A Scalding and Two Injections

Just after breakfast there was a knock on the door and Nagapa and Little Murkapa with the spiky hair stood on the threshold. Nagapa asked for something but I couldn’t catch what it was as he seemed to be in a fluster. At one point it seemed as if he wanted matches but when I fetched a box it wasn’t that. After a few more tries the story came out. A baby had been scalded and it was medicine for burns they wanted. I knew enough to know that burns, especially on a baby, can be very serious and since I had no medicine I recommended that they take the baby immediately to a doctor. But, after they left I was filled with trepidation. These tribal workers they never go to the doctor unless they really have to – maybe it’s the money, maybe it’s the way they are treated as the dregs of society. Whatever the reason I knew it was likely they would delay any decision till most of the men and the father returned from work. I looked with worry from my balcony over to the tents where they lived. No, I decided, I had to go down and see what had happened.

The tents, five of them, are squeezed between one block of flats that they themselves had built a couple of years before and new block they are currently building. And tents isn’t really the right word. We think tents are for camping but these tents aren’t anything like this. I’ve seen them erecting them. The ground is first beaten flat with a big stone then poles and hoops of bamboo cane are lashed together to form a strong frame. Then comes the covering, the tenting – old flattened cardboard boxes; rags; rush matting, pieces of tarpaulin, torn plastic – almost anything really that will provide protection from the searing midday sun, the blast of the dusty afternoon winds, the chill of the winter nights, and the torrents of the monsoon. Once the frame is covered it looks nothing like the tent of our imagination. Still, these are their homes for as long as they work for the ‘builder’ and for which, more importantly, they pay no rent.

‘The Tents,’ too, are a sort of ‘no-go area.’ Apart from the ‘builder’ who employs them who would have cause to go there? Certainly none of the residents in the flats – they, no doubt, along with the majority of city dwellers, just see ‘the tents’ as an encroachment that brings disease and dirt closer than comfort and probably regard the tribals as just one step up from beggars. Even so I’ve been down to the tents two or three times. This is where Bheema lived till a few months ago when he and a few other families were shifted to another street.

One time I’d sat on their mats under the block of flats on an unbearably hot night talking with them. Another time I had to go and say goodbye to a family who were returning to their village in Karnataka – they wanted to thank me for the medicine I’d given them. They all know me and I know many of them. There’s little black ten year-old Nagama, who apart from her own Kanad language, knows Marathi and Hindi, and her infant sister with the stiff black hair whom she nurses; the old man with the polio-deformed foot who leans heavily on a stick; the old granny who stays back when all the others go to work; strong masculine Shanapa with the squint eye whose wife all the others are devoted to because of her kind nature; Mama Murkhapa with the flat nose and big grin who is the same age as Bheema and at the same time his uncle; little Murkapa with the spiky hair who is nineteen but looks like fourteen and has, as I later found out, an extra thumb on one hand; Kanakapa and Adhapa who are inseparable friends; And Hanumanta, another of the uncles, who is younger than Bheema. These are the people who made up the little community of tent dwellers who lived on my road and whom I knew I had to visit again.

There was an ominous gathering of a few guys by the tents – it looked more like a funeral party than anything else. Big Murkhapa – Mama Murkhapa – was nursing the baby and the mother was sitting helpless by her tent – a dark figure in a deep purple sari with tears streaming down her cheeks. The baby was Murkapa’s elder brother’s baby, an ugly little thing, I thought, a girl – sort of wizened. She wasn’t crying and although not sleeping didn’t seem to be very conscious either. To me it didn’t look good. Murkapa showed me the burned hand and I was horrified to see that they had plastered mud over it, no doubt a tribal remedy for burns – mud, mud, glorious mud, nothing quite like it for cooling the blood! Yes, one could follow their thinking – wet mud would be cooling as it dried, but at what risk of infection? It was obvious I would have to take the baby to the doctor.

I arrived with the Jeep. Murkhapa still had the baby in his arms and though the baby was awake she still seemed to be ominously quite and her eyes were filled with tears. She looked a sorry sight. Murkhapa and his sister-in-law, the mother, prepared the baby for the doctor – the mud on her hand was washed off with cold water. The baby struggled and writhed in pain but still no sound. And again tears welled in her eyes. When I saw the hand fear filled my heart the hand was mottled blue in colour. After the washing mother disappeared into the tent and reappeared with a tiny, clean, lime-green dress. The old rag was pulled off and the baby was squeezed into the new clean one at the cost of some pain. The wizened face puckered up in pain and tears rolled down her cheeks and dripped off her chin. A clean dress wasn’t really necessary but it was obvious that the mother didn’t want her baby to be taken away without clean clothes on.
I thought the mother would come but she didn’t, only Murkhapa and the baby. He was very good with her – talking to her, blowing on her hand and when we sat in doctor’s anteroom he played with her trying to distract her from the pain. Sometimes he tried to get her to rest on his shoulder but in whichever position she rested tears were always in her eyes.

