How Can I Call Them Poor?
Trip Start
Oct 09, 2007
1
4
45
Trip End
Mar 10, 2008
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Kolkata (Calcutta),
West Bengal,
India
Monday, November 19, 2007
I am sitting next to the wide rear door. Bhimal, the medicine compounder who also distributes the prescriptions from the back of the van after patients leave the clinic with their prescriptions in hand, sits next to me. When I enter the van, he is careful to scoot forward and face front, leaving extra space between us. Indian men are often very conscious of body contact with women and take extra care to be respectful. Dr. Ronen Roy, the homeopathic physician, whom I have met several times when he was coming or I was going at Baba's, sits in the front passenger seat. The driver's name is Bihal. I am grateful that it is a cool morning as we bounce along Kolkata's streets at a good clip. All the windows are open, so I am not cooking beside the rear window which faces the morning sun.
Black rubber floor mats overlay one another covering the cabin floor. A small, very used, brown wooden folding table stands on its side against the back of the front passenger seat. An old, blue plastic seat stool sits in front of the table. Behind the driver's seat is a small black plastic lawn chair that is taken into the clinic for Dr. Roy to sit on. I move from the bench to the lawn chair to be able to talk to Dr. Roy. The chair is wobbly, and I can only hope it will survive my weight. Dr. Roy advises me to hang on to the back of his seat while we talk.
We make several turns into progressively more narrow streets. Sometimes we have to wait several minutes for all the foot, bicycle, and cart traffic to clear before we can enter the busy, very narrow, one lane streets. These streets wind and curve at odd angles. All of them with lots of foot traffic. Many vendors seem to be doing a relatively brisk business. Houses abut right up to the road, but vendors still creep a foot, sometimes a daring 18 inches, into the street from a wide doorway, which makes traveling down the street in a jeep an intimate introduction to its community, its life, its faces. Luckly, this is a very skilled driver.
We often have to stop, while some helpful person appears out of nowhere to clear the road ahead or to the side of us to spare someone's bicycle from being crunched. One very old, very poor, very bent man politely motions for us to back up and wait while he reverses the heavily laden cart of bricks he is pulling and moves it into a side alley to allow us to pass. People are so often gracious, helpful and accommodating here.
Shortly after a very narrow 90∘ turn in which we clear the corner wall of a house by less than ½ an inch, we arrive. I am told to wait in the van. This street is a bit quieter. Virtually all of the people coming and going are cleanly if not elaborately dressed, nicely groomed. The house I am facing as I sit is a very old Victorian brick, with fading red paint, severely peeling, faded dark green shutters, and a dimly glittering gold, scalloped panel below the windows. One panel is completely gone, but you can see where it was attached. Someone obviously took great pride in this house at one time. The curtains are formerly white, now gray, with tinges of mysterious, blue and pink streaks and speckles, and finely detailed lace with perforations that I cannot quite make out.
After about 5 minutes, I am asked to come. We walk back to that sharp corner to an open doorway.
There is a Bengali sign over the doorway and a table and several benches in what serves as the waiting room for patients. A bright yellow cloth serves as a curtain dividing one large, single room. The curtain has several stains and holes, but it is cheery nonetheless. It hangs from a rod held in place by hand-twisted lengths of metal coat hangers. Everything in Kolkata seems to be homespun functional. The walls are turquoise, faded, scraped and splotchy, at times roughly patched with much deeper turquoise paint.
Overcrowded Slum Clinic Waiting Room
Dr. Roy leads me past the curtain to a metal chair set across from the now-set-up folding table. I notice a large photo of of a military officer on the wall behind my chair, so this room is obviously loaned to the clinic. Several long boxes and a pile of puja debris line the far wall.
Dr. Roy takes out his briefcase and a box, and carefully sets up two large ledger books, a handful of pens, his stethoscope, and a box. Out of the box, he removes a flashlight (which he later uses to examine patients' eyes, ears and throats) and several stacks of small white pieces of paper that I eventually realize are medicine envelopes.
The first patient comes in. The young-to-middle-aged looking man hands Dr. Roy an approximately 3x4 inch white card containing his patient information and begins describing his condition in Bengali. Dr. Roy tells me that he has severe hemorrhoids that have been bleeding profusely. The bleeding has dramatically reduced over the last 4 weeks of treatment but there is still some bleeding. The underlying condition is serious and needs ongoing attention even after the bleeding stops, as any bleeding lesion can lead to cancer. Dr. Roy listens carefully to his lungs with the stethoscope, takes his pulse. He asks the patient to stick out his tongue. He carefully enters the patient number & name, and each prescription on a separate line of the ledger book. He then enters each Rx on a separate white envelope, makes a tiny notation on the patient's card, hands the card and the envelopes back to him, and wishes him well.
