Avantika takes out her phone from the pocket of her kurti. Shifting her gaze from the screen straight into the eyes of her patient and speaks in a bold voice, “if it’s out of respect that you are standing then I may remind you that I haven’t even received my bachelor’s completion certificate and you are here with a double masters’.” It took a while for Saarang to figure out the humour in those deep eyes as he was wondering when she checked his credentials. And as he recalled the detailed history taking by the junior doctors earlier in the day, he coughed into a laughter and responded looking around, “Oh! I’m sorry I kept you standing this place is all yours.” Taking the lead from him, Avantika pulled out the chair near the bedside table and asked Saarang to be seated on his bed before settling on the chair herself.
There was merely a distance of one metre between the two and Saarang felt his heart pound again. He was confused and couldn’t recognise his feelings for a moment. He has had so many female friends in the past, but it seemed awkward to him the way his heart was responding. He feared if the doctor would use her stethoscope to evaluate him and the anticipated embarrassment further raised his heart rate. As Saarang tried to calm himself, Avantika kept her phone aside on the bedside table after scanning through it for a while.
She began, “see Mr. Saarang, …. errr… do you mind if I call you by your name?” Saarang was relaxed a bit on hearing that cute question from this ultra-professional girl. He said smilingly, “what other options do we have, definitely not uncle right? And big brother is outdated if I’m not wrong.” The young doctor laughed and continued, “You are good at holding conversations, no wonder you are into business.” On this he retorted, “Communications as such are just a part of business doctor, the major part revolves around a whole lot of calculations and pretty a number of decisions.” Avantika listened deeply to him, though the words seemed very common, but she became thoughtful for a few seconds. She found it interesting to know about the concept of a profession different from her own, or rather generally of any profession, because she was standing at the threshold of a career yet to begin in near future.
Regaining herself, she was into the task allotted to her and recollected the treatment schedule of this new patient, which she had just referred to on her phone. She started up again, “So! See Saarang you are suffering from an ailment which is not very severe in its presentation but may have a factor of chronicity if we don’t arrest it at the proper time and may have a tendency of coming back if we don’t create and maintain an unfavourable environment in your body for this particular disease.” Saarang sat looking at her, ready to imbibe in all sorts of information that was flowing. This time without any sorts of feelings though he was focussing right into her eyes.
Avantika continued, “So sir thinks that your body needs to be purified at first, then only could he work on your body against this particular ailment as well as on the general up gradation of your health in the long run.” After saying this much she paused for a while and asked if there was something that he couldn’t follow, because she had noticed him frowning as she spoke. Saarang smiled, sporting his glistening well aligned teeth, and said, “Doctor, I respect your profession and I believe that whatever treatment your professor has planned for me would surely show the desired results. And much more than that, the amount of value you give to the concerns of your patients. You are sitting here before me is simply the proof for that.” Avantika responded quickly, “I’m sorry to interrupt, but you know it is very important that the person knows what he is going through, because his state of mind really has a big role in the effect of medicines. Professor says that it’s the body and mind of the patient which does all the healing and the treatment we provide whether internal or external just creates a favourable environment for it. So that eventually the natural maintenance of equilibrium is carried out and the state of health is restored. Ok…Ok… you tell me what struck you when I explained your treatment plan.”
Saarang cleared his throat and asked a bit embarrassed, whether his body was so messy that it had to be cleaned up first before doing anything to fix his complaints. And what they actually meant by that cleaning? Was that the same as cleaning the site with spirit before puncturing a needle to make it germ free and did he have germs all over his body? The state of confusion was so evident on his face that Avantika wished that she hadn’t mentioned about the term cleaning at first only. She took a deep breath and continued with quite a strong will to convince her patient. The words of the professor echoed in her mind that it’s the right of the patient to know and understand what exactly is done on his body and that understanding helped to accelerate the healing.
Avantika spoke up, rather softer in her tone this time. “I understand Saarang, it’s natural that you get such doubts. You know when I joined this course five years back every word the teachers spoke left me coiled up in a million questions. Some of which I asked to the teachers and some to the seniors and many more questions became the topics of heated discussions among my peer, in which ironically all were new to science. In the course of time many got answered and there are still many left unanswered. So, what I mean is, don’t expect that you will understand things as I do at this point of time, as I have been living with science for about five years now. But still I’m confident enough that I can make you understand at least this particular treatment planned for you. So, basically, it’s a threefold schedule in the given order. That is Rookshana, Snehana – Sweda, and Shodhana before sending you off with a long term medication.”
Saarang was listening carefully and said, “I like the openness of yours, obviously I don’t want to learn the entire thing as you guys do, but as I’m new to this medicine and when I showed the interest of knowing it, the doctors over here welcomed it, which itself is impressive, I just expressed my thoughts aloud. And I guess the Sanskrit words you just spoke were the same as the ones uttered by the professor earlier, right?” “Exactly, it’s great that you could recognise the terms, it has raised my confidence as a teacher”, said Avantika with a smile of relief on her face and continued. “See the terms are in Sanskrit, which is the traditional ancient language in which the various medical and surgical textbooks of Ayurveda are written and as we study them in the core form itself, the terminologies used also continue to be in Sanskrit only.”
Saarang spoke up again, “may I interrupt you for a while…. I wanted to know whether these textbooks of yours are still available or whether you guys learn it as such from your teachers.” Avantika retorted, “It’s a truth that many of the manuscripts were lost in the long run but the basic texts are in regular print, both in their original Sanskrit versions and in different language translations. And there are many more explanatory books, at local, national, and international levels.” Saarang nodded his head, expressing his impressive feelings.
Avantika looked around, as if she was searching for something. “Are you looking for something?” asked Saarang. “Yaa …my notepad is with Jenni, I thought I would use a paper and pen, in case I needed them to explain things to you in a better way.” Saarang raised from his bed and walked towards the cupboard and pulled out a tan formal leather bag, maybe the one he used to carry his laptop. He took out something like a notepad from that and walked back to his place after replacing the bag into the cupboard. He gave the notepad to Avantika and asked if that was enough.
“Sorry to bother you, this is great… a cute notebook.” Said Avantika as she opened the notebook and pulled out a pen from her kurti’s pocket and started scribbling something on the watermarked pages of the notebook. She wrote three words one under the other and numbered them, and then put a hyphen adjacent to each of them. She then looked at the patient, rather her student now and said, “These are the three words you enquired about and let me tell you that these are just few of the hundreds of words we come across every day in the clinical scenario at any Ayurveda establishment like this. And first of all, let me tell you about some relatable words in English for each one of these, so that you can understand better.” And gripped her pen again to write down something when cracking the silence, they heard a pair of heavy footsteps right at the door and Rehan broke into the room gasping for his breath.
Both Saarang and Avantika jumped onto their feet frowning, eager to figure out what exactly had happened. “Rehan spoke up before they could utter a word, “Bro! there’s this news from Nisha….” Saarang was confused because just before hours everything was normal, and both of his parents are definitely in good state of health and he feared if Nisha was alright and that Rehan had to head back immediately. Rehan continued, “My brother…uncle has met with a minor road accident, but she said that he’s perfectly alright and luckily there are no major injuries. He was immediately taken to the hospital and all medical evaluations were normal.”
Saarang was all red and sweated profusely, “When bro and how …and what do you mean by no major injuries…” he trembled as these words dropped from his mouth. Avantika stood still, shocked by the unexpected incident happening but she gathered all the courage and asked Rehan whether Saarang’s father was driving or a pedestrian and what kind of vehicle was involved.
