Malgudi Days (28 page)

‘Where did he get my horoscope?' I asked.

‘They took it from your father many, many years ago; they were such good friends and neighbours in our village.' She added again, ‘They were such good friends that they vowed on the day the girl was born to continue the friendship with this alliance. On the very day she was born, you were betrothed,' she said calmly, as if it were the normal thing.

‘What are you saying? Do you mean to say you betrothed to me a child only a few hours old?'

‘Yes,' she said calmly.

‘Why? why?' I asked, unable to comprehend her logic. ‘Don't you see how absurd it is?'

‘No,' she said. ‘They are a good family, known and attached to us for generations.'

‘It's idiotic,' I cried. ‘How can you involve me in this manner? What was my age then?'

‘What does it matter?' she said. ‘When I was married I was nine and your father thirteen, and didn't we lead a happy life?'

‘That's irrelevant, what you have done with your lives. How old was I?'

‘Old enough, about five or six, what does it matter?'

‘Betrothed? How? By what process?'

‘Don't question like that. You are not a lawyer in a court, she said, dropping her mask of friendliness.

‘I may not be a lawyer, but remember that I am not a convict either,' I said, secretly wondering if it was a relevant thing to say.

‘You think I am a prisoner?' she asked, matching my irrelevancy.

I remained silent for a while and pleaded, ‘Mother, listen to me. How can any marriage take place in this fashion? How can two living entities possessing intelligence and judgement ever be tied together for a lifetime?'

‘How else?' she said, and picking up my last word, ‘What lifetime? Of course, every marriage is for a lifetime. No one marries anew every month.'

I felt desperate and cried, ‘Idiotic! Don't be absurd, try to understand what I am saying . . .'

She began to wail loudly at this. ‘Second time you are hurling an insulting word. Was it for this I have survived your father? How I wish I had mounted the funeral pyre as our ancients decreed for a widow; they knew what a widow would have to face in life, to stand abusive language from her own offspring.' She beat her forehead with such violence that I feared she might crack her skull. Face flushed and tears streaming down her cheeks, she glared at me; I quailed at her look and wished that I could get up and escape. At close quarters, unaccustomed as I was, it was most disturbing. While she went on in the same strain, my mind was planning how best to get away, but she had practically cornered me and was hissing and swaying as she spoke. I began to wonder if I had thoughtlessly used some bad word and was going over our conversation in a reverse order. My last word was ‘idiotic', nothing foul and provocative in such a word. Most common usage. ‘Idiot' would have been more offensive than ‘idiotic'. ‘Idiotic' could be exchanged between the best of friends under any circumstance of life and no one need flare up. Before this word she had said, ‘No one marries anew every month.' I never said that they did. What a civilization, ‘A Wounded Civilization', a writer had called it. I could not help laughing slightly at the thought of the absurdity of it all. It provoked her again. Wiping her eyes and face with the tip of her sari, she said, ‘You are laughing at me! Yes, I've made a laughingstock of myself bringing you up, tending you, nursing you and feeding you, and keeping the house for you. You feel so superior and learned because of the books your father has collected laboriously in the other room . . .'

‘But they weren't his . . . only someone's property mortgaged for a loan . . .' I said, unable to suppress my remark.

And she said, ‘With all that reading you couldn't even get a B.A.! While every slip of a girl is a graduate today.' Her voice sounded thick and hoarse due to the shouting she had indulged in.

I abruptly left, snatching my
kurta
and the upper cloth which were within reach, though I generally avoided this dress as it made one look like a political leader. I preferred always the blue bush-shirt and dhoti or pants, but they were hanging by a hook on the wall where Mother was leaning. As I dashed out I heard her conclude: ‘. . . any date we mention, that man will come and take us to see the girl and approve . . .' So, she was imagining herself packing up, climbing a bus for the village with me in tow, to be received at that end as honoured visitors and the girl to be paraded before us bedecked in gold and silk, waiting for a nod of approval from me. ‘Idiotic,' I muttered again, walking down our street.

