I was on my afternoon rounds, when I noticed an altercation outside the out-patient clinic (OPD) between a ward-boy and an elderly lady. The ward-boy told me she was insisting on being admitted to hospital. It was nearly 3 pm and the OPD was closed for the day. "But she just won't listen, sir, and calls me names." The old lady lifted her rolled up umbrella and smote him upon his trouser seat. I glanced at the old lady and the little boy with her, who, a bit intimidated, was hiding behind her. The woman turned to me angrily and in rapid Marathi, said she was coming from Ratnagiri and that she had travelled long and hard in a crowded train and she didn't have a place to stay and was hungry and tired, but this idiot was trying to push her away and he was a donkey and would I please admit her? "Admit me, my Prince" she concluded, a trifle breathless, patting my face.
She was old, real old. Gnarled hands like distorted tree-branches, thinned out hair white as snow, toothless gums except for a canine in the upper jaw and thick-lens spectacles held up with copper wire. Tobacco-spittle trickled out of her mouth. She told me she had found a lump in her neck that "jumped up and down while swallowing" and a village doctor had recommended she come to "Tata", a common reference to the Tata Memorial Hospital for cancer in Mumbai. I looked from her to the ward-boy who was shaking his head warningly. The old woman noticed the ward-boy's antics and cracked another smart one on his backside with her umbrella. Smiling, I told the ward-boy to escort her to my office upstairs and order whatever she and her grandson wanted to eat from the cafeteria. I took the indignant ward-boy aside and told him, "Think of her as your own grandmother. Don't mind her abuse, she is tired and hungry." I told the woman that I would be with her in half an hour and continued on my rounds.
By the time I got back to my office it was almost 4 pm. The old lady was lying down on a tattered sheet, her grandson curled up against her, both fast asleep. I told my secretary to let them lie there for another half hour and not to let any visitors into my office, then I went down to the ward to ask one of the nurses to wake her up after that time and bring her down for a physical examination.
When she came down, she was distraught for having slept off. She wished a thousand blessings upon me and my family for having fed her and her grandson and once again repeated her request for admission. Where will I go today, she asked. Her bewildered grandson stuck to her, but allowed me to hoist him onto a revolving chair. He scrambled down immediately but a few minutes later climbed back on his own and began turning round on it.
While examining her thyroid, I looked at her face closely. In the spotlight her face seemed oddly familiar and I sat back, looking at her and trying my best to recall her to memory. She sat waiting, giving me her toothless smile. Her action of beating the ward boy on his behind with her rolled up umbrella seemed to hold the key, and all of a sudden, the years fell away and I was again ten years old, returning from school with my "ayah", breaking free from her restraining hand while crossing the road and getting caught and being spanked on the trouser seat with her rolled up umbrella. "Aayee" (Mother in Marathi) is what I used to call her, and it doubled as a cry of distress too, when being spanked. Could it be? It had to be! How many years ago was it - Aayee must be over eighty now. Choked with a tenderness that clutched my heart, I asked the old lady if she remembered working in Bombay's Matunga, to look after a little boy, take him to school, bring him back, feed him, bathe and dress him etc., a sort of governess-cum-maid to him. Both his parents worked for the Railways and lived in quarters overlooking the rail tracks. His name was Unni and he was a mischievous fellow and you used to beat him on his trouser bottom with your umbrella. Did she remember?
"Ayee" chuckled and repeated "Unni-baba" a few times when I told her all this and playfully pulled my ears, another gesture she had been addicted to. I admitted her for the night in our ward, got her thyroid scanned the next morning, aspirated the fluid from it and decided there was no active surgery or other treatment she needed - she only needed to be kept under observation. I asked her to return after three months and to bring her son, the little boy's father, when she came. I told her I wished to take her home and introduce her to the wife and the kids. She said she had to return to her village but would come next time. I got nurse to buy her a nice sari and for little Eknath a trouser and shirt. I offered her some money to take care of incidental expenses but she turned it down. She left, pleased with her visit, promising to return after three months. Eknath clutched a Cadbury's bar and waved goodbye.
That night discussing her at home, we decided that we would send "Ayee" a monthly pension and if possible fix a good school for Eknath in Mumbai or if that were not possible fund his education. Feeling a sense of "something-attempted-something-done", we went to bed.
Two months later her son, (Eknath's father) came to the hospital to tell me that his mother passed away quietly in her sleep a month earlier. She had told them she had met her "son" on her last visit. I don't know if she actually remembered me but I was grateful to her for saying that she did.
( Dr Narendra Nair, Tata Memorial Cancer Hospital)
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