In the City a Mirror Wandering

by Upendranath Ashk

  And now Dina Nath was back in that same old shop again. His father and uncle did the same work they’d always done in their shop in Lal Bazaar. Dina Nath’s seven- or eight-year-old son opened the shop every morning and tidied it, and Hakim Sahib would come and sit down about half an hour after the shop opened.

  Since Dina Nath was devoted to medicine and refused to return to goldsmithing no matter how many times his father told him to, he’d put up a signboard with the added title ‘fida-e-tib’ or, ‘Devoted to Medicine’:

  Hakim Lala Dina Nath, Devoted to Medicine, Hakim Hazik (Gold Medallist)

  But Anant always called him Mama-e-Tib, or ‘Uncle Medicine’.

  3 The son of Thallu, the maker of inlaid jewellery.

  7

  ‘Tell me, brother Chetan, when did you come from Lahore?’

  Chetan was walking along, wrapped up in his thoughts, when suddenly he stopped. Hakim Dina Nath was seated to his left at his old shop in a suit and shoes, instead of a kameez and pyjamas, at a small table and chair, smiling through wispy whiskers (Chetan was astonished).

  If Anant had been with him, Anant would have asked, ‘Hey there, Uncle Medicine, what’s your latest scam?’ At the thought of Anant, Chetan said to himself, ‘Tell me, Hakim Sahib, I heard you had a son, congratulations! Now give your wispy whiskers a break!’ . . . But he wasn’t in the mood to joke. Silently, he climbed the wooden step into the shop.

  Before, when Dina Nath had worked with his father and uncle inlaying jewellery at this same shop, there were burlap mats spread out for sitting on and no steps whatsoever. When Chetan and Anant used to stop by on their way home from school, then college, they’d sit on the mats and let their legs dangle from the shop; but now the spot where the mats had been was adorned by a table, chair and bench, so a wooden step had also been installed for climbing up into the shop.

  Chetan entered the shop, shook Dina Nath’s hand, and went to sit on the bench against the wall across from him. He didn’t respond to his question, but said instead, ‘Congratulations, Hakim Sahib, Anant just told me you’ve had a son.’

  ‘Congratulations to YOU, congratulations to YOU,’ Dina Nath’s fair complexion reddened slightly as he said this and his smile was tinged with embarrassment. But Chetan wasn’t happy. He saw that Dina Nath’s cheeks were sunken, the lids of his large, bulging cowry-like eyes had grown heavy; his long, thick handlebar moustaches, which he’d once been so proud of—pointy enough to pierce a lime, and which up until two years ago had been as thick as pump shoe laces, now hung limp beneath his nose. When he smiled, lines formed on either side of his mouth, from below his nose all the way down to the sides of his chin—and he wasn’t yet twenty-five.

  ‘Tell me, how’s it going?’ asked Chetan hesitantly.

  ‘Thanks be to God,’ he said, his smile contracting slightly, as he drew out the A in ‘thanks’. Then a long sigh suddenly escaped his lips, ‘But this isn’t the right place for a good hakim.’

  ‘All places are equal for the man with a healing touch,’ said Chetan. ‘People will come from Delhi and the south to be healed by him, whether he’s in the desert or the jungle, the village or the city, on a soft cushion or at the plinth of a well.’

  ‘If patients come to see someone, have him treat them, and they find relief, then he will become famous and people will learn that he has the healing touch. Here, a patient comes to my place one day, the next day they go to Nabi Jan, and the third day they go to Durga Prasad. And of course, whoever does come wants free medicine,’ Dina Nath added with some irritation.

  ‘To get famous, you have to distribute free medicines,’ said Chetan. ‘There must be some medicines that are cheap and can be given out for free—the kinds for digestion, constipation, purgatives and so on. Let people fill the expensive prescriptions with the compounder. Hakim Nabi Jan . . .’

  ‘Arré bhai, I know all this . . . but right at the beginning I made the mistake of opening my dispensary in my own neighbourhood. People have drunk seers of violet sharbat and essence of bugloss and not a single bastard has given me one paisa, and on top of that they swear at me.’

  ‘A brilliant man like you should set up shop in Lahore,’ argued Chetan. ‘And your medicines should be made famous throughout India with advertising. Already your whooping cough medicine is infallible . . .’

  Dina Nath only sighed deeply.

  And Chetan told him the story of Kaviraj Ramdas, how he’d got his Kaviraj degree, made his dispensary famous all over India on the strength of advertising, written Marriage Secrets and sold lakhs of copies, and how the people who read his books came immediately to his dispensary, whereupon he fleeced them forthwith.

  ‘You’re so brilliant,’ said Chetan abandoning the more formal term for ‘you’ as he spoke. ‘You know so much more than Kaviraj; you’re devoted to your work. But you’re just sitting here rotting away. Jalandhar is too small for you. Come to Lahore and start a practice there.’

  Hakim Dina Nath’s eyes opened wide. For a moment he sat and stared into the void, as if lost in a dream world. Then he got up and took a manuscript from the cupboard.

  ‘I have also written a book for married couples. Take a look, the style is so much better than Kaviraj Ramdas’s Marriage Secrets, and there’s much more information in it.’

  ‘If Dina’s book is printed, a hullabaloo will break out in the medical community!’

  Chetan turned to look. Dina Nath’s uncle, Dal Chand, stood nearby, with his big round eyes, handlebar moustaches and innocent, plump-cheeked face.

  ‘Where did this idiot come from?’ thought Chetan to himself, but aloud he said, ‘Namaste,’ and pressed his hands together. He added, ‘Tell me Chacha Dal Chand, how are things?’

  ‘Arré, has anything ever been bad for me, that it would be so today?’ laughed Uncle as he smoothed out his moustaches. ‘I get up at dawn, I still do one hundred push-ups and sit-ups, I work hard all day and sleep soundly at night. I never touch Vanaspati ghee, and eat only milk and ghee from my own cow.’

  He set one foot in the shop, scratched his thigh and began to explain the harm that can come from using Vanaspati ghee, and the benefits of pure milk and ghee, as though he were an elder, when he was actually only five or six years older than his nephew Dina Nath.

  *

  Uncle Dal Chand had been like this from the beginning. Dina Nath had started working at the shop after passing the middle school exams, but Chetan and Anant were in the habit of making a point of sitting in the shop with Dina Nath for a while if they went home through Mohalla Mendruan, Mitta Bazaar and Padiyan. Dina Nath had left school, but he continued to study his neighbours’ textbooks, especially science. Chetan and Anant still did not know much science. They hadn’t yet started studying it, when one evening Dina Nath showed them a science trick. He placed two small glasses filled with a white watery substance on a teapoy. He then took a white paper and wet one end of it in one of the glasses. It turned red. He dipped the other end into the other glass, and it turned blue. Chetan looked on astonished. How could a white paper change colour in a white watery substance? He just could not understand it.

  Then one day, Dina Nath made a crystal and showed it to them. Chetan asked him where he’d learned all this.

  Dal Chand had replied for him, ‘This is all the magic of science. Even at this age, Dina can perform amazing feats your science teacher probably doesn’t know. When he grows up, he’ll be an important scientist.’

  And that day, Uncle Dal Chand explained at length what can be done with chemistry and how Dina Nath would one day turn copper into gold.

  When Dina Nath started doing magic tricks, Uncle Dal Chand began giving speeches on magic; even Thallu Ram would sometimes jump into the middle of the speeches. When Dina Nath took up compounding medicines, his father and uncle augmented everyone’s wealth of knowledge on the topic of medicine. Thallu Ram did not interfere as much as Dal Chand, but both of them suffered from this affliction, and Chetan felt quite irate when he was forc
ed to listen to what those two had to say rather than what Dina Nath was saying. Finally, one day, he got so annoyed, he said to Anant, ‘After all, Dina Nath’s the one studying medicine, but Thallu Ram and Dal Chand seem to have become doctors without studying anything at all!’

  ‘I’ll fix those sons of bitches,’ said Anant.

  In those days, they were studying for their intermediate FA degree. One day, on their way home from college, they saw Dina Nath seated at the shop as always. After talking about this or that for a couple of minutes, Anant asked, ‘Dina, is there any cure for haemorrhoids?’

  Dina Nath looked through a book and read out a very long recipe.

  Then Thallu Ram pushed the cheap frames of his glasses on to the bridge of his nose (they had slipped down while he was working) and, leaving off work, he remarked, ‘A moneylender had bleeding haemorrhoids and was in a wretched state from continuously losing blood. All the hakims and vaidyas around tried to cure him, but it came to nothing. One day, he was travelling to another village on urgent business, when he stopped at a well along the way to rest a bit. A sugar-cane crop grew in the nearby field, the long stalks of cane waving in the breeze. They were tended by a tenant farmer. He cut down fifteen or twenty stalks of sugarcane and presented them to the moneylender. The moneylender did feel a bit thirsty, and some of the cane was quite sweet and juicy, so he sucked them all dry. Then the farmer said he would harvest a whole bundle of them and send them home with him on his way back.

  ‘That evening, the moneylender did not bleed. The next day, he sucked the sugar cane some more, but the corners of his mouth were skinned from too much sucking, so he stopped after five or ten tastes. That day too he found relief from his sickness, and there was no end to his astonishment when he found his haemorrhoids were completely cured.

  ‘One day the town hakim came to the village to see a patient. He had previously cured the moneylender many times. After seeing the patient, the hakim went to see the moneylender as well and, after greeting him, he asked after his health.

  ‘“My problem has disappeared,” the moneylender, who had been completely cured in just a few days, told him enthusiastically.

  ‘“But how?”

  ‘“By sucking on sugar cane.”

  ‘The hakim wrinkled his brow. For a few moments he was lost in thought. Then he said, “Yes, there is one kind of bleeding haemorrhoids which can be cured by sucking on sugar cane.”

  ‘“Then why didn’t you tell me?” complained the moneylender.

  ‘“Because there was no hope of finding the right kind of sugar cane,”’ said Thallu Ram, imitating the hakim’s voice in a theatrical manner.

  ‘“But of course you can get any kind of sugar cane,” said the moneylender.

  ‘“Well, let’s go to that well where you sucked on the sugar cane,” said the hakim.

  ‘Then the moneylender enthusiastically took him to the field in the company of a couple of other villagers. The hakim told the farmer to dig up the spot where the sugar cane had been harvested. Everyone was astonished when they dug up a dead hooded snake. The farmer told him that one day he’d found a snake in the porch, which he’d killed and buried right in this spot.

  ‘Then the hakim said to the moneylender, “You are lucky, sir, that you were given the sugar cane from this soil to suck on. This cure for haemorrhoids is written in the books; come to town and I’ll show you. If a black-hooded snake remains buried somewhere for two months, and sugar cane is planted there, then the person who sucks on that cane will find relief from the most intractable of bleeding haemorrhoids. I would certainly have told you this cure, but where would I have found such sugar cane?”’

  After telling this story, Thallu Ram looked at his son and his friends with great pride and, hitching up his dhoti slightly, he jumped down from his seat and went a slight distance to squat over the drain and urinate.

  Then Uncle Dal Chand smoothed out his moustaches. ‘But I can tell you an even easier cure for haemorrhoids than this,’ he remarked.

  Chetan nudged Anant with his elbow.

  ‘It’s like falling off a log,’ said Dal Chand. ‘Get a bitter white radish. Don’t peel it, divide it into four parts, sprinkle it with salt, hang it upside down by the leaves. When all the liquid drains from it, eat it. In just one week, you’ll get relief from the bloodiest of haemorrhoids.’

  ‘Did you cure your own haemorrhoids that way?’ asked Anant, picking up his books and stepping down into the bazaar.

  ‘I cured your father’s,’ growled Dal Chand, and he hurled a particularly vehement curse Anant’s way.

  ‘You must have cured your mother’s because my father never had that problem,’ called out Anant, and then added, preparing to run, ‘Amazing how there’s only one goldsmith that’s studying hikmat, but the whole family’s turned into hakims.’

  ‘You come back here, your mother’s—’ Dal Chand picked up a nearby anvil, jumped over their seats and, hurling the stones of curses after Anant, leapt into the bazaar. But in the midst of this, Anant had got quite far away and was running as fast as he could without looking back. After chasing him a short way and flinging curses after him, Uncle Dal Chand returned panting.

  Chetan and Anant stopped when they got to Har Lal the grocer’s shop and laughed long and hard.

  *

  Dal Chand was narrating the benefits of pure ghee and Chetan was staring at him fixedly. He’d always envied such men who experienced all emotions the same way, who considered whatever came before them to be ordained by fate and took it in stride, who harboured neither ambition nor envy, who were satisfied with just a little, who ate, drank and slept comfortably, and when the time came, aged like ripened fruit. Chetan had always noticed a peculiar innocence bordering on idiocy in Uncle Dal Chand’s eyes. And sometimes he was jealous of this innocence. It was this innocence that made him so idiotically self-confident. Dal Chand would never believe that anyone could be smarter than him. He had unbreakable faith in the truth of his own words. And he was like those flowers floating in the waters of a lake that neither know the depths of the lake nor the loftiness of the sky, and flow along laughing and smiling. Then some wave comes along and swallows them and they drown, smiling all the while.

  Ever since he’d known Dal Chand he’d seen him smiling happily like this. It was as though a light, cool, unchanging breeze always blew within him, and he had never experienced any rattling or gusting gales. Whenever Anant teased him, the two of them changed their route and went home via Lal Bazaar for a few days. After ten days or so, when they again came to sit by Dina Nath, Dal Chand would have forgotten everything. They thought he was a moron, but sometimes Chetan envied him his simple nature.

  Telling them the benefits of pure ghee and the detriments of Vanaspati ghee, Dal Chand added, ‘Now I’m in the habit of eating hot chapatis slathered in pure ghee with a bit of sugar. In the winter, I continue to eat ghee and sugar . . .’

  ‘The elders have also said,’ Desraj, the jeweller seated at the shop across the way, left off his work to interject, ‘eat sugar with ghee, bring the world to its knee.’

  ‘Well, who knows if I bring the world to its knee—all I do is bring home my earnings—but I for sure eat sugar with ghee,’ said Dal Chand.

  And he continued, ‘So yes, as I was saying, I’m in the habit of eating chapatis slathered in ghee, with a bit of sugar. That’s what I take for dessert after dinner. A few days ago, I went to a friend’s house in Phagwara. Now, what can I tell you, at the start of dinner, I asked for a spoonful of ghee on the last roti with a bit of sugar.

  ‘When I was done eating and tore off a bit of the sugary bread, I just didn’t take to it. All the fun of eating was spoiled. I felt nauseous. “What kind of ghee is this?” I asked.

  ‘“Pure Vanaspati,” they said.

  ‘And the result was that now, as soon as I put ghee and sugar on my chapati, I remember the Vanaspati ghee I tasted in Phagwara, and I start feeling nauseous.’

  ‘Arré bhai, one
day everyone will eat Vanaspati ghee. When there’s not enough food for men, who will feed the cows and buffaloes?’ asked Desraj from across the street. ‘I’ve just started using Vanaspati.’

  ‘By then I’ll be gone,’ Dal Chand retorted, smiling to display his pearly teeth in the garden of his moustaches.

  ‘It’ll happen in your lifetime, mark my words,’ replied Desraj, standing up on the stoop of his shop and stretching in a prophetic manner.

  ‘Okay, brother Chetan, be happy!’ said Uncle Dal Chand, ignoring Desraj and patting Chetan on the back. ‘If you’re in town again, come by here too.’