Having run out of steam on my planting and other yarns, I have had to delve way back
oppo_1058
into my past to keep, so to say, the ship afloat as the last thing I’d want is it to have that go down with all hands-on-deck!
I was VERY young, all of 13 years old, when my dad prematurely handed in his dinner
pail, consequently while my memory of him has been rather sketchy, with him being a so much larger than life character, there are a couple of episodes which remain as vivid as though it was yesterday.
What defined my dad, besides the fact that he was a very well-known and a highly respected figure in our (what at that time was) our beautiful and small town of Simla, was a fiery temperament which would erupt every once in a while, having everyone in his vicinity scurrying for cover. At the other end of that spectrum was his brilliant sense of humor which, very much like is temper, would surface when least expected.
It is those two very disparate traits popping up at two different times, which are as though etched in my memory. Being so very contrasting, I thought it best that I not confuse the two in one blog, so here goes the first one.
While also located in Simla as were we, my father in his wisdom, when I was still shy of five years of age, had bunged me off to Bishop Cotton School, an all-boys boarding school. With his friends and relatives deriding him for what they termed as cruelty towards a little tyke, my parents having taken that, what must have been a difficult decision, is one which I have always been most grateful for.
From the time I was eight years old, being a somewhat highly spirited kid, I would be scaling up any tree which came in my way. More often than not, ending up dropping out of one much like some overripe fruit. While most times on landing on terra firma I would get away almost unscathed, it became somewhat of an annual event that I’d end up with a fracture. Strangely enough, it was always my left arm. Each such incident would have me being marched up to the school hospital, to be glared at by the matron Mrs. Jacobs. The school hospital not being equipped to handle injuries such as fractures, following a long-winded scolding by that dragon lady, I would be bundled off to the Civil Hospital in Simla for my arm to be put in a cast.
Odd as this may sound nowadays when hospitals are manned by streams of specialist doctors, back then the Ripon Hospital was run and manned by only one, Dr Mukund Lal, a G.P. who was also a member of the local Masonic Lodge and a friend of my dad. The gentleman was also colloquially known as ‘the butcher’. Each time that I landed up in his hands, Mukand Lal would call to let my dad know that his progeny had done it again. School town leaves being allowed only once a month, my dad would take advantage of me being in the hands of the doctor to walk across to the hospital to meet and chide me for behaving like an idiot monkey. All par for the course.
When I was eleven, almost as regular as clockwork, back I was in the Ripon Hospital. Dad having been informed of my being there, had arrived at the doctor’s chambers and was sitting in the ante room while I was being ‘treated’ in the adjoining room. On that particular annual visit while Mukund Lal was messing around with my arm, doing whatever it was that he had to do, the pain having become intense and unbearable, I had let out a very loud scream which had my father rush into the clinic. His look of concern was assuaged by the doctor telling him that because my ulna bone had got deviated, the gentleman had to twist it back into its original location which, he assured my dad, simply had to be a very short painful procedure.
During the half hour, while the plaster of Paris cast was hardening, I was given the expected bollocking and an earful for being the idiot accident-prone child I was turning out to be. The tirade which could have gone on indefinitely was fortunately cut short because as soon as the plaster had dried up, I was immediately despatched back to school, for me to brag and proudly show off my latest ‘badge’ of honor’ to my classmates.
Two months later I found myself back at Ripon for the doctor to cut and remove the plaster. The date for the removal being known in advance, when I arrived at the doctors chamber my father was already there waiting for me. Probably feeling sorry for his son, when called in by the butcher, my father walked in with me into the treatment room.
No sooner had the large shear being wielded by Mukand Lal snipped off the last bit of the cast, with a strange jerk my forearm simply twisted around all the way from the elbow down to my hand with the result that my palm ended up facing at an almost 900 angle away from the normal, with my fingers twisting upwards giving the appearance of being some sort of grotesque claw. On being prodded to move my fingers, I tried but found that that there simply was no movement possible. I was unable to move any of my fingers which had become stiff and had got locked in that awkward position. It was obvious that the doctor, when doing whatever it was that he had done 60 days earlier, had made a balls-up of it.
With tears streaming down my face I was looking at my dad whose face had gone beet red with the veins on his forehead popping out and swollen. As soon as the butcher turned to face my father with a look of confusion on his face, he was accosted by a loud barrage of the most descriptive expletives. For those who’ve not had the pleasure of hearing a Punjabi abuse, I can tell you that those can be very graphic involving the receiver’s mother, sister, daughter or any other of the persons relatives. In addition to the verbal bombardment continuing in a loud and unbroken stream, my father had also whipped off his shoe with which he was repeatedly whacking Mukund Lal across his head.
To cut this long story short, I was eventually taken down to the Christian Medical College in Ludhiana where I went through a major orthopedic procedure which involved my improperly set forearm having to be broken and reset to bring it back to normal. What followed was a long and painful nine-month recuperation at the hands of a physiotherapist which ended with me reverting back to becoming a normal kid with both arms intact.
As a postscript to the saga a la Mukund Lal; it was the talk of the town that should that gentleman be walking down the Mall Road (the main and only pedestrian ‘throughfare’ in our small town) in one direction and should he spy Mr. Khanna (my father) walking down the Mall in the opposite direction coming towards him, the doctor would immediately duck into the nearest store, to stay well hidden away, to emerge and carry on with his walk only after the danger had passed.
