The ouch in life

There are a couple of things, the thought of which makes me really wince. 1) Visits to the dentist - and 2) what Asha calls "Payshuls". (Facials). Actually my present dentist is a good guy and can make even root canal work seem relatively painless. These days I sail through the normal check ups and cleaning. Still, I suppose the memory of all the hours spent as a kid and a young adult in the dentist's chair, not to mention a dentist with a Don Martin look bending over you, and working with old world instruments that looked like miniature scalpels, and having to spit out tons of blood every time you got the tartar scraped off your teeth is embedded in your brain cells and you cant help the "ouch" that involuntarily arises at the thought of your next appointment.

As for Payshuls. Sunita - Asha's daughter - came over to give me one this morning and for the umpteenth time I wondered why one needs to go through with all of it, with being kneaded and poked and having blackheads tweezed out of the side of your nose. But a couple of years ago when Sunita was a student at a beauty parlour at Kemps Corner, she would come and practise on me and in a way it's become a habit I suppose and I am getting used to the idea. At least when I am eighty seven years old I will be told by people that I dont look a day over eighty.

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Our post lunch conversation, Asha's and mine this afternoon: she asked me which side of her body her heart was. I told her. She said she supposed that if she ever felt pain in that region she ought to run to the doc. I said well, it could also be gas ("gase" according to Asha) but she wasn't buying it. There was this young man in the chawl, who lived in the room next door, she said. Recently, one night, he woke up with a pain in his chest, thought it was gase and rubbed some ointment all over his chest. The next day as he was standing in the post office queue to send a money order to the gaon, he collapsed on the floor, clutching fifteen hundred rupees and the money order form - and died.

"Well, of course," says Asha Bai, "if you have to die you have to die. If I really have to die I dont mind."