Hats and Doctors: Stories Page 12

  Mr Ghatpande was snoring away comfortably. I turned over quietly. The invisible dagger had been stabbing at my heart only a moment earlier. Clouds were peeking out from behind the tall silver oaks above the cottage across from the verandah; there was a gentle breeze now; a flock of nightingales materialized from out of nowhere with a flutter of wings. They divided into pairs, some perching on the electric wires, some on the long branches of bougainvillea and some on the henna hedge. So many nightingales! I started watching them to see if any pair among them was fighting. Everyone loves the song of the nightingale, but I love to watch them fight. When ordinary birds fight they fall down on the ground, but nightingales keep flying straight up, higher and higher into the sky, striking one another with their tiny beaks. Such beautiful fighting! I kept watching them for quite a while, but they didn’t chirp or fight, and then, one by one, they flew away.

  I felt strangely lonely. I missed home. When death is inevitable, home is infinitely better than the harsh and loveless ward of a hospital or a sanatorium. I wanted to die with my head in my mother’s lap. Why had she thrown me out in this condition? A whirlwind of anger rose in my heart against my brothers and sisters and my father. My eyes grew moist like a tiny child’s when I thought about my mother’s warmth and affection. Just then, Mr Ghatpande gave a loud snore and his earlier oration echoed in my ears, and I remembered how he had said that the best cure for any disease was to not allow it to get the better of you. I don’t remember when my eyes closed as I tried to console myself and to rouse my dormant will power.

  ‘Tell me, are you just going to keep on sleeping? Your tea is getting cold.’ I was awakened by Mr Ghatpande’s voice.

  The ward boy had put my cup on the teapoy, but I was not allowed to sit up. I rang the bell. The ward boy came and raised the head of my bed slightly. I picked up my cup. Mr Ghatpande was sitting down, facing me. He asked, ‘So, how are you feeling?’

  Since I was not allowed to speak, I made a gesture to indicate that I was all right.

  Mr Ghatpande replied: ‘I have had a sound sleep. Perhaps you don’t know that with this disease it’s best to sleep as much as you can. Sleep is a sign of feeling carefree, and feeling free of care works like a cool and efficacious balm to the wounds. That’s why I sleep soundly and I don’t let worry come anywhere near me. I don’t even read the newspapers. After all, what else is in them but fighting and war and poverty and disease? It makes one feel depressed and uneasy. I never even pick up a newspaper and look at it, and I don’t listen to anything anyone says. What can I tell you: you know how friends and relatives, when they hear that you’re sick, come to console you supposedly; but by the gestures they make and the way they talk, they frighten you so much that you wonder what’s going to happen to you. In my heart of hearts I just say to myself: look, my friend, you have T.B. Now, what could be worse than that? And then I start having thoughts—quite gloomy ones, really—but I exercise my will power, drive them all from my mind and fall into a deep sleep …’

  Mr Ghatpande finished his tea. He had propped himself up with two pillows and stretched his legs out luxuriously. I was coughing less, lying with my head slightly raised. I listened to him attentively. Perhaps he was about to expand upon his ideas regarding will power, which, because of the sister, he had not been able to discuss in full earlier, but at that very moment another patient made a dramatic entrance from the ward, asking, ‘Tell me, gentlemen, did you just arrive today?’ He greeted both of us respectfully with a nod of his head, and then he began to examine the chart which was hanging from my bed.

  Although he was able to walk about and even had a smile on his face, tuberculosis had etched the marks of its friendship into his form. He was six feet tall, but emaciated; his chest was broad but sunken, his fair complexion was yellowish, or actually almost black from T.B., and since his cheeks were hollow, his nose jutted out and looked longer than it actually was. In fact, other than his nose, nothing was noticeable about his face.

  When he glanced at my chart, he made a face as if to say it was just as he had expected, and mumbling, ‘Bilateral!’ to himself with satisfaction, he turned to Mr Ghatpande’s bed.

  But Mr Ghatpande’s chart was empty. Since I had come very early, the doctor had already examined me and filled in my chart, and had also given me Calcium Gluconate and Congored injections. The doctor had left by the time Mr Ghatpande came in. He was to undergo pathology tests in the evening.

