Like life itself, health is not constant. It has its flickers, which range on a scale of ‘good to too bad’. Although our preference of position on the scale does not fluctuate, our health does. From bad food habits, sleep deprivation, and a load of anxieties, to an execrable lifestyle, we modern machines have plenty of reasons owing to health deterioration. We have reached that point in time when even an apple a day doesn’t keep the doctor away. Oh yes! The doctor! The one demi-god we pin all our hopes in, when we fall ill. And truly, doctors do deserve the honour and reverence associated with their profession because the kind of selflessness exhibited by doctors, serving humanity day in and day out is nonpareil.
Falling sick is not always as despicable for children as it may seem to adults, for children may see it as an opportunity to have that sweet syrup the doctor prescribes or that extra amount of care from parents to play down their siblings. At least in my case, it used to be so. I remember moving about with an air of importance whenever I fell ill. It was like having won the war of succession, as if I was made to sit on the throne and rule the kingdom. Only the bad part of it was visiting the doctor. Yet, it wasn’t too bad as long as the doctor was no random one. It was in fact adequately well to visit the doctor whom I dearly called Doctor Uncle!
Betterknown as Dr. Ghulam Muhammad Bhat (MBBS), Physician, the ‘doctor uncle’ who happened to be my father’s childhood friend was not just an adept doctor but an incomparable human being. There was in him an unseen but quite felt element of care for his patients. Maybe he didn’t just advise and prescribe, but prayed for their recovery too. Perhaps, the shifa or cure in his hands was actually a manifestation of his relationship with the Divine. This seemed to be a reason good enough as to why patients thronged his cabin even in the presence of other prominent physicians of the hospital. After a complete day of duty, he would spare a couple of hours in a dispensary and see patients there for a pittance. This was followed by free visits to ill acquaintances in need. He was a person of calibre and a gentleman par-excellence.
As is often used in Kashmiri jargon, the touch of the master’s hand is enough! So happened to me when I visited the doctor uncle. He didn’t happen to be too frank with kids, yet my liking for him seemed to spring from some indescribable reason. In no time that I visited him, I felt fit as a fiddle. The prescribed medicines would be left as of no use except for the one paracetamol syrup the taste of which I liked.
Time went by bringing about a twist in the tale of his life. A transfer by the department or more precisely a contrivance by the doctors (for obvious reasons) landed him in Ladakh, far away from his family and friends. After that, I could never visit doctor uncle again. For some time, he advised a sick me or my siblings on phone but later on, that too stopped. Hearing from him happened once in a blue moon.
Of late, I heard of him again, but this time it was different. This time, I heard of his passage from life to death. It came as a shock. I came to know he had been fighting a fatal disease. But what I was not apprised of before was that he had been a tragic character throughout, more of a misfit in the society, an exceptional man who did not conform. Eventually, he left this world, and he left this world for good.
Seeing the evil magnify around us, it often intrigues me as to what sustains the world, what keeps it going, what keeps it from falling apart. Now I feel, it is the noble souls like the afore-mentioned – it is their unflinching faith, their relentless service and their many benevolences to the society that provide a secure anchorage to the world.
The more I see of the world, the more I am convinced of its transience and of the futility of investing into the affairs of this life; impermanence reigns life. The only essence of this impermanence lies in its brief provision to invest for the ‘Eternal Ever-after’. Greater the investment, greater are the chances of our redemption. Period!
Asma Majid is Masters In English Literature