asked to sing popular Indian songs for the boys. None passed the qualifying exams. One caught Amir’s eye and her golden voice filled his ears. One song, a sentimental but haunting one, telling of how she would live and die unseen in his street, he remembered, and often sang under his breath. Where did his thoughts fly when he remembered that old song?
He made his first Indian Ocean crossing in 1949 at the age of sixteen. This was to be the first of many such journeys from the east coast of Africa to Bombay. He traveled in the cheapest part of the liners that ploughed these seas several levels below the deck. While all around him were in miseries with mal-de-mer, he stocked up on his ever-favorite Kit-Kat chocolates and made them last the seven days crossing. He said he had to consume them ‘to prevent them from melting’ in the furnace heat of the underbelly of the ship. At different times during these crossings, the ships stopped at Seychelles, Madagascar or Mauritius, all of which he roamed. One of the Seychelles Islands is Amirante, no doubt named for him. Lorenço Marques, now Maputo in Mozambique, was another name that he evoked in romantic memory of those ocean journeys.
In Bombay he started studies at the then-elite Elphinstone College. A few miles away I was attending the much inferior Jai Hind College. I had not found my star yet, and organic chemistry left me in disarray. Two years later we both were admitted to the Grant Medical College, he on merit and I on questionable merit but helped by the alumnus status of my father.
I found my muse in medicine. And in a way he did, too. I roared through at the top of my class. And he thoroughly enjoyed those young years which were there to enjoy. He had a group of male friends with whom he played poker till the wee hours of the morning while drinking bootleg liquor in prohibition Bombay. A succession of nurses enjoyed his fun and company. In the third year of five-year medical school, he excelled in one examination— Pharmacology—and that is when I first noticed him.
Another highlight of his distinctly non-academic medical school years was the famous ‘SJ Mehta trial.’
SJ Mehta was an irascible surgeon in the old school mold. He terrorized and even brutalized medical students, specially those in the ‘Amir mold.’ He would walk into surgery—gallbladder was his special favorite—with a lighted cigarette between his lips. If ash fell into the open belly, he claimed it was sterile and stimulated healing. A ‘ward boy’ stood behind him at the operating table with the only function of removing and replacing the cigarette from his mouth. From his mouth would also emanate the vilest curses directed toward his forever-inept house officers. They did nothing that satisfied his sense of perfection, and knuckle bashing with a variety of surgical instruments was background music to all his surgery.
Amir and his pals organized a mock trial accusing SJ of crimes including physical and emotional assault, and defamation directed against medical students. Amir appointed himself the chief prosecutor with a team of assistants. SJ gamely consented to appear but refused the offer of one of the nerdy male students to be his defense counsel. He would, of course, conduct his own defense.
Several traumatized medical students were rehearsed and brought in as witnesses against SJ. One stated that a naso-gastric tube had been forced into his stomach as punishment for not knowing the pH of gastric juice. SJ’s defense was that this student would never ever forget the indications for the use of a naso-gastric tube and thus he had done the student a favor in teaching him an unforgettable lesson.
Predictably, I did not attend Amir’s glorious moment in this event, which I thought too frivolous a waste of my time. But all accounts of it for days after reported a coup decisively won for the students by Amir Tejani.
Our five years ended in grueling exams in seven clinical disciplines. Each had written (essay type, not multiple choice) and oral examinations involving actual patients. The whole process was spread over a month, and after that experience all future exams paled into insignificance. The pharmacology star did not repeat his brilliance, but I did excel. Was it that that attracted him? He claims it was not my brain but only my legs that drew him in toward me. But it occurred soon after the examination results that we became an item, a team. All our acquaintances predicted a short affair because of our outward incompatibilities and dissimilarities. Well, it lasted forever. Literally till death did us part.
He decided on pediatrics as his specialty and entered an internship on one of the busy pediatric units at our campus. There were so few real teachers at the time. But the junior attending on his unit was a slim quiet man, devoted to children with an encyclopedic knowledge--Dr. Wagle, forever remembered by Amir.
While working on this, his first pediatrics job, he started a habit which I thought awful but would always earn him people who adored him beyond everything and those who could not stand him. He played flagrant favorites. A little girl, Nimmi, stole his heart away. She was a long-term resident in the hospital with tubercular meningitis and liquid eyes and a smile to die for. We never went anywhere without him bringing back a gift for Nimmi—often a jasmine bracelet. No matter how late we would be back from our evening roamings, he would pop into the pediatrics ward to give it to her. Jasmine does not last beyond a few hours but Nimmi was his forever.
We interned for six months in one of the major specialties and then three months in a minor one. He did a minor in Dermatology or ‘skin,’ as it was disparagingly called. The chief on ‘skin’ was a romantic eccentric, Dr. L., who made instant diagnoses and never stopped to explain the reasoning behind his decision. The applications and management for all the diseases he diagnosed were the same, so it really did not make that much difference. Dr. L. always had a certain rose-like aura about him. On asking about the rose smell, I was told that every day on his way to work he stopped his chauffeur-driven Mercedes Benz at one of the row of ear-cleaning establishments in Bhindi Bazaar just outside the main hospital gate.
In response to a honk of the horn, the impoverished kansaf (kan=ear saf=clean) rushed out to Dr. L., still seated in the double or triple parked car, with home-made Q-tips and hot oil. He poured the oil into Dr. L’s wax-filled ears, rolled his (the doctor’s) head around a bit and then scraped out the oil and wax with the Q-tip. Following this, a rose-attar drenched clean Q-tip was placed under the outer fold of each ear. Dr. L. often arrived at the clinic with these Q-tips still sticking out of his ears, and a peon would help remove them before he started his morning of snap diagnoses. What chance did his interns have of learning any real dermatology?
It was now early 1958. Letters arrived from Amir’s family in Africa. By this time they had moved to Kampala, Uganda. His father had started a business in this, the largest city in Uganda— not yet the capital. Once again, this time in the suitcase business, he did not prosper and thought this was the perfect time for Amir to return and start a practice in the space he had used as his store. It was time for Amir to come home after these long student years and take over the responsibility of helping support this large family. His father and mother had given him the best of opportunity to educate himself, and now it was time to start earning a living.
I never saw the letters between him and his parents, but I know there was no argument, and I and he accepted it as inevitable. I had just started a two-year senior training position in Obstetrics and Gynecology and did not doubt that I should complete it even though this advanced training would not be accepted toward the British boards that were required in Uganda. Perhaps we both thought we needed to contemplate things before making the plunge. I remember and know his reasoning more than mine. He had to go back, start his practice, move the family to a larger house—they lived in ‘blue room,’ a two-roomed apartment for the entire family of parents and nine children. During these two years apart, he did all this and the family moved into an independent house in ‘Madras Gardens’ in the Indian section of Kampala.
I remember my own resolve wavering in those two years but he never faltered and at the end of the two years was back in Bombay to start our time together as he had always planned.
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