  When the man with the long nose found Mr Ghatpande’s chart blank, he gave him a questioning look.

  ‘I just have a mild infiltration,’ Mr Ghatpande told him with an air of nonchalance.

  ‘Right side?’

  ‘No, left.’

  ‘Do you take A.P.?’

  Mr Ghatpande told him that he had been taking A.P. for two months and had responded well to the treatment. He had had a nice ‘collapse’ and his lung had shrunken to just this much: he showed him the size with his fingers.

  ‘Do you come from Bombay or Surat?’

  Mr Ghatpande laughed. ‘I come from Poona,’ he said, with that same carefree air of his. ‘In fact, in my case, it wasn’t entirely necessary to come here, but since the weather was unendurably hot there, I decided to come. It’s only a mild infiltration and I’ll test negative in a couple of months.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter if it’s mild or it’s serious,’ the man with the long nose retorted. ‘T.B. is T.B. When I was admitted to the sanatorium, I was C-minus, but now look at me. It’s well over a year since I came here. First it was fluid, which eventually led to pus. Every week they pierce me with a needle this long to take it out.’

  He raised his shirt on the left side to show the spot on his ribs from where they removed the pus. Two big patches of sticking plaster sealed the wound.

  Mr Ghatpande went white in the face. He asked him anxiously, ‘What the hell is fluid?’

  ‘With A.P., ninety out of a hundred people run the risk of getting fluid in their pleura,’ said the gentleman with the long nose. ‘The A.P. air is transformed into water. You think you’ll be cured within two months, but it could take two years. When the doctors send their patients here they just say things like that. Mr Manilkar is in the cottage opposite the ward. He’s been here for two years. Last year he tested negative, but he got fluid three times.’

  ‘He might be a particularly bad case,’ Mr Ghatpande said, ‘but I gained twenty-five pounds in one month.’

  ‘That’s immaterial,’ said the patient with the long nose. ‘This Bohra, who’s lying parallel to you on the other side of the window, has been here for the past five years. He managed to get up to a hundred and sixty pounds, but look at him now. The weight we gain is just body fat. It’ll burn off in just four days if you have a fever.’

  Just then the Bohra patient coughed pitifully. A cold shiver ran down my spine.

  He spat with great difficulty and called out from inside the ward in his broken voice, ‘Everyone’s fate is different. It’s not as if it happens to everyone.’

  The man with the long nose felt that he was losing ground with the Bohra patient’s statement. He became excited, and pulling his legs up on to the chair to sit cross-legged, he said, ‘Admittedly T.B. can be said to be the result of a man’s ill-fate, but fluid is the result of A.P. Ninety per cent of the people who take A.P. are susceptible to it.’

  He laughed pointlessly. Mr Ghatpande sank back into his pillow and I began to console myself with Mr Ghatpande’s own words: since I already had T.B. and both my lungs were affected, why should I be afraid of fluid? One should not pay attention to what others say. When the doctor comes in the morning to give me my injection I’ll ask him about it.

  ‘You didn’t come here at the right time, my friend,’ the man with the long nose said. ‘In another fifteen or twenty days the monsoon will start and there’s a particular risk of fluid in the rainy season. By about the fifteenth of June nearly half the sanatorium will be empty.’

  He would have continued to au
gment our knowledge about T.B. and fluid for who knows how long, but by then the doctor had arrived in his office and Mr Ghatpande was called in to see him.

  The man with the long nose turned to me. But acting on the instructions of the sister, I remained absolutely silent. He glanced at me and said, ‘You should try to get plenty of rest. You shouldn’t talk at all. Talking would just unnecessarily tire out your lungs. If A.P. works in your case, that’s all very well and good, otherwise they’ll give you P.P. No need to worry, P.P. turns out to be successful in many cases and people who take P.P. don’t run the risk of fluid.’ He smiled at me and left.

