioning. We have eaten sandwiches, quickly in a dark car, because the plane is an hour and a half late which means we are late and hungry. Dinner time has come and gone, just as the time for sleep will come and go and still we will not have slept. Because this is travel.
A decision is taken to fly the plane without air-conditioning. Repairing the air-conditioning would take another three and a half hours _ though it is said to be only a minor mechanical problem _ and who wants to wait three and a half hours? It’s not like you can just up and get another plane. Airplanes have commitments. They have schedules. There are not extra ones lying around. The captain doesn’t say the air-conditioning is broken. He says it is “degraded.”
Degraded is OK, though, because we will get water and icky lemon drinks and, soon enough, rise high into the stratosphere, where there air is thin and the molecules move slowly and there is no need for air-conditioning. We can just press our hands to the cold black windows and the world will give us exactly what we want.
What do we want?
We want to get lost.
We want peace.
We want tigers and leeches and stars and strange animal cries in the night. We want fires. We want to stand naked under waterfalls. We want phantasmagoric butterflies. We want to come upon a wounded guar. We want to find fresh blood, bright and bubbling on a dry leaf. We want to see what tiger scat looks like (thoroughly unimpressive). We want to hear the suffering call of the brain fever bird, so pained by his desire for love that he cries and cries and cries. We want to rub the shiny green pods of fresh cardamom between our fingers. We want to taste a bitter wild orange. We want to smell fresh crushed lemongrass and eat berries whose name we will never know. We want someone else to cook for us.
We want to go to the jungle.
For all of this we are willing to suffer some.
Not much, but a little. We will drive behind belching trucks and wait on clogged roads. We will turn into strange villages and ask one two three people which way we must go to find Mananithwadi and they will tell us left, you must go left, all the while waving their certain hands to the right.
Thus we will proceed, fearless and full of wrong confidence. We will drive for hours through dull landscapes, passing dense little towns and rubble and forgettable trees. We will ford ditches to piss in hot fields. Then we will return to our red Suzuki Swift and continue our slow battle with the universe. Time will stack up like plates, higher and higher until we are sure they will all come crashing down: five hours, six hours, seven hours, eight hours, nine hours.
And then we will find the man we are looking for. He is skinny. He wears a jacket even though the temperature is above 100 degrees. He wears a floppy hat that seems to tell us that even though he was born in these far hills he is not of them. He is not knit into the stern, protective fabric of fathers and mothers and wives and babies. He is a cowboy. He will get us liquor and grass and we will follow him around a sharp right turn from a small road to a smaller road cut into the red dirt of a mountain. And then he will vanish on his motorbike, jacket billowing, around tight corners. The trees will grow dense and tight around us.
We will pause at the fork in the road, and convince ourselves that we should go to the right, though we could just as easily turn left. And then we will crest a hill and we will find our cowboy, straddling his bike next to three other men, also straddling motorbikes, as they look out across the valley and point to a patch of trees where five wild elephants have just been feeding.
It will be so quiet.
Then we will proceed, pressing on past a gate where a dead tiger was recently found, poisoned by some wronged farmer. And we will soon enough reach a clearing where there is a stone bungalow with a red tile roof and purple hyacinths and fresh lemonade. There will be lanterns and candles for the night and silk pillowcases with brown embroidered flowers.
Someone will cook for us. And then we will sleep.
In the morning, we will wake in darkness and drink sweet milky tea and eat oily cashew biscuits and follow our cowboy down a track through the woods, where it is quiet except for the insect hum. There should be no cell phone reception here and no cell phones, but there are two people so swell they have both cell phones and reception. So they walk along, scaring away the animals in the early light, saying to some important person somewhere else: “Yes, yes, I am on a jungle walk.”
