"Go back to America!" (BH:D93)

November 4, 2011

At the sample collection center in the Lords Hospital, on Wednesday morning, I was told that the thyroid test results will take two days. So I called up early this morning to check if the results have been send to the friendly Dr. Gopakumar. "Avide phone kedanenu thonunnu, oru panthrandu mani kazhinju vilikuvo?" (the phone in that dept is not working, can you call after noon?)said the Malayalee female voice who came on the line after the American accented automated female voice 'welcomed' me to 'the Lords hospital' and asked me to dial the extension if I knew it or else wait for the operator.

I called half an hour before noon. The extension worked. 

"Result ready aanu. Dr. Gopakumarinte case alle. File-il koduthittund" (Results are ready. Dr. Gopakumar's case, right? It's been added to the file). 

"Valiya upakaram, chetta" (Much gratitude, brother)

On the rickshaw ride, Achan and I laugh again about a book title we had seen in the Hindu newspaper yesterday. Howard Johnson's book is called "Whatever it is, I am against it!" We both thought it will be an apt title for Amma's autobiography!

A curious mix avatar of mason and mechanic was repairing the door of Dr. Gopakumar's office. The surgically removed damaged lock is lying segmented on the examination table. It's fate is sealed. 

"How long will it take?" the doctor asks the fixer. 

"Aramanikoor saare" (Half an hour Sir). 

"Half an hour?!" the doctor repeats in disbelief and then smiles at me. 

"Ithanu India" (This is India) 

The doctor stays in Thiruvananthapuram for six weeks and then six days in London where he has nursing homes. So he is familiar with the relative inefficiency of the workforce as in Malayalee vs Polish. My file hasn't reached him. Achan goes to ask for it at the front desk. I discuss the Wheat Belly book with the doctor. 

Achan comes back empty handed. A nurse is supposed to bring it. "You will be lucky if it comes over promptly. The nurses are usually performing 'thiruvathira' dance here!" doctor jokes. He asks the mechanic to continue working as we talk. 

As soon as Achan gets up to find out what happened to my file a few minutes later, a young nurse brings it over. But it doesn't have the two test results from Wednesday. Another trip to the reception. This time we manage to recover one result. The last one is brought over by another nurse. "Definitely a blood sugar problem. Good that we caught it early. You just manage your diet and exercise and reverse the condition in a couple of months. I will prescribe a tablet. Eat half of it daily after lunch till the day of surgery. It is meant to stimulate your beta cells which are not working full capacity now. Then have your surgery and go back to America". We laugh at the go back to America suggestion. But he is serious. " Your body is used to American diet. This country is rapidly urbanizing without any progress in hygiene and pollution management. The rapid increase in cancer and thyroid problems we are seeing now is nothing. Next generation is totally doomed. Look at the way hazardous waste is dumped all over the place. And harmful insecticides and pesticides. It is coming right back to us through the ground water." Given this overall pessimistic outlook for the society, my personal situation suddenly appears rosy. But the doctor continues, "Don't touch alcohol" Bloody Brilliant! I cannot drink myself to oblivious blindness at this inevitable doom. The decline and somber fall must be witnessed soberly. 

He writes the prescription. "If you go into hypo after taking half a tablet after lunch, keep a small pouch of sugar handy." 

"How do I know I have gone into hypo?" 

"You will feel cold. Your head will have the tingling feeling." 

He remembers that he has packets of sugar that he picks up form the cafeteria at Technopark where he goes to have lunch. "You can keep these" he hands me two red packets from his leather bag. 

"What about you?" he turns to Achan. Achan explains how he gave up testing long time ago and hasn't been feeling any symptoms. "You are too cool," laughs the doctor, "John Wayne cool, I would say! Symptoms may not come. All of a sudden you might get a painless heart attack. Get yourself a glucose test done and bring me the results." Achan had been planning to do that since he liked Dr. Gopakumar's approach to life.

"My sugar level jumps every time I come back to India. Get yourself a glucometer. You can test yourself a couple of times each month. When I see my levels rise, I cycle for 45 minutes and do dumbbells for another 45. Exercise is the only way out. So start as soon as your surgery is done." 