Doctor Wable was out but after a few minutes his wife, also a doctor, appeared and she soon saw the baby. She was told what had happened and she looked at the hand and pronounced that it didn’t seem too bad today but that the second day was the telling time, only then would we know how deep the burn had gone. Today she would prescribe cream to cool the hand and antibiotics in case infection set in. It wasn’t really a good idea she told Murkhapa to put mud and ink on the hand. Ink, I thought, ink! That’s why the hand was blue. But why ink? Maybe they thought that ink had some special virtue. It was only later that Malati, a close friend from our medical project, told me that doctors often dowsed burns in a deep blue solution and maybe these people thought that it was ink. I guessed that was it. Doctor Mrs. Wable though instructed that the hand be cleaned in an iodine solution and told us to bring the baby back, without fail, the next morning.
The next morning the baby seemed much better and Murkhapa having left for work it was left to little Nagama to accompany the mother with the baby. Both the Wable doctors were present that day and having checked the baby they pronounced that that the burn didn’t seem so serious but to bring her back at night just to check. The baby came with Murkhapa at night and both doctors were satisfied that the baby wasn’t in any real danger but that the antibiotic course should be continued until the end. It was at this point that Murkhapa showed Dr Wable his foot that had been pierced by a nail that afternoon. There was some discussion and it was agreed that he be given a tetanus injection. As he lay on the couch with his hip bared Dr Wable rubbed a small area with cotton wool soaked in alcohol. The cotton turned dark brown. When a second piece still hadn’t removed all the dirt Wable showed me the cotton and said, “See, these people don’t know how to wash!”

The remark wasn’t at all fair, I thought, but I kept my peace. Murkhapa, like all the others had been out at a hard days work on a building site and after work there is virtually no chance of washing. Where would they get water at night? Bathing is their first activity of the day when the taps are running and when they can easily fetch water for the days needs. At night all they can do is rub off as much of the muck as possible with water at the building site. But, by and large, at night they return with skin dry and pale from cement.

After three or four goes Wable was convinced the skin was clean enough and proceeded with the injection whereupon Murkhapa burst out laughing. Wable looked at his wife and said, “See, this boy gets an injection and he laughs!” and turning to his patient he asked, “So, what’s making you laugh?” Murkhapa replied, “Oh I thought it was going to be painful but it wasn’t really at all!” With that we all laughed. Murkhapa pulled his trousers up and we left collecting the baby, Mother and Nagama from the waiting room.

That should be end of this story but there is a little sequal to it that followed. Back home later that night Bheema met me. He still wasn’t looking well. He hadn’t put on any weight since his visit to his village a few months ago. If fact for the last week to ten days he hadn’t been feeling well – lethargic, not eating properly, headache and just today his urine had turned bright yellow and, when I looked his eyes too were not white but dull yellow. It was hard to get him to agree to visit the doctor. He had only agreed once before to visit Wable Doctor when I promised he wouldn’t get an injection – and he didn’t. This time he wasn’t so sure and looking at his own eyes he agreed that they had gone yellow. That worried him more than bright yellow urine.

Next night we saw Dr Wable very quickly and looking him over Wable agreed that they eyes were yellowish although his sample of urine wasn’t too yellow. There was lots of talk about how much water he should be drinking in this hot season – four to five litres Wable thought if you were working hard under the sun. But if he did have jaundice we really needed a blood sample too to find out how far it had gone.
“That means an injection!” Bheema objected.
“No, not an injection. Nothing is going in, only some blood we will take out.”
“No, but that still means the needle is going in!”
“Correct,” Doctor admitted.
“Then it’s an injection!”

Even so Bheema reluctantly agreed to the blood sample. We sat in the waiting room Bheema almost paralyzed with fear. Every so often he’d look at me and he’d just say one word – Dhar – fear. The technician was a long time in coming and this only served to heighten his anxiety and when he did come he asked Bheema to lie on a bed. Bheema’s eyes fixed on the long needle as if it were a deadly weapon. I asked him what was that on the wall next to him. He looked. “What thing?” I pointed to the blank plaster – “That there!” Of course he couldn’t see anything, this was only my distraction tactic.
The technician said, “OK, that’s it!”
“What do you mean that’s it?”
“I’ve got the sample, now I’m finished.”
“Finished already? Where is it?” The technician showed a standard tiny 5ml bottle filled with blood.
“So much!” Bheema said with shock.

We were called back into Wable’s surgery and Bheema told us that he thought that he would be on the bed for about two hours while the blood was taken. Two hours! Not much wonder he was so frightened – he must have thought that most of his blood would be taken in that time.
“How much blood is in my body?” he asked.
“Oh, about six litres.”
“Arey!” he said in surprise, “six litres!”
Then his brow wrinkled in perplexity. “So, where is it all kept?”