We will find pools of white petals fallen around our feet but we will see no flowers. We will look up and follow the huge trees all the way to the sky. We must presume that in the soaring canopy of this place there are secret white flowers which having grown tired, sigh and let go. We will hear whistling thrushes. We will walk along the flat ground with our smooth walking sticks and think how many people in how many epochs have held smooth walking sticks and strode silently down this path. There was at least one Englishman, whose bungalow we are now staying in and whose name has been temporarily misplaced, who used to manage a cardamom plantation in the area. This used to be his road, which we are now borrowing and which people in the years to come will borrow too. We are part of a great long walk, which began before us and will continue after us. We are the least important entity in this place. The jungle is buzzing with its own industry. All the animals and plants are calling out to each other in love and death, and we have no idea how to listen. We are deaf and dumb and blind because we have not learned to see the important things and we cannot speak any of these small, miraculous languages. But, even crippled in this way, we know beauty.
Then the cell phones will stop and we will come to a waterfall. All the other animals gather here, but we have risen too late and arrived with the sun, and so have missed them all. The water comes down fast and hard over the rocks and we stand under it on slippery stones and drink if we must.
Then we will run home through the jungle, because this is the best way to lose ourselves, the closest we can come to animal calculation.
Soon enough, after naps and books and dinner and drinks, the direction of things will shift. One Sunday, we will get up early, slam the trunk shut and take a different, even more terrible road home.
We will keep asking for animals: “Are there animals?” we will say. “Have you seen any animals this way?” We have nothing to do but look for animals, but none will come. So we begin to fancy ourselves animals _ why not? we must do something to fill our time _ and we become snails crawling along over rocks and holes and ruts that we were not built to handle.
Similarly imperiled cars will come inching along in the other direction and we will stop shoulder to shoulder, with windows rolled down and ask: “How is the road?”
And they will say: “Bad. Bad for 40km.”
Then they will ask us: “How is the road?”
And we will say: “Bad. Bad for 40km.”
And then we will inch off in opposite directions, laughing at each other, laughing at ourselves, laughing at our great and mutual folly. We say to ourselves: “We are living the Hindu rate of growth.” And then we laugh some more. We are sure the monkeys are laughing at us too. And the birds. And the mosquitoes in the car, they are getting fat and laughing at the same time. The elephants hidden in the deep grasses are laughing but they won’t let us see. The tigers would laugh if they cared. God is laughing. Time is laughing hardest of all.
This eventually makes us sad and cranky. We are tired of laughter. We are tired of listening and tired of talking. We are tired of each other. We are tired of our brains. We are tired of all the songs on our iPods. All the snacks are gone. We are tired of being hungry and tired of eating. We are tired of being not-a-wife and not-a-mother, even though we sometimes hate our mothers. We are tired of being just a self. We are tired of our apartments, tired of our clothes, tired of throwing ourselves at this weary world. We are tired of being tired. We are trapped. We begin to wonder: Which is home and which is the jungle?
But we keep going in the direction we have set out in because at some point we must stop asking questions and simply proceed. Also, we must catch our plane.
We must go home. And we know in our hearts that home lies before us. We will ask people which is the way home and they will tell us that home is to the right, while urging us on with pointed fingers to the left. And the next person will say home is straight or home is just around that corner there. And thus we will proceed forward _ brave, dumb and hopeful.
Sunday, March 8, 2009
The Good Doctor
Date Feb. 23 09
I had my first Indian doctor experience today. This was a recommendation from my kind and gracious neighbor, Naresh, who has grown up in Bandra and knows Mumbai well. Also, naresh is something of an accidental expert in respiratory tract infections, as he is afflicted three to four times a year.
All of which is to say that the air here is bad. Very, very bad.
Not just for pink-lunged neophytes like myself (though I did grow up next to an oil refinery in Manhattan Beach). Bad for everyone.
Dr. Jerry is a jovial guy. He answers his cell phone on Sunday, graciously tells me to take crocin (paracetamol) until tomorrow, Monday, when his clinic will be open.
I have had a fever since Thursday night, low grade, but getting worse and worse, passing 102 degrees F Saturday night. I am far too old for such stuff. And I have cough, and a miserable headache and my neck is an agony.
Friday I spent all day in the Bandra East slum chasing Azharuddin Ismail and Rubina Ali, the two child stars of Slumdog Millionaire. Then kept up till 2am by a fine editor in New York, who decided at the end of all that time to not change much of anything in the piece.
