Guest columnist Javeed Akhter: Haunting lessons from a different time and place
It was one of those summer vacations we spent as a family with my father, Dr. Ahmed Abdul Razzak, who passed away in 1973. This time it was the town of Bhainsa, a small place with an even smaller hospital.
The hospital had no inpatient beds and no place to do autopsies. My father was the only physician at the hospital. He delivered babies, saw children and adults, and did minor surgery, the quintessential family physician, but rarely any autopsies. The occasion to do one arose unexpectedly.
After his day at the hospital my father saw patients at home in the evening. It was a gracious home built in the old-fashioned style. There was an inner courtyard with the family quarters (zenana) in the back, a large entryway with rooms on either side; one serving as a "drawing room" or place where male guests would be hosted and opposite it another room that served as a clinic.
It was a lazy and warm late summer afternoon. The high ceiling and the fan made the heat tolerable. It is a dry type of heat, which makes it easier to handle. The two small windows opened onto the outside street, which was more like a tiny lane. The monotony in the room this day was broken by the sound of an approaching crowd.
We could hear animated voices and the sounds of abuse. We all rushed out to the door and saw a crowd of about 50. In front of the crowd was a boy of 9 or 10 carrying piggyback another child about the same age. The crowd of villagers was screaming angry epithets at him, and some were plying him with chappals (Indian slippers/flip-flops.) It was clear the boy, the subject of all this abuse, was frightened out of his wits.
It turned out the crowd was coming to visit my father. My father took charge of the situation, asked them to let the child unload the other boy, sat the boy down and gave him water to drink.
The boy who was the subject of the abuse had been playing soccer in the street with the younger sibling of the boy he was carrying on his back. During the play, he accidentally hit the sibling in the stomach and that boy fell and died. The villagers wanted to find out why the other child died and were demanding an autopsy.
As there was no place at the hospital, an autopsy was conducted on the dead boy in open air, under a shade tree on the Hindu cremation grounds at the outskirts of the town. The body, which had been taken home from the soccer field, was brought to the cremation grounds.
The autopsy was limited to opening the abdomen, revealing an enlarged spleen from chronic malaria, which was endemic in the area. Spleens that large can rupture easily even from minor trauma and kill the victim.
The results of the autopsy clearly saved the alleged killer's life. And I still remember the queasy feeling I had, witnessing the autopsy; CSI move over.
Another incident haunts me. One of the villagers, an elderly, dignified-looking Hindu man wearing a colorful turban, came with a younger woman. She looked young enough to be his daughter but was his wife. It turned out she had TB of her lungs. The treatment is long and in those days consisted of intramuscular injections of Streptomycin, along with orally taken INH tablets and PAS granules. The man asked what the total cost of the treatment would be, and as my father gave approximate figures, he was quietly jotting down the numbers. After a minute or two, he said in a matter of fact, unemotional voice, "it would be less expensive to get a new wife."
The meaning of what the man had just said, what we had heard, sank in slowly. We realized that the woman sitting at the back of the room with eyes downcast had just been condemned to death. I am sure she did not hear what her husband had just said. Evil that day wore a colorful turban.
The young woman was the very embodiment of the hundreds of thousands of women, who are abused and exploited in India. Many die a so-called "dowry death" when they conveniently meet with accidents in the kitchen and are burned alive. Their crime: That the husband did not get the money, car or other property he was expecting.
My father was a great doctor who did his best to mitigate societal injustice when he could. Doing an autopsy and saving child was a satisfactory outcome. Saving that young woman's life was impossible in the social constraints of those days.
A Muslim physician in a Hindu town made no difference. There was love and respect in abundance. Thank you, Dad, for memories that taught me so much.
• Javeed Akhter is a physician and freelance writer from Oak Brook.