I was standing outside the eye wards, listening to some music. I think I was playing Fountains of Wayne.

I saw a man come toward me, and he said, “Sir, may I ask you something?” He had on a dirty green shawl, and he had a straggly beard, I think he’d be two or three years older than I am.

I removed my earphones, and he drew me to one of the benches in the corridor and took out a file. It was dirty green too. He took out a couple of prescriptions from it.

He talked very fast. He said he had a daughter who was 10 months old, and she had a tumor on her chin. They took her to the local doctor who couldn’t do anything with it.

He stopped for a few moments, and then he said that he wouldn’t lie, and he took her to Medical College. He stopped again, and said, “Should I tell this to the other doctor? Will he be angry that I didn’t come here straight away?”

I almost laughed. I reassured him, and he said that they went to the OPD, and they referred him to the Pediatric Surgery department. They referred him to the pathology department for an FNAC. He came back with the report, but then they referred him to our college, and he came to our OPD, and they referred him to Pediatric Surgery again.

Here he stopped, and handed me the prescriptions. There was one from the OPD at Medical College and the new one from ours. I saw the one from Medical College, and the reason they had referred her to our college was that their Operation Theater was under repair.

I was reading this when he said that he wanted some help.
Well, this happens fairly regularly at our college; so much so, in fact that I have evolved a strategy to deal with it: I took my wallet out and showed him the couple of tenners I had, and told him that I could only afford to give him ten rupees.

He started, and said that he didn’t want my money. He wanted me to take him to the pediatrics department, and introduce him to someone. He told me the names of the three people from his village in Nadia who had graduated from NRS, Samrat Banik, Bimal Das, and someone else, I can’t remember.

He said, urgently, that he didn’t want to be turned away again.

And then he showed me the FNAC report. It said that she had an embryonal rhabdomyosarcoma, a very malignant tumor.

I looked back at him, and I saw he had tears in his eyes. He pointed to a woman coming toward us, and he said that was his mother, with his daughter. I saw the child. She was crying, and she had a piece of cloth around her chin, but you could see the outline of a large lump, with three twisted segments.

I would have taken him, but I don’t know anyone in Pediatric Surgery. It is a post-graduate discipline, and we don’t have any classes with them. I told him that, I told him that going with me, and going by himself would come to the same thing.

He asked, “But will they ask me to go somewhere else?”
I said, “No, you’ve come to the right place. Just tell the doctor exactly what you’ve told me, and you’ll be fine.”
“They won’t be angry that we went to Medical College first?”
I smiled, and put my hand on his shoulder, and said, “Of course not. All medical colleges are equivalent. It is all the same.”

And then he asked the question that I was praying he would not ask. “But will she get better?”
I replied, carefully, “They will cut it off. The tumor will be gone.”
He looked up at me. We both knew that wasn’t what he was asking.

I told him I had class, and left him waiting for the doctor.

There wasn’t anything else I could have done.
There wasn’t.