Saturday I try to call the Fernandes family doctor but the people who answer the phone just keep shouting at me: WHO GAVE YOU THIS NUMBER? WHO GAVE YOU THIS NUMBER? And no matter what I do N-A-R-E-S-H, I cannot get them to understand my accent. The thought of spelling out Fernandes causes me to crumple into a heap of self-pitying tears (why is everything so hard in this fucking country?) and hang up the phone.
So Monday I head to Mahim, a largely Muslim working class neighborhood just south of Bandra, to Dr. Jerry’s clinic. The clinic is a small storefront on a calm street just parallel to the main thoroughfare, not far from St. Michael’s Church.
In the clinic there is a small antechamber where people wait: wooden benches, two buckled old magazines of uncertain provenance which look thoroughly uninteresting. Peach walls, old posters. A single door opens to Dr. Jerry’s room. He is a large headed man with a broad face, thick waves of graying hair, and a big smile which he stretches on nearly constantly. There is no examining room I can see. He sits behind a desk.
Jerry is clearly Christian. I know this not only from his name but also because there was inspirational Christian rock playing in the waiting room. Also the Beatles’ “Hey Jude,” which I abhor because one year I was struck with an excess of adolescent angst that song lodged itself in my young breast and would not let go, playing loop after loop after loop, making me feel that “Hey Jude” was itself a sign of depression as surely as dark thoughts, sluggishness, and irritability.
Across from me in the waiting room is a dark woman not quite elderly but past middle age in an electric blue sari with the leathered, weathered feet of someone who has spent a lot of time barefoot outdoors with not a lot of money to show for it.
There is a young man in grey slacks who looks like a student.
Another guy in a cheap sort of suit walks in.
And a muscled kid in jeans with studs on them.
Then the homeless dude comes in. His hair is wild, his pants and shirt in some former life were white, but now bear all the insults of the world upon their dark, scarred flesh. His entire being, to my immune compromised self, seems alive with dirt and germs. He is an infectious agent. I realize this is an ungenerous attitude, but my lungs hurt. His shoes were once sandals but are now a miracle of physics. His thick toenails pop out here and there. The shoes and perhaps his feet themselves are held together by straps cantilevered in awkward busted ways that one would not have thought geometrically possible. He has a long dark beard. He seems to flit here and there in a great, grave hurry, darting in and out of the room, sitting down, standing up, accomplishing nothing in particular.
He lunges over to me and points a shaking, grimy index finger at my New Yorker, where I have been reading excerpts from 50 years of John Updike contributions to the magazine. “Is that yours?” the guy says. I place my hand on it protectively. It is not easy to get New Yorkers here. They are very expensive. My mother sends me some. The rest I pilfer from my local coffee shop, because the head of Goldman Sachs lives in my neighborhood and leaves his magazines at Gloria Jean’s once he’s finished with them. Often, however, he tears the best bits out.
The homeless guy moves on to the only other magazines in the room, which are not mine, snatches them up and proceeds to tear pages out of them, which he stuffs in his pockets. He sits for a few agitated seconds before deciding he needs a pen. One head two heads three heads (this last one, mine) shake a sorry no sorry buddy don’t have one on me. Finally, on the fourth try he succeeds, and waddles – for he’s a spry little guy, skinny, bowlegged and bow armed and kind of hunched over, his big messy head leading him this way and that through this startled world – back to his bench. Then he pulls the magazine pages out of his pockets and begins to scribble on them.
He stops this long enough to try to dash into the doctor’s office every time the door opens, thus cutting in front of everyone who has been waiting in this little room listening to the smooth uplift and joy of Elohim. In this he does not succeed.
It is my turn.
The door closes behind me. There is big faced Jerry across the desk. To my chagrin, the music is louder in here than it was in the waiting room and though Jerry speaks with a booming bass, I have trouble hearing him. I have to lean forward to make him hear me speak, for not only do I not possess a booming bass, I have a lung infection and if I try to talk too loud I succumb to a cascade of coughs, which make my head feel like it is going to pop off, not like a balloon, but like a grenade.
Jerry wants to know my name. Easy. As for medical history: “You’re generally healthy right?” Big smile.
I lean forward: “Yes.”
