MAY HIS TRIBE INCREASE!

A swinging half door separates my waiting room from the treatment area. From my working position I can see half of any one standing behind those doors and when I notice two fidgeting legs in a pair of brown trousers and the collar of a striped shirt (held in the hand) hanging over them, I know it is Mr. Pillai. He always comes to the clinic on his way back from his work and always carries the shirt of his uniform in his hands in a crumpled bundle. He does not wear it to work as all his colleagues do, nor does he carry it folded in a bag. The crumpled bundle of shirt will be on the table in front of him in the library and next to his plate in the hotel. Visiting my clinic is a deviation from Mr Pillai’s twenty eight year old routine, necessitated because of tooth ache. Otherwise he would have got down from the factory bus near my clinic, walked to the library, spent an hour there reading magazines and news papers and moved on to the park for half an hour on the bench listening to the music from the public address system of the municipality. From there he would have proceeded to the hotel for dinner and walked back to his room.

Pillai is a peculiar person. Well, all of us are peculiar in our own ways. He is a little more peculiar than others. He is a bachelor and stays alone in a rented room not very far from my clinic. He is working in the same factory, staying in the same room and eating in the same hotel for the last twenty eight years. He has been a regular in my clinic for nearly ten years and what started as a purely patient-dentist relationship has now turned into friendship. Still, he is very formal as far as appointments, treatment and payments are concerned, but he can’t help adding a touch of his idiosyncrasies.

When he takes an appointment he makes me write it down using a pencil and insists that I cancel or change it if I come across any other urgent case. “I am not sure of keeping up the appointment doctor. I do not know what exigencies arise in the factory. I have to listen to my bosses. Private factory you see, we are slaves. Any way I am free all evenings and you can put me any other time. I give you absolute freedom to cancel or postpone my appointments.” But he never misses an appointment. He is always there five minutes before time. If he is called in on the dot he will be very happy. If I make the mistake of taking his words at face value and utilize the liberty to alter the appointment, he stands next to the half door scratching his beard and fidgeting. He neither sits in the waiting room nor stands outside and his presence behind the door upsets me. I hurriedly finish the case at hand and Pillai will rush in thanking his stars for not making him wait very long. But if anyone else is waiting, he will remain at the door and will ask the other person to get in first. “I am always your patient doctor. I can wait. Others may get fed up of waiting and go away. Attend to them first. You should not lose your customers.” I have to overrule his offers and pull him in. In case I take up any other case, he continues to stand at the door fidgeting, waiting for his chance and if I post pone the appointment for another day his spirits go down completely. But he will urge me again “write my name in pencil doctor. If there is any other urgent case………….”

Initially when he started visiting my clinic he was very apprehensive. After two extractions, three root canals and umpteen fillings he is somewhat relaxed but still sits gripping the handle of the chair tight. I tell him to take any position that is comfortable to him (I mean as comfortable as one can be while undergoing dental treatment) and retain it. He can’t. As I bend my head, strain my neck or shift my position to get a better view while working, he keeps shifting his head, neck and body in the opposite direction in what he thinks to be an effort to make it easy for me, but actually making my job much more difficult.
And then there is his handkerchief. It is normal for all my patients to spit out the water collected in the mouth from the water spray attached to the drill. And all of them keep a napkin or a tissue in their hands to wipe their mouth. Mr Pillai carries his hand kerchief with him but it is always kept neatly folded in the back pocket of his trousers. Every time he rinses his mouth, he slides down to reach his back, takes the kerchief out, uses it, folds it neatly and keeps it back in his pocket. Within a minute he needs to take it out again for use and I have to wait till the exercise is finished. I suggest that he keep it in his hands but he never does. I keep wishing that his shirt and handkerchief change their places, But they never do.
My biggest woe while treating him is his beard and mustache. Mr.Pillai hails from a small town in Kerala and visits his native place once a year to meet his family members and have a haircut and shave from a particular barber there. He never goes there in between and never visits any other barber in Ponda. Also, he does not trim his hair himself. For the most part of a year he sports an overgrown head and a flowing beard. I need an extra pair of hands to push aside his mustache and beard and since I do not possess them I suffer a lot while attending to his teeth. He tries to help me out by pushing aside his mustache with his fingers, causing additional obstruction.

I was doing a root canal for his wisdom tooth and it was impossible to get a proper view of the tooth which was behind the veil of his mustache. I suggested that he trim his mustache and he made a wry face and offered vague excuses for not being able to do so. I told him that barbers are our professional ancestors and we dentists sort of have it in our blood and offered my services to trim it but it was not accepted. I tried my hand at working by ‘feel’ without actually seeing the tooth and damaged the next tooth. So, I refused to attend to him unless he trimmed his mustache and how he does it was his business. He came for the next appointment cleanly shaven. I congratulated myself for being able to alter one of Mr Pillai’s habits without realizing that I was working against my own interest. I finished his treatment without speaking anything about his mustache. It was weeks later that I learnt from one of his neighbours that Mr Pillai had summoned his barber from his native place paying a hefty fee apart from providing for his travel and lodging!
Mr Pillai is extra careful with his health. “You see doctor, I am a bachelor. I need to look after myself. There is nobody to take care of me if I fall ill”. He needs to eat properly to be healthy and so has to care for his teeth. Hence he comes to the clinic many times with trivial complaints and fears. In the last two weeks he came to my clinic thrice and all the three times there were no other patients and I was spending time reading the news paper.
“What is this doctor? I see no patients in your clinic”
“It is nice once in a way. I enjoy the leisure and find time to indulge in other activities for which I usually do not find time”
“No doctor. You should not take it easy. It is your business. If there are no patients how do you run your home and clinic? Your children are still studying.”

He was worried.

I assured him that the situation was not so bad and attended to him on the spot. Since the procedures were very minor, I refused to accept any payment.

The third time he said “Doctor, You have to accept some money. There are no other patients and if you do not take anything from me how will you manage?"
I just joked saying that if I can not run my clinic, I will close it down and try to live on whatever pension I get.

"That is what I am worried about. And that is why I am forcing you to charge me.If you cannot earn enough, you may shut down your clinic and then what am I going to do for MY TEETH?”

Mr Pillai cannot change his dentist and if I close down what will he do?

That’s when I realized that by trying to change Mr Pillai’s habits I was working against my own interest.

Mr Pillai is a bachelor but I cannot help but wish MAY HIS TRIBE INCREASE.