  For a moment I was surprised. I wondered why he had been so sympathetic towards me but had said no words of comfort to Mr Ghatpande. Perhaps he was jealous of Mr Ghatpande’s good health, whereas he would have no reason to envy me.

  When Mr Ghatpande returned after about half an hour, he burst into a loud guffaw. ‘I just asked the doctor about fluid,’ he said, ‘and he told me that the chances of my getting fluid are about the same as getting run over by a car.’ Mr Ghatpande laughed again and continued, ‘The doctor told me, “Nobody ever thinks about getting run over by a car, so why are you worrying about getting fluid in your lungs?” My case is quite mild. There’s hardly any chance I’ll get fluid.’

  Saying this, he sat down comfortably on his bed. He rested his back against his pillow and then he laughed again. The colour had returned to his face. ‘The doctor was telling me,’ he said, ‘that as a rule here, they examine the new patients for seven days in this ward, and if they don’t run a fever, they’re transferred to another ward and even allowed to walk around a little.’

  I heaved a deep sigh because I knew for sure that the chances of my ever being transferred from this ward were very slim.

  ‘You have no reason to worry,’ Mr Ghatpande told me. ‘You should never listen to what other people say. Have faith in yourself. You know what Napoleon once said about self-confidence?’

  Mr Ghatpande was about to reveal to me Napoleon’s views on self-confidence, when a patient with a shaven head came out of the inner ward. He wore a khaki shirt and trousers, and was of medium height and lanky. He had a broad chest and a rather large face, but his cheeks were sunken and there was a kind of a crazy look in his eyes. They seemed peculiarly hollow, straying constantly from one object to the next, resting on nothing.

  ‘Just think, gentlemen, you’ve arrived today and today I’m leaving.’ He bared his teeth in a grin and greeted us from the door. Walking on to the verandah, he first cast a glance at my chart and then at Mr Ghatpande’s.

  Mr Ghatpande laughed and asked him, ‘Are you too afraid of fluid?’

  ‘Well, yes, fluid is definitely worth fearing,’ he said, ‘and then, it’s been a year since I came here and my condition has not improved a bit. My fever hasn’t gone down and there hasn’t been any decrease of “G”.’

  ‘I myself will be leaving the sanatorium in a couple of months. My doctor says …’ Mr Ghatpande started to say, but the other man cut him short: ‘All the doctors say that. That’s exactly what they told me and, now look, I’ve been here a whole year. You did the wrong thing, coming to this sanatorium. Who cares about the patients here? This is just a goddamn business. I’m going to Miraj. The doctor there is the most renowned specialist in T.B. You did the wrong thing by coming here. If your case gets worse here, there’s no way you’ll get any better. It will rain here incessantly for weeks and months while the weather will be wonderful at Miraj.’

  He went outside and sat down on a recliner. I thought Mr Ghatpande would continue with his discourse, but he kept silent and looked sullenly out the window. In the inside ward the Bohra patient began to cough pathetically as usual. I felt some comfort as I reclined on my bed. I turned my eyes towards the outdoors. Evening was beginning to close in. A cool breeze was blowing and the silver oak leaves rustled. A bird came and perched on a thin branch of the tree opposite the ward and began whistling long, melodious notes. Just then the man with the long nose came in, bringing an Irani fellow with him, whom he introduced to Mr Ghatpande.

  The Irani was a pale young man, short of stature, with a cheerful disposition. His name was Hasan. In both English and Hindustani his pronunciation was quite entertaining. He looked at me and said, ‘Doan warry my friend. You’ll be arright. I been here the past year. I come in C-minus. I get fluid and that turn into pus. They prickled such big needle in my ribs. Oh my God! You’ll see how much I scream. Tomorrow they prickle me with the needle again. You hear it in here even.’

  ‘Could anyone explain to me what this bloody fluid really is?’ asked Mr Ghatpande suddenly.

  Mr Hasan turned towards him and said:

  ‘You know when the steam touches a cold surface, and drip-drip, it turns into drops of water? Same with the A.P. The air drip-drip, turns into water if it gets cold.’ He motioned with his fingers to show how the drops of water ‘drip-drip’, trickle into the pleura and become fluid. Then he said, ‘During monsoon most people here they get the fluid. I got a delicate chest like a goddamn balloon. I got to watch out about catching the cold.’