He leans across the desk with his stethoscope to listen to my lungs. He places the stethoscope just under my collar bone on each side of my chest. I’ve always had people listen to my lungs from the back too, because your lungs go way down the back, and I wonder whether the aural environment here is conducive to differentiating between bronchitis and walking pneumonia. My instinct tells me….No.
Moving on then, Jerry wants to talk about the Oscars! Slumdog Millionaire! You’re a journalist! You’ve been in the slums! Oh, yes, you met a guy with TB! You should have written Slumdog Millionaire! No the movie you should have written part of the movie, not articles about it! Yes, you would have made more money! So funny! Do you miss America! Oh family of course! Do you find India inconvenient!
There is a small sink behind his desk, but I have neither seen nor heard any evidence that the man washes his hands between patients. This returns my mind painfully to thoughts of the homeless dude outside.
Dr. Jerry pulls out a yellowed plastic pill case, which is filled with small white and large pink and medium white pills, which he plucks out with his thick fingers and arranges on his faux wood desk top into breakfast lunch and dinner doses. He’s singing along to the music as he does this: “we’ll take a sad song and make it be-ee-ee-ter.”
All I can think are about those unwashed fingers. This is paranoid of me I realize. I feel ugly, judgmental. I am usually pretty relaxed about hygiene. I eat street food sometimes. I eat vegetables, fruits, filter water, I don’t always carry anti-bacterial gel or hand wipes. I’m even figuring out how to get by without toilet paper.
But now I’m sick. And I’m surrounded by sick people, who seem to have emanated from the same sour streets that made me sick. They are unprotected by money and air-conditioning. They live normal lives, which are different from my normal life. On another day I would embrace them. I didn’t mind those kids crawling up my legs by that pile of smoldering trash in the slum. I didn’t mind drawing little stars on the skinny arms of those eager, coughing boys. I like sitting in little houses make of torn tarps and moldy blankets. But today everyone looks like my enemy. Especially Dr. Jerry’s potentially toxic thumb and forefinger nudging out those pills from his old unmarked Tupperware and flicking them into piles on his desk. Those pills, I convince myself, are not going to heal me. They are going to inoculate me with some species of germ far worse than what I am hosting now. Danger is everywhere.
Dr. Jerry does not want to tell me the names of the pills he is giving me, which makes them seem even more suspect.
“What you are going to look them up on the internet!” he says.
I say: I just like to know what I am taking.
Paracetamol 500mg
Nimesulide 100mg
Dexamethasone 8 mg
And I have to get antibiotics from the pharmacy (Hifen, 200mg, twice a day)
He doesn’t want to give me a receipt, either. The bill is 200 rupees, a little less than $5. You have to come back! Come back Thursday! After 11! Are you going back to work! Ok bye bye now! Bye bye!
I flee. I do not feel like walking down the street much less going to work. My fever has been going up to 102 at night, but Dr. Jerry didn’t ask about this and he didn’t take my temperature.
And the heat comes in oppressive waves, slowing me down, making my head light and strange and filled with sun. I’m in slow motion, getting into a taxi and going home, where I call Siddharth who looks up the pills on the internet for me and tells me that Nimesulide has potential liver complications and has been placed on restricted use in Europe and has never been approved by the FDA. Dexamethasone is a strong steroid. Both probably best avoided.
I call Akash’s doctor for a second opinion. He says don’t take them. And, angrily, who is this doctor?! Come see me tomorrow.
Which I do. His front door is white, with his name stenciled in chipping gold letters: DR JAWAHAR B. MUKHTYAR. The office is an emanation of old Bombay. It is on the ground floor of an old apartment building across from the clubhouse of the Wankhede cricket stadium, near Churchgate railway station. His waiting room has long dark wood benches, speckled tiles on the floor, and the antique, sleek curves of art deco wrought iron bars on the windows. He has a stethoscope, a light box for looking at X-rays, a blood pressure cuff, an ear thermometer, an old green plastic examining table. These are simple instruments, at once functional and historic. It all has a kind of faded grey museum quality, but I find this reassuring. The doctor, his office, his simple tools are ambered evidence of the timelessness of the human heartbeat, of lungs, of fever, of the struggle against infection.