Going down Market Road, I noticed Dr Kishen arrive on a scooter at M.M.C., already opened by his general assistant named Ramu, who fancied himself half a doctor and examined tongue and pulse and dispensed medicine when the doctor's back was turned. The doctor did not mind it, as Ramu was honest and rendered proper account of his own transactions. The doctor on noticing me said, ‘Come in, come in.' A few early patients were waiting with their bottles. He was one who did not believe in tablets, but always wrote out a prescription for every patient, and Ramu concocted the mixture and filled the bottles. The doctor always said, ‘Every prescription must be a special composition to suit the individual. How can mass-produced tablets help?' He wrote several lines on a sheet of paper and then turned the sheet of paper and wrote along the margin, too; he challenged anyone to prove that his prescriptions were not the longest: ‘I'll give free medicine to anyone who can produce a longer prescription anywhere in this country!' And his patients, mostly from the surrounding villages, sniggered and murmured approval. When he hailed me I just slowed down my pace but did not stop. ‘Good morning, Doctor. I'm all right . . .' He cut me short with, ‘I know, I know, you are a healthy animal of no worth to the medical profession, still I want to speak to you . . . Come in, take that chair, that's for friends who are in good health; sick people sit there.' He flourished his arm in the direction of a teakwood bench along a wall and a couple of iron folding chairs. He went behind a curtain for a moment and came out donning his white apron and turned the hands of a sign on the wall which said DOCTOR IS IN, PLEASE BE SEATED. He briefly glanced through a pile of blotters and folders advertising new infallible drugs and swept them away to a corner of his desk. ‘Of value only to the manufacturers, all those big companies and multinationals, not to the ailing population of our country. I never give these smart canvassing agents in shirt-sleeves and tie more than five minutes to have their say, and one minute to pick up their samples and literature and leave. While there are other M.D.s in town who eat out of their hands and have built up a vast practice with physician samples alone!' Ramu went round collecting the bottles from those occupying the bench. ‘Why don't you give me a cheque?' asked the doctor.

I thought he was joking and said, ‘Yes, of course, why not?' to match what I supposed was his mood, and added, ‘How much? Ten thousand?'

‘Not so much,' he said, ‘Less than that . . .' He took out a small notebook from the drawer and kept turning its leaves. At this moment an old man made his entry, coughing stentoriously. The doctor looked up briefly and flourished his hand towards the bench. The old man didn't obey the direction but stood in the middle of the hall and began, ‘All night . . .' The doctor said, ‘All right, all right . . . sit down and wait. I'll come and help you to sleep well tonight.' The man subsided on the bench, a sentence he had begun trailing away into a coughing fit.

The doctor said, ‘Two hundred and forty-five rupees up to last week . . . none this week.' I now realized that this was more than a joke. I was aghast at this demand. He thrust his notebook before me and said, ‘Twenty visits at ten rupees a visit. I have charged nothing for secondary visits, and the balance for medicine . . .' The cough-stricken patient began to gurgle, cleared his throat and tried to have his say. The doctor silenced him with a gesture. A woman held up a bawling kid and said, ‘Sir, he brings up every drop of milk . . .' The doctor glared at her and said, ‘Don't you see I'm busy? Am I the four-headed Brahma? One by one. You must wait.'

‘He brings up . . .'

‘Wait, don't tell me anything now.' After this interlude he said to me, ‘I don't generally charge for secondary visits—I mean a second call, which I can respond to on my way home. I charge only for visits which are urgent. In your case I've not noted the number of secondary visits.'

I was mystified and said, ‘You have yourself called me a healthy brute, so what's it all about?'

‘Don't you know? Has your mother never spoken to you?'

‘No, never, I never thought . . . Yes, she spoke about my marrying some girl, worried me no end about it,' I said, and added, ‘Doctor, if you can think of some elixir which'll reduce her fervour about my marriage . . .'