As we finish medical matters, the door lock is fixed. The mechanic hands the doctor 4 keys. "Don't tell them you gave me 4 keys. Just say two. I will keep one and leave one at the office. If extra keys are floating around here, the nurses will use this room at night." The mechanic beams and leaves. 

Our conversation drifts to non-medical topics. The dog problem in the city came up. The doctor had an apartment in Jawahar Nagar but he moved to one at Vazhuthacad because of the dog problem. "It is impossible to walk at nights. The dogs chase scooters and bikes. Two dozen of them at least. God knows where they disappear during the day time. One night, they chased a policeman on his scooter. He fell down. They mauled him real bad. I got myself a 6 feet long cane. The guy selling the cane asked me if it was for killing snakes. I walk around with that." 

"They are afraid of the cane?" Achan wonders. 

"Yes, it works" 

Doctor talks about his issues with a lawyer in London. "I argued the case myself because his juniors were useless. They just stood there silently in the court. I argued myself and won. But then he billed me for those 5 hours as well. I am obviously not going to pay." He went on show his remarkable familiarity with the legal systems of the world. "The trouble with the legal systems of England and its erstwhile colonies is that advocates get promoted to be judges. This leads to many problems. In France and Germany, the course and tests to become a judge have nothing to with becoming an advocate. That separation is very useful." 

He narrates a funny case of an Indian plastic surgeon in the UK who specialized in penis enlargement and got sued. "I don't know why people get that surgery. You get this much added," he says holding his thumb and index finger parallel to each other indicating the extension of the penis surgically possible. His gesture reminds me of the classic symbol for a "small" drink, my mind still stuck on the alcohol moratorium. "Even in the 80s that surgery was around 8000 pounds. He made a lot of money." 

The narration continued with the imitation of the Jewish lawyer who was hired and the final judgment which let him free. "Lawyers fee: 3 million pounds! But he made that back in a couple of years. He quit enlarging penises and went after enhancing other parts."

We shake hands when it is time to leave. "I may not be here for the surgery. But if my UK trip is postponed to the 14th, I will be. Either way, I am sending your file with the OK for surgery" I wish he would be around. I could use more stories next weekend. 

On our way back, we stop at Kanakunnu palace. International book fair is in progress organized by DC books and Malayala Manorama. A banner outside says Kiran Bedi would be a guest during one of the days. I wonder how much she charges for her flight ticket to get here. Around 350 publishers are participating. Though it is a working day afternoon, there are visitors in every stall. A young man in a blue suit and tie at the entrance asks us to deposit our bag before proceeding. It was a bright and sunny day and the afternoon was uncomfortably warm to be in a suit. 

During my initial days as a poor Indian graduate student in the USA, while at restaurants, I would pay attention to only the right side of the menu card. The dishes and their ingredients were pointless for me. Only the price mattered. At the book stall today, I would quickly flip each book to check the price on the back cover. Achan said he had Rs. 1500 with him. If Dr. Gopakumar, the story teller, was going to be away, I wanted to ensure that I had books for company at the hospital. Most of the English book prices are direct conversions of their dollar value. Surprisingly, the made-in-china coffee table, collectible and pictorial reference books are prohibitively highly priced. I had expected them to be cheaper in India than in the US. Not the case. 

After the major English fiction and non-fiction publishers, there are the spiritual printers and children's books specialists. 

At one stall, wordsworth editions of classics are lined up reasonably priced in the below Rs. 200 range. I pick up Don Quixote and Brothers Karamazov. "Have you read Anna Kareena?" the young bespectacled man in a black tshirt at the stall asks. I like his manipulation of the title to include a popular Bollywood actress's name. Subliminal selling, I suppose. I smile. 

"How about the Idiot?" he asks. I keep the Brothers back. Achan gets read to pay. "All payment is at the end, Sir. You can pick up all the books you want and go there." the young man clarified.

Across from that stall, the rather enticingly titled "Low price publishers". The books are low quality hard bound ones, but some brilliant titles. I pick up 'Jatakamala or A garland of birth stories' by Marie Musaeus-Higgins (1914, Rs. 150) making a mental note to spruce up the Jataka tales section of www.timelessfolktales.com The illustrations in the book are hardly visible but the endearing font from 1914 is preserved. I hope the typos are too. 

A quick mental toss up had to be done between two books. I told myself that history of education in medieval India from 1100 to 1757, I can learn online. So 'Travels in India by Jean-Baptiste Tavernier' translated from the original French edition of 1676 was picked up Rs. 350. I was pretty sure that this book would be available in Google books. But then sometimes a book is a book, not a google book. And there was no way Achan was going to read anything online. As if she had read the superfast economics and financial calculations rising and falling inside my head, the lady manning the stall said, "there will be a 10% discount on everything". She also wore spectacles. I think sales staff with spectacles are preferred at a book fair. 

If Mr. Tavernier, the Baron of Aubonne, was going to tell me about India in the 17th century, it was only fair that Ibn Battuta became my teacher for the 14th century. H.A.R Gibb's translation of Battuta's work comes at a cheaper Rs 185. 

Onwards to the Malayalam section. Big crowd. Difficult to walk in the aisles between the tables among the other browsers. Who said reading is dead? "In Thiruvananthapuram, it certainly is not" Achan asserts. I browse through numerous works of EMS Nampoothiripad. Achan asks a salesman(with specs) if Bimal Mitra's 'Vilkanund' (translated from Bengali) is available. While the dude went to search the database, we pick up Bimal Mitra's "Charithrathil Illathavar"(history's unmentioned). The salesman comes back with bad news. 

We get ourselves a shopping basket and move on. Since our backyard vegetable farming is picking up speed,we drop Paulson Thom's "Purayidakrishi" (yard farming) into the shopping basket. At the end of the aisle, we part ways. Achan goes to the novel and non-fiction section, I turn to poetry and spirituality. I pick up collections of poems by Vallathol and Kumaranasan. G. Shankarakurup's translation of Rabrindranath Tagore's Gitanjali has been hailed as the best. Achan had gifted the home copy of Changambuzha's Ramanan to Biju, so I get a new one. A collection of short stories by Kakkanadan who recently passed away. I weigh Ravi Menon's small work on old Malayalam film songs but put it back from budgetary consideration. 

As we wait to get billed, my eyes fall on Kuttykrishna Marar's Bharathaparyadanam which is supposed to be a classic. "get it, get it" Achan got excited. The 8 Malayalam books cost us close to Rs 600 with the discount. "English books are billed at the end, you must make all payments also there. We will get these books to you there."

The remaining stalls are packed with big, thick textbooks of engineering, medicine and computer science. Here not the just sales folks but even the shoppers have spectacles. We hurry past them to make the payment. Across from the payment center, stalls selling globes, posters and writing boards. Another one selling hand-held massagers. Next chappati makers and induction cookers. 

After the payment counter, there are magazines available for ready cash. After them, multicolored Kozhikodan Halwa sit seducing shoppers from their shrink wraps. Green, yellow, red, black. White cashews and pistachios on top of them. Sugary halwa is strictly off limits for me. "Like Socrates let us pretend we are in this market place to make a list of things we do not want," Achan dishes out some philosophy to dry my drool.

We come out of the fair. Smell of Mulakai-bajji frying wafts in the air. Few couples under the trees in the palace compound. A stray dog scavenging.

Right outside the exit, a brand new Hyundai Eon is parked for test driving. Marketing by Hilton Hyundai. As we walk by, the sales guy approaches us with a brochure. "Innu vere oru car vangichathe ullu" (We just bought another car today!) I smile at him. He is amused at this unexpected remark. 

Earlier in the day Achan had remarked how casual buying a car has become. It used to be a moment of celebration with months and years of planning and relatives visiting in the 90s. Now one just sucks on a couple of Kopiko espresso toffees that one is really not supposed to eat!