Dr. Mukhtyar is a competent man, who asks good questions, and takes a thorough exam and history and orders a chest x ray and blood test and stool sample and says I probably have bronchitis and a respiratory infection and the reason my head hurts so much is that my sinuses are infected. And we talk a little about the work his wife and he have done in the slums, about how people would sell the medicine they gave them for free to local pharmacies at 1/3 the price, and then come back again and again never getting better.
“They just want the money,” he said. “They don’t want to change. Things come to them. They get things easily, even if it is so little. They don’t want to have to work for themselves.” Mothers tell their children to throw away vitamins, not believing in their power because they are free and free things must be worthless.
“I became very disillusioned,” he said.
“I can tell,” I said. “It is very hard to help people.”
Chest xrays in India by the way cost 200 rupees, which is less than $5. That is so cool.
As it turns out I have pneumonia. And anemia. And some sort of parasite, which may or may not be benign, but which stands as sure evidence that at some point along the way, I have ingested feces.
Akash’s driver takes me home from the doctor and maybe it is the fact that I am in an air-conditioned car with nowhere I have to be fast and nothing I am trying to get from this obstinate world…maybe it is the fever…Either way, for the first time since I’ve been here, I am struck with the sense that India is a benevolent place. The silhouettes of boys chasing each other along Chowpatty beach against the sparkling Arabian Sea. The latest Amul ad: a play on composer A.R. Rahman winning an Oscar. The birds knit together, swooping high against the sun. The kids teetering on the back of a piled up truck grinning at something I can’t see. The intensity of color: rickety old black and yellow cabs, hulking orange goods carriers, big red buses, electric saris, dirty kids, the sky, the street, the sand, the one armed beggars, it all seems a benign, living tumult.
India has its patterns; there is grace here, even in the absence of coherent form. But you cannot fight the sum of forces at work around you, you cannot possess them, you can only enter them. You cannot win against the traffic if you are late. Your notions of fairness in the universe, of compassion, of the minimum level at which a human being can or should live have no place in this order. You, your principles, and your schedule will be subsumed. It is not about you anyway.
I was listening to A.R. Rahman’s music in the car, and I felt that we in the West cannot possibly have the depth of a place like India nor the hope. Rahman prays before he sings a song and before he composes a new piece. His songs are offerings, and they have the deep, hopeful sweep of prayer, they have in mind infinity. Then I listen to someone like Alanis Morisette or U2 or Coldplay, who even when happy, are tinny because they have only themselves to draw on. There is no surrender.
I have had a fever now for six days. When it came I was struck with a terrible weeping, as if the heat had weakened some tie inside and let all my weakness spool out. I was lost in a grave tangle of spent bravery. My body, it seems, is locked in struggle with a grief too great to be understood. Part of me does not want to get better. Part of me wants to sit on my couch in the afternoons and watch the dark fingers of the palm trees against the setting sun. I want to sit in this heat of mine and feel my mouth get warmer and my cheeks flush and try to stay utterly still as the crows call out and the cuckoo makes its swooping high whistle and the hawks glide from tree to tree until their hunched dark bodies vanish against the night sky. It is as if Terence must be burned out of my body, as if the heat of love when lost will not simply surrender.
I had my first Indian doctor experience today. This was a recommendation from my kind and gracious neighbor, Naresh, who has grown up in Bandra and knows Mumbai well. Also, naresh is something of an accidental expert in respiratory tract infections, as he is afflicted three to four times a year.
All of which is to say that the air here is bad. Very, very bad.
Not just for pink-lunged neophytes like myself (though I did grow up next to an oil refinery in Manhattan Beach). Bad for everyone.
Dr. Jerry is a jovial guy. He answers his cell phone on Sunday, graciously tells me to take crocin (paracetamol) until tomorrow, Monday, when his clinic will be open.
I have had a fever since Thursday night, low grade, but getting worse and worse, passing 102 degrees F Saturday night. I am far too old for such stuff. And I have cough, and a miserable headache and my neck is an agony.