  Who knows what other information he would have shared with us if the dinner bell had not rung from far off in the club room. The man with the long nose went away and took Mr Hasan with him.

  The ward boy brought my meal, but I couldn’t bring myself to eat a single bite. When he left after tidying up my bed, I began to regret that I had ever agreed to come here. Already there was no strength left in my body and now I would have to be stuck full of needles. If I developed fluid and if I got pus, then I would be stuck full of even bigger needles. To die of tuberculosis was terrifying enough in itself, but to die getting stuck full of needles? My eyes filled with tears. But then Mr Ghatpande’s words echoed in my ears: Have faith in yourself. Exercise your will power and don’t listen to what other people say! The ward boy had switched off the lights at about 9.30. The night was especially dark with the waxing of the moon. I didn’t know if Mr Ghatpande lay awake or if he was sleeping. I wanted to talk to him. But I couldn’t even hear him shifting around in his bed. ‘He is the master of strong will power,’ I thought, trying to console myself. ‘He must have gone to sleep.’ Then I tried to soothe myself with the help of his words: ‘Will Power, Will Power, Will Power!’ I don’t know when I finally fell asleep as I lay there awakening my will power, soothing myself, listening to the ‘drip-drip’ of the A.P. fluid.

  When I woke up in the morning there was a great commotion in the ward. It was discovered that Mr Ghatpande had been missing since dawn. The man with the long nose had come to wish him a good morning and turn their acquaintance into a deep friendship, as soon as he got up that morning. He had seen that Mr Ghatpande’s bed was empty. He thought Mr Ghatpande must have gone to the bathroom. After half an hour he returned. But he was still not there. When he went to look in the bathroom he was not there either. The newly admitted patients were not allowed to use the bathroom even to relieve themselves. He went and conveyed the news of Mr Ghatpande’s disappearance to the nurses’ quarters. And thence arose all the tumult. Even the head doctor was informed. After a good deal of running around, a telegram was sent to his father. The old man arrived that evening. Laughing with embarrassment and begging everyone’s pardon, he told the doctor that Mr Ghatpande had arrived in Poona by the first bus that morning. Certain patients had made his son feel frightened that he would get fluid and who knows what else, and he was not prepared to return for any reason. Mr Ghatpande’s father got a refund of his one month’s security deposit, foregoing the charges for not giving fifteen days’ notice and took away his son’s belongings.

  The R.M.O. came into the ward as soon as he had left. He reprimanded all the old patients and threatened that if they did not tell him who had spoken with Mr Ghatpande and who had misguided him, he would throw everyone out of the sanatorium within twenty-four hours. He reprimanded the doctor and the sister and gave orders that if any new patients arrived who had
already had some treatment, they were never to be put in the Acute Ward if their health was reasonably good and if they were not running a fever, etc., etc.

  Mr Ghatpande was gone. Perhaps he had no recollection of me, but I could never forget him. I stayed in the sanatorium for three years. I was given A.P. injections in both my lungs every eight or ten days. I also had P.P. injections in my stomach. I underwent an Adhesion operation in both lungs, and both times, after the operation, I got fluid. I had a number of close calls. The Bohra and a few other patients died during that time, but I never forsook the company of that great cure Mr Ghatpande had explained to me, citing Marshal Stalin as an example.

  Three years later, when I was leaving the sanatorium, the R.M.O. shook hands with me and said, ‘I feel that in your recovery your will power has played a greater role than our treatment. I congratulate you on getting well. Though we got disheartened at times, you never did!’

  Today, five years later, all these events suddenly passed before my eyes again. I am completely healthy now, but I always go to the mountains during the hot season. This time, I have come to the Dharampur Sanatorium. A few hours ago, a patient arrived in the cottage next to mine. Just for the sake of it I went to see who it was. He was in a lamentable state. Both his lungs were affected. Only a skeleton! I heard the Doctor-in-Charge saying: