The beautiful dentist

It’s always been something of a mystery to me as to why doctors’ waiting rooms have magazines strewn about on a centre table. Usually, people complain that they are old, which is true. But old or new, my puzzlement is over whether the sick can actually read, that too in a doctor’s antechamber. I, for one, have never seen anyone doing so, especially in a dentist’s clinic.

“It’s an Englishman’s affectation,” a friend had told me once. “It helps them avoid each other’s eyes.” English or European or Zulu, it seemed a very stupid thing, especially now that TV was so cheap. Airports and bars have installed them to help while away the time, so why not doctors’ waiting rooms?

This was my 18th visit to my dentist this year. My teeth have always been like something out of that story in Jerome K Jerome’s ‘Three Men in a Boat’ where the hero reads a reference volume on diseases and concludes that he has every one of them except perhaps housemaids’ knee.

My teeth were like that. Horrible. I had been to dozens of dentists over the last 45 years and all of them had told me that my teeth were bad, as if I didn’t know. Now most were missing. But it wasn’t until I found this dentist, a Dr Ambika Kapoor, that I had met someone who could administer painless treatment. The others, in comparison, had been butchers. Raj, ever dour, had said it had nothing to do with Dr K’s skills, but the new technologies. As my sons would say, whatever. She was a godsend, and that’s what mattered to me. I had undergone more pain than the Jews in Buchenwald.

In the five years that my teeth had been courting her, she had never spoken a word to me without that green mask on her mouth. Not just that, she spoke very little, that too very indistinctly because of the mask, and communicated mostly through her junior, an enthusiastic and very thin fellow with astonishingly good teeth. Anyway, after all these years there wasn’t much to say. My dental secrets were known to both sides and it was either to fix the next appointment or to present the bill for previous ones that we communicated. I must say, though, that I got preferential treatment, like a frequent flier or repeat guest at a hotel. I never had to wait very long these days. Dr Kapoor clearly understood my need for sympathy and had probably instructed the staff to send me in as soon as a chair fell vacant. I owed a lot to her.

She was a person of quiet taste. The waiting room, although it had no TV, had some very decent paintings on the walls by young Indian artists. I am not an art buff but, as in music, so in art: I can recognise class when I see it. What stood out in the six paintings that she had put up was the single splash of colour in a drab background, like the sun shining on a communications tower atop a mountain or the single piece of bright plastic hanging on the high-tension wire along a highway. All the paintings shared that feature and I wondered why she had chosen these ones particularly.

She also had some excellent music on in the waiting room. By now I had come to know that she had 17 CDs and played them according to the time of the day: Hindustani classical vocal before lunch; Mozart and Chopin till tea break; and old Hindi film classics after that, till she had seen off the last patient, which was usually around eight in the evening.

After the first two years, she had started attending to me herself. No junior doctor was allowed to treat me, not even her thin sidekick, whom she seemed to trust completely. I have spent hour upon hour gazing into her eyes, which, alas! were always focused on my teeth. If she became aware of my admiring gaze, she would turn the overhead light slightly to blind me. That was the only indication she ever gave of being aware of anything but my teeth. Sometimes she had to cradle my head on her ample bosom, which could not be hidden under the housecoat. If nothing else, it at least served to distract me from the pain.

I had arrived very late this evening, straight from the airport. I had gone to France for some conference and, on the second day, felt the onset of pain. By the time we boarded the flight back home late on the third evening there, the pain had become quite unbearable. By the time we landed in India eight hours later, I must have swallowed a dozen painkillers.

By some strange chance, she was alone in the clinic, sitting in the waiting room listening to the soft songs from old Hindi films and almost asleep. I said ‘good evening’, she opened her eyes, took one look at my face and took me straight to my favourite chair. Without a word she slipped a napkin on to my chest, gestured that I should open my mouth and set about tapping, poking, anaesthetising, drilling, filling and asking me, at last, to sit up.

I opened my eyes, still supine on the chair and she turned off the overhead light. After my eyes had adjusted, I saw that she had taken off her mask. This was the first time in seven years I had seen her full face. She was stunningly beautiful, with a straight nose, a soft glowing complexion and a serenity of expression that quite enhanced her looks. Her slightly greying hair fell on to her shoulders and framed her face in a perfect play of light and shade. I could only sit and gape. Beautiful women I had seen aplenty; but a beautiful dentist? It was a contradiction in terms, a biological oxymoron, if you will. Unaware of my stare, she yawned and I saw her teeth.

And I knew we were made for each other.

TCA Srinivasa-Raghavan’s debut novel, An Imperfect Calling, is forthcoming from Speaking Tiger mid-2018

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