Dr. Roy tells me that he always tries to be positive and encouraging because it gives the patient the best possible chance for recovery.
The next patient immediately enters. The scene is repeated again and again. A middle aged man with a bacillary lung infection brings in cards not only for himself, but his asthmatic mother and his wife and children who have the same lung infection that he does. A toothless older man speaking in a thin and raspy whisper has pharyngeal carcinoma and severe prostate symptoms (the cancer has been treated elsewhere, but Dr. Roy is treating the prostate issues and orders further prostate lab work). An older, heavy woman with a pronounced cataract in her right eye and a heart problem walks in laboriously. I help her to her chair. Three weeks ago, she couldn't walk across the room, but with treatment, she has walked 10-15 minutes to the clinic today. The Mission will see to it that she receives cataract surgery soon. Dr. Roy pats her shoulder reassuringly as she leaves.
Boy Seeking Tx to Recover Voice
About every 20 minutes, Dr. Roy stands up and adjusts his own position, later explaining to me that he has back pain himself from sitting at this chair 6-10 hours a day, 6 days a week.
A young woman comes in. She has pronounced, painful spinal spondylitis caused by constantly carrying heavy pails of water for her work as a maid. She brings her sister's card as well, who has the same condition. "They have to work, however much their pain...they have no choice," Dr. Roy tells me. A classically beautiful 15 year old girl is treated for swollen thyroid glands. A mother brings her month old newborn in, they both have colds. A robust man in a soiled cotton dhoti, who appear to be in his early forties, is treated for phantom pain in his shoulder due to an above-the-elbow amputation as a young man. "It's much better after treatment, but the condition is chronic; it cannot be cured. He will always have some pain," Dr. Roy reports. Young and old come and go. With bacillary dsyntery from bad water. With exacerbated asthma from the polluted Kolkata air. With more bleeding hemorrhoids. More severe spondylitis. Unnamed gynecological problems. Renal and urinary infections.
Two and a half hours pass quickly, without a break. Two long ledger pages have been filled. The last patient has been seen. We load up to go. Dr. Roy tells me that there will be more than a hundred patients waiting at the next clinic, which is in the poorest slum in all of Kolkata. Driving in, I see many tiny, winding, muddy footpaths that cut between the disarray of shacks and open huts. It is dirtier, grimier, more intensely chaotic and cramped than anything I have yet seen yet in Kolkata. How I would love to really look at what is going on here, to take lots of pictures. But its feels inappropriate, that it would embarrass or shame them, that it would be a violation, so I hardly even look. I can only take in general impressions.
The van stops across from a particularly picturesque bicycle repair hut. The street is wet, full of trash, intimidating. I forge ahead, following Dr. Roy through a narrow alley lined with nearly falling down huts, and random debris. We come to a small building and go inside. The interior is rough, with old irregular wood poles tied together to support a thatched roof. Piles of indecipherable junk are in the rafters, and more piles of junk, with a stack of ancient, gray metal suitcases in the corner beside the door. Pictures of Stalin and Lenin look down on us! (Have I mentioned that the government of West Bengal has been Communist for 30 years?) Another, obviously loaned space. Benches and some chairs are set up in U formation around the wooden table. The room is packed with children and adults of all ages, mothers with their young children and babies, thin old men, a few fathers with toddlers.
Giggling Buddha Baby with Mother
The 1st patient is a young man, about 30, who was crippled for many years and who could not work. Everything had to be done for him. After several years of treatment, he is now able to walk without crutches and to work. "He cannot do the same work, but he can work," says Dr. Roy, "Which is a miracle for him and his family." The man has kind eyes, a gentle, vulnerable smile.
One exceptionally thin and small girl sits quietly for hours, without movement. Her facial affect is flat, her stick-like arms are pulled inward toward her chest, held straight and tense toward her knees. She is wearing a blue cotton dress with a plaid top. I am sure she is much older than the frail, looks-like-6-year-old frame she presents to the world. The man next to her points toward her back to show me that she has a huge tumor that covers her entire left shoulder, almost to her waist. It is significantly bigger than a very lopsided grapefruit. I ask if it is painful. Dr. Roy answers, "Very painful. At first we were only treating for the pain, which is less now. We are beginning to work on reducing the size as well as the pain. It is a bit smaller. It is glandular."
Patients continue to pour into the cramped room. Each slips his or her patient card under the pile, to the bottom of the ever growing stack of cards of those waiting to be seen. One woman in her 30s has a painful tumor in her breast. I ask if she can have it removed surgically. Dr. Roy says there is no need to right now, since the tumor has reduced 3S-40 percent in the 15-20 weeks she has been receiving treatment here. A middle aged man has TB. An amazingly placid and quiet 2-3 year old boy has a draining, swollen and inflamed outer ear infection.
A tiny, wiry old man in a soiled white t-shirt and dhoti comes in. He sits on the bench to my right. Later, when a mother passes her baby into the room from outside, he plays with the child, obviously enjoying it, for some time before a young girl takes it.
Bright, Obviously Intelligent, Engaging girls
Everyone is waiting a very long time for Dr. Roy to pick up their card and call their name. We are getting to know one another pretty well. My presence as a westerner has added to the excitement and character of the day, especially for the children, who are wildly intent on engaging me, constantly begging me to take their picture, which I happily do. Children and adults gather outside the window to catch a glimpse of me, trying to get their photos taken. I pranam endlessly, again and again, to everyone.
I take hundreds of shots, showing them to those who are interested (they all are). The children, and often the adults as well, respond with great bursts of excitement and heightened interest in having another photo taken. We are having great fun. All the while, I am struck, again and again, at the ease of their laughter and their generosity toward one another, the radiance and intelligence in their faces. Most, though not quite all of them, are in clean clothes, however poor they might be.
At times the children's excitement over the photos gets out of hand and they crowd Dr. Roy, making it hard for him to examine a patient. When I apologize for causing such a stir, Dr. Roy is gracious and understanding. He knows that this is as important and healing as the medicine they receive. I am falling in love with these people, entranced by the communal good feeling that we are so naturally sharing.
As the day goes on, I am increasingly haunted by what Baba said to me several nights ago. I am coming to appreciate what I couldn't fathom when he originally exclaimed, "How can I call them poor?!? Look at their open hearts, their generosity, the light in their eyes, their readiness to laugh and play with one another. They have a naturalness of being I don't find anywhere else. How can I call them poor? They have that kind of wealth, a kind of being that no one else has."
So Many Madonnas...
I look again and again at one lovely mother across from me who sits in the back of the room, laughing easily with those around her. But every one of these women are beautiful. So many Madonnas holding their own divine child.
I think about the west. Though some of us might visit easily with our neighbors in a doctor's waiting room and have a chance special encounter, but how often would we have a communal experience like the one we are all enjoying here, in the poorest slum of poor Kolkata?
Girl Encouraging Child
With each glance and interaction, I take each child, each mother, each old man in a little deeper. Magic is happening. One very thin old woman comes in and adds her card to the bottom of the pile. I urge the girls in the chair next to me to give her their chair. I pranam to her and say, "Namaskar" and then we stare for a long, long time into each other's eyes. The girls ask me if I speak Bengali. With lots of gestures, I say, "No Bengali. Only English. Only pranams. Only Namaskar, Namaskar, Namaskar. Only eyes. Only heart," as I reach across moving my hand back and forth from my eyes to the old woman's, from my heart to hers. "Only smiles," I finally conclude. We all laugh.
Every man, woman and child here has met my quiet stare into their eyes with a easy and natural, mutual exchange of deeply felt human connection. Where could this happen in the U.S., I wonder? How can we call these people poor? I repeat the question to myself again and again in the freshly dawning realization of what they are teaching me. Poverty is a lie. It is an illusion, a soul-killing fabrication of the mind (in the mind of those who have and those who have not). There is so much more going on, so much more inside each of us, whatever our circumstances. Without knowing what our gifts are, how would any of us ever know how rich we are or what we are capable of?
By 3:30 p.m., 197 patients have been seen and the room is empty except for those who linger to say goodbye. They each received medicine for Rs. 1 per Rx. If they have no money, the medicine is free. Before I step into the van, many of the children have returned to say, "Thank you. Thank you," and to shake my hand. Lots of hugs and kisses later, I step into the van. I am in love with these children, these mothers, grandmothers and grandfathers. They have given me a startling revelation into the true nature of poverty, and the richness of human dignity.