Friday I spent all day in the Bandra East slum chasing Azharuddin Ismail and Rubina Ali, the two child stars of Slumdog Millionaire. Then kept up till 2am by a fine editor in New York, who decided at the end of all that time to not change much of anything in the piece.
Saturday I try to call the Fernandes family doctor but the people who answer the phone just keep shouting at me: WHO GAVE YOU THIS NUMBER? WHO GAVE YOU THIS NUMBER? And no matter what I do N-A-R-E-S-H, I cannot get them to understand my accent. The thought of spelling out Fernandes causes me to crumple into a heap of self-pitying tears (why is everything so hard in this fucking country?) and hang up the phone.
So Monday I head to Mahim, a largely Muslim working class neighborhood just south of Bandra, to Dr. Jerry’s clinic. The clinic is a small storefront on a calm street just parallel to the main thoroughfare, not far from St. Michael’s Church.
In the clinic there is a small antechamber where people wait: wooden benches, two buckled old magazines of uncertain provenance which look thoroughly uninteresting. Peach walls, old posters. A single door opens to Dr. Jerry’s room. He is a large headed man with a broad face, thick waves of graying hair, and a big smile which he stretches on nearly constantly. There is no examining room I can see. He sits behind a desk.
Jerry is clearly Christian. I know this not only from his name but also because there was inspirational Christian rock playing in the waiting room. Also the Beatles’ “Hey Jude,” which I abhor because one year I was struck with an excess of adolescent angst that song lodged itself in my young breast and would not let go, playing loop after loop after loop, making me feel that “Hey Jude” was itself a sign of depression as surely as dark thoughts, sluggishness, and irritability.
Across from me in the waiting room is a dark woman not quite elderly but past middle age in an electric blue sari with the leathered, weathered feet of someone who has spent a lot of time barefoot outdoors with not a lot of money to show for it.
There is a young man in grey slacks who looks like a student.
Another guy in a cheap sort of suit walks in.
And a muscled kid in jeans with studs on them.
Then the homeless dude comes in. His hair is wild, his pants and shirt in some former life were white, but now bear all the insults of the world upon their dark, scarred flesh. His entire being, to my immune compromised self, seems alive with dirt and germs. He is an infectious agent. I realize this is an ungenerous attitude, but my lungs hurt. His shoes were once sandals but are now a miracle of physics. His thick toenails pop out here and there. The shoes and perhaps his feet themselves are held together by straps cantilevered in awkward busted ways that one would not have thought geometrically possible. He has a long dark beard. He seems to flit here and there in a great, grave hurry, darting in and out of the room, sitting down, standing up, accomplishing nothing in particular.
He lunges over to me and points a shaking, grimy index finger at my New Yorker, where I have been reading excerpts from 50 years of John Updike contributions to the magazine. “Is that yours?” the guy says. I place my hand on it protectively. It is not easy to get New Yorkers here. They are very expensive. My mother sends me some. The rest I pilfer from my local coffee shop, because the head of Goldman Sachs lives in my neighborhood and leaves his magazines at Gloria Jean’s once he’s finished with them. Often, however, he tears the best bits out.
The homeless guy moves on to the only other magazines in the room, which are not mine, snatches them up and proceeds to tear pages out of them, which he stuffs in his pockets. He sits for a few agitated seconds before deciding he needs a pen. One head two heads three heads (this last one, mine) shake a sorry no sorry buddy don’t have one on me. Finally, on the fourth try he succeeds, and waddles – for he’s a spry little guy, skinny, bowlegged and bow armed and kind of hunched over, his big messy head leading him this way and that through this startled world – back to his bench. Then he pulls the magazine pages out of his pockets and begins to scribble on them.
He stops this long enough to try to dash into the doctor’s office every time the door opens, thus cutting in front of everyone who has been waiting in this little room listening to the smooth uplift and joy of Elohim. In this he does not succeed.
It is my turn.
The door closes behind me. There is big faced Jerry across the desk. To my chagrin, the music is louder in here than it was in the waiting room and though Jerry speaks with a booming bass, I have trouble hearing him. I have to lean forward to make him hear me speak, for not only do I not possess a booming bass, I have a lung infection and if I try to talk too loud I succumb to a cascade of coughs, which make my head feel like it is going to pop off, not like a balloon, but like a grenade.
Jerry wants to know my name. Easy. As for medical history: “You’re generally healthy right?” Big smile.
I lean forward: “Yes.”
He leans across the desk with his stethoscope to listen to my lungs. He places the stethoscope just under my collar bone on each side of my chest. I’ve always had people listen to my lungs from the back too, because your lungs go way down the back, and I wonder whether the aural environment here is conducive to differentiating between bronchitis and walking pneumonia. My instinct tells me….No.
Moving on then, Jerry wants to talk about the Oscars! Slumdog Millionaire! You’re a journalist! You’ve been in the slums! Oh, yes, you met a guy with TB! You should have written Slumdog Millionaire! No the movie you should have written part of the movie, not articles about it! Yes, you would have made more money! So funny! Do you miss America! Oh family of course! Do you find India inconvenient!
There is a small sink behind his desk, but I have neither seen nor heard any evidence that the man washes his hands between patients. This returns my mind painfully to thoughts of the homeless dude outside.
Dr. Jerry pulls out a yellowed plastic pill case, which is filled with small white and large pink and medium white pills, which he plucks out with his thick fingers and arranges on his faux wood desk top into breakfast lunch and dinner doses. He’s singing along to the music as he does this: “we’ll take a sad song and make it be-ee-ee-ter.”
All I can think are about those unwashed fingers. This is paranoid of me I realize. I feel ugly, judgmental. I am usually pretty relaxed about hygiene. I eat street food sometimes. I eat vegetables, fruits, filter water, I don’t always carry anti-bacterial gel or hand wipes. I’m even figuring out how to get by without toilet paper.
But now I’m sick. And I’m surrounded by sick people, who seem to have emanated from the same sour streets that made me sick. They are unprotected by money and air-conditioning. They live normal lives, which are different from my normal life. On another day I would embrace them. I didn’t mind those kids crawling up my legs by that pile of smoldering trash in the slum. I didn’t mind drawing little stars on the skinny arms of those eager, coughing boys. I like sitting in little houses make of torn tarps and moldy blankets. But today everyone looks like my enemy. Especially Dr. Jerry’s potentially toxic thumb and forefinger nudging out those pills from his old unmarked Tupperware and flicking them into piles on his desk. Those pills, I convince myself, are not going to heal me. They are going to inoculate me with some species of germ far worse than what I am hosting now. Danger is everywhere.
Dr. Jerry does not want to tell me the names of the pills he is giving me, which makes them seem even more suspect.
“What you are going to look them up on the internet!” he says.
I say: I just like to know what I am taking.
Paracetamol 500mg
Nimesulide 100mg
Dexamethasone 8 mg
And I have to get antibiotics from the pharmacy (Hifen, 200mg, twice a day)
He doesn’t want to give me a receipt, either. The bill is 200 rupees, a little less than $5. You have to come back! Come back Thursday! After 11! Are you going back to work! Ok bye bye now! Bye bye!
I flee. I do not feel like walking down the street much less going to work. My fever has been going up to 102 at night, but Dr. Jerry didn’t ask about this and he didn’t take my temperature.
And the heat comes in oppressive waves, slowing me down, making my head light and strange and filled with sun. I’m in slow motion, getting into a taxi and going home, where I call Siddharth who looks up the pills on the internet for me and tells me that Nimesulide has potential liver complications and has been placed on restricted use in Europe and has never been approved by the FDA. Dexamethasone is a strong steroid. Both probably best avoided.
I call Akash’s doctor for a second opinion. He says don’t take them. And, angrily, who is this doctor?! Come see me tomorrow.
Which I do. His front door is white, with his name stenciled in chipping gold letters: DR JAWAHAR B. MUKHTYAR. The office is an emanation of old Bombay. It is on the ground floor of an old apartment building across from the clubhouse of the Wankhede cricket stadium, near Churchgate railway station. His waiting room has long dark wood benches, speckled tiles on the floor, and the antique, sleek curves of art deco wrought iron bars on the windows. He has a stethoscope, a light box for looking at X-rays, a blood pressure cuff, an ear thermometer, an old green plastic examining table. These are simple instruments, at once functional and historic. It all has a kind of faded grey museum quality, but I find this reassuring. The doctor, his office, his simple tools are ambered evidence of the timelessness of the human heartbeat, of lungs, of fever, of the struggle against infection.
Dr. Mukhtyar is a competent man, who asks good questions, and takes a thorough exam and history and orders a chest x ray and blood test and stool sample and says I probably have bronchitis and a respiratory infection and the reason my head hurts so much is that my sinuses are infected. And we talk a little about the work his wife and he have done in the slums, about how people would sell the medicine they gave them for free to local pharmacies at 1/3 the price, and then come back again and again never getting better.
“They just want the money,” he said. “They don’t want to change. Things come to them. They get things easily, even if it is so little. They don’t want to have to work for themselves.” Mothers tell their children to throw away vitamins, not believing in their power because they are free and free things must be worthless.
“I became very disillusioned,” he said.
“I can tell,” I said. “It is very hard to help people.”
Chest xrays in India by the way cost 200 rupees, which is less than $5. That is so cool.
As it turns out I have pneumonia. And anemia. And some sort of parasite, which may or may not be benign, but which stands as sure evidence that at some point along the way, I have ingested feces.
Akash’s driver takes me home from the doctor and maybe it is the fact that I am in an air-conditioned car with nowhere I have to be fast and nothing I am trying to get from this obstinate world…maybe it is the fever…Either way, for the first time since I’ve been here, I am struck with the sense that India is a benevolent place. The silhouettes of boys chasing each other along Chowpatty beach against the sparkling Arabian Sea. The latest Amul ad: a play on composer A.R. Rahman winning an Oscar. The birds knit together, swooping high against the sun. The kids teetering on the back of a piled up truck grinning at something I can’t see. The intensity of color: rickety old black and yellow cabs, hulking orange goods carriers, big red buses, electric saris, dirty kids, the sky, the street, the sand, the one armed beggars, it all seems a benign, living tumult.
India has its patterns; there is grace here, even in the absence of coherent form. But you cannot fight the sum of forces at work around you, you cannot possess them, you can only enter them. You cannot win against the traffic if you are late. Your notions of fairness in the universe, of compassion, of the minimum level at which a human being can or should live have no place in this order. You, your principles, and your schedule will be subsumed. It is not about you anyway.
I was listening to A.R. Rahman’s music in the car, and I felt that we in the West cannot possibly have the depth of a place like India nor the hope. Rahman prays before he sings a song and before he composes a new piece. His songs are offerings, and they have the deep, hopeful sweep of prayer, they have in mind infinity. Then I listen to someone like Alanis Morisette or U2 or Coldplay, who even when happy, are tinny because they have only themselves to draw on. There is no surrender.
I have had a fever now for six days. When it came I was struck with a terrible weeping, as if the heat had weakened some tie inside and let all my weakness spool out. I was lost in a grave tangle of spent bravery. My body, it seems, is locked in struggle with a grief too great to be understood. Part of me does not want to get better. Part of me wants to sit on my couch in the afternoons and watch the dark fingers of the palm trees against the setting sun. I want to sit in this heat of mine and feel my mouth get warmer and my cheeks flush and try to stay utterly still as the crows call out and the cuckoo makes its swooping high whistle and the hawks glide from tree to tree until their hunched dark bodies vanish against the night sky. It is as if Terence must be burned out of my body, as if the heat of love when lost will not simply surrender.
Saturday, March 7, 2009
Kumbalgarh Fort
Kumbalgarh Fort, 80km north of Udaipur. To enter you must pass through seven stern ramparts. The fort, built by the Rajput ruler Rana Kumbha of Chittaurgarh in the 15th Century, was only successfully beseiged once, when the Mughal emporer Akhbar poisoned the water supply. It was a festival day, with drums and a float dripping with flowers that drew villagers slowly up the steep, winding road through the ramparts to the old fort. Many women were in colorful purdah. The boy with the green eyes was playing the cymbals.
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