‘Yes, yes, I'm coming to it. It's a thing that is weighing on her mind very much. She feels strongly that there must be a successor to her when she leaves.' The doctor seemed to be talking in conundrums. The day seemed to have started strangely. ‘Has she not discussed her condition with you?' Before I could answer him or grasp what he was saying, the man with the cough made his presence felt with a deafening series, attracting the doctor's attention, and as the doctor rose, the woman lifted the child and began, ‘He doesn't retain even a drop . . .' The doctor said to me, ‘Don't go away. I'll dispose of these two first.' He took the squealing baby and the cougher, one by one, behind the curtain, and came back to his table and wrote a voluminous prescription for each, and passed them on to Ramu through a little window. Presently he resumed his speech to me, but was interrupted by his patients, who wanted to know whether the mixture was to be drunk before or after a meal and what diet was to be taken. He gave some routine answer and muttered to me, ‘It's the same question again and again, again and again—whether they could have buttermilk or
rasam
and rice or bread and coffee, and whether before or after—what does it matter? But they want an answer and I have to give it, because the medical profession has built up such rituals! Ha! ha!'

At this moment two others approached his desk, having waited on the bench passively all along. He gestured them to return to their seats, and rose saying, ‘Follow me, we will have no peace here . . .' I followed him into his examination room, a small cabin with a high table, screened off and with a lot of calendar pictures plastered on the wall. He asked me to hoist myself on the examining table as if I were a patient, and said, ‘This is the only place where I can talk without being interrupted.' I had been in suspense since his half-finished statements about my mother. He said, ‘Your mother is in a leave-taking mood . . .' I was stunned to hear this. I could never imagine my mother in such a mood. No one seemed to have her feet more firmly planted on the earth, with her ceaseless activities around the house, and her strident voice ringing through the halls. The doctor had said ‘leave-taking'. How could she ever leave her universe? It was inconceivable. My throat went dry and my heart raced when I tried to elicit further clarification from him. I said weakly, ‘What sort of leave-taking? Thinking of retiring to Benares?'

‘No, farther than that,' said the doctor, indicating heaven, after lighting a cigarette. The little cabin became misty and choking. I gently coughed out the smoke that had entered my lungs without my striking a match. The smoke stung my eyes and brought tears, observing which the doctor said sympathetically, ‘Don't cry. Learn to take these situations calmly; you must think of the next step to take, practically and calmly.' He preached to me the philosophy of detachment, puffing away at his cigarette, and not minding in the least the coughing, groaning and squealing emanating from the bench in the hall. I felt bad to be holding up the doctor in this manner. But I had to know what he was trying to say about my mother through his jerky half-statements. He asked suddenly, ‘Why hasn't she been talking to you?' I had to explain to him that I came home late and left early, and we met briefly each day. He made a deprecatory sound with his tongue and remarked, ‘You are an undutiful fellow. Where do you hide yourself all day?'

‘Oh, this and that,' I said, feeling irritated. ‘I have to see people and do things. One has to live one's own life, you know!'

‘What people and what life?' pursued the doctor relentlessly. I couldn't explain to him really how I spent the day. He'd have brushed aside anything I said. So I thought it best to avoid his question and turn his thoughts to my mother. Here he had created a hopeless suspense and tension in me, and was wandering in his talk, puffing out smoke and tipping the ash on the cement floor. What an untidy doctor—the litter and dust and ash alone was enough to breed disease and sickness—he was the most reckless doctor I'd ever come across. As more patients came into the other room, Ramu parted the curtain and peeped in to say, ‘They are waiting.' This placed some urgency into the whole situation and the doctor hastily threw down the cigarette, crushed it under his shoe and said, ‘For four months I have been visiting your home off and on, some days several times—that little girl would come running and panting to say, “Come, Doctor, at once, Amma is very ill, at once.” When such a call is received I never ignore it. I drop whatever I may have on hand and run to the patient. Giving relief to the suffering is my first job . . . Sometimes the girl would come a second time, too.'

‘What was it?' I asked, becoming impatient.

‘Well, that's what one has to find out; I'm continuously watching and observing. It's not in my nature to treat any complaint casually and take anything for granted . . .' He was misleading himself, according to what I could observe of his handling of his patients. After a lot of rambling, he came to the point: ‘She is subject to some kind of fainting, which comes on suddenly. However, she is responding to treatment; I think it must be some kind of cardiac catch, if I may call it so, due to normal degenerative process. We can keep her going with medicines, but how long one cannot say . . .'