On Breaking an Ankle

A while ago I broke my ankle and had to undergo surgery and had orthopedic implants put in to repair the damage.



This recalled has to mind an accident an uncle of mine had had some time around the 1920s. He would have been about twelve years old then. He was attempting to pluck some mangoes standing on the terrace wall of a two-storied house, watched fondly by his sister. He unfortunately fell the two floors and broke his thigh- bone. Reports have it that the bone was seen through the injury.



He was rushed to some hospital, doctors there declared that nothing could be done and an amputation was the only option. The medical facilities available were evidently not advanced enough those days. His mother, my grandmother, put her foot down. She insisted that he be taken to a traditional bonesetter in a nearby village, if he also said there was no hope she was willing to accept amputation, but he had to be consulted.



The bone setter worked a miracle without access to technology such as X-rays and Plaster of Paris casts he set the fracture with his traditional methods and medication one of which I recall was called peacock-oil. My uncle was walking in a few months though he walked with a limp.



Further months passed and my uncle was still limping when the bonesetter happened to pass through the village and saw him limping. He called on my grandfather and asked that my uncle be sent along with him for a week and he would cure him of the limp. Quite naturally my grandfather was more than willing and sent him along.



The bonesetter’s claim was that that my uncle was not limping because of any necessity but purely out of habit. The treatment consisted of walking behind my uncle with a cane and hitting him with it if he limped. My uncle was cured of his limp he lived to the age of ninety and walked without a limp. In fact he was on one of his regular evening walks when he had the heart attack that finally took him away.



Those days, I am given to understand that except, for very serious illness doctors were not called. There were women who knew home remedies, my grandmother I believe was one such. There were traditional medical practitioners available and it was only when all else failed that the MBBS doctors were called in. I must admit however that I have all this information on hearsay evidence.



I do however have firsthand recall of the era of the family general practitioner. Everybody at home went to the same doctor and he treated you for everything. His examination was quite through He sent you to very few specialist barring ophthalmologists and dentists. Pathological tests and x-rays were called for rarely and more often to confirm a diagnosis. He made home visits and since he saw you on a fairly regular basis he could notice changes his diagnosis was based on a wider picture he was thus a good diagnostician. I find such doctors increasingly rare.

In the recent past I have encountered doctors for whom even the stethoscope around their necks was merely a badge of office. You told them what was wrong and without even touching you they handed out their prescriptions. There are yet others who need a whole battery of tests, blood tests and almost every kind of scan imaginable before they can come to some kind of conclusion. There seem to be as many specialists as diseases. Now days you get referred to specialists more and more often. (An aside about all specialists, not just doctors: a specialist is a person who knows more and more about less and less a super specialist is a person who knows everything about nothing) With the specialists you miss the personalized care and relationship which one had with one’s family physician.



Coming back to my broken ankle and the reminder it has provided me with the kind of personal care provided to my uncle makes my sense of loss at the passing of an era a little more bearable. I do limp a little but I certainly do not want the kind of treatment meted out to my uncle.



Talking of my uncle has recalled to my mind the various things we seem to have lost.



We have lost the skills and knowledge of the traditional bonesetters. The skill is still available, in parts of Orissa and Gujarat; a once more prevalent art seems to be on its last legs.  Other traditional knowledge and skills are also being lost.



It seems hard to believe that in this age of the Internet and search engines that knowledge could be lost. The very volume of information on the information superhighway can easily be its undoing, burying the useful under the mass of the useless.



The idea that knowledge only grows is a myth. Were this not so the heliocentric view of the solar system would have been known from the time of the ancient Greeks. They had worked out that the sun was the center of the planets and that the earth was one of the planets. They had worked out that the earth was a sphere and even its diameter. Yet mankind did come to believe that the earth was the center and that it was flat. Knowledge did indeed regress.



Apart from the specific items of knowledge and information that have been lost what is more significant is that we seem to have lost a way of life; a way of life that was ecologically sound and stressed the interconnectedness of all things. I shall try giving specific examples.



I remember from my childhood in Tamilnad that each household had a pot to collect the kitchen wastes. Into this pot went the wash water from washing the rice, the water and the skins from washing the dals. The water drained off after boiling the rice and the various vegetable peels generated in the kitchen. Essentially all the kitchen waste would find its way into this pot. This pot would be periodically taken away by the milkman he would use this water and add it to oilcakes, yet another waste generated from extracting oil from oilseeds. This ensured that the nutrients available from the waste were not wasted







The importance attached to this wastewater, In Tamil, kazuneer can be gauged by the fact that there is a deity named after this. The deity Kazuneer Thotiyan is at a temple dedicated to Vishnu the main Idol at this temple is remarkably similar to the idol at Tirupati. Despite this similarity many differences exist. The prasad at this temple includes vibhuti a shivite custom and quite alien to vishnavite traditions, a subsidiary deity is represented by just a plinth without any idol. I like to feel that this temple attempts a synthesis between the various traditions apart from the vishnavite and shivite it also incorporates earlier tribal traditions.  At the outer wall of this temple is a small tank, thoti in Tamil, which collects the wastewater from the temple kitchen. This tank is dedicated to the deity Kazuneer Thotiyan and no offering at this temple is considered complete without an offering to this deity. From this understanding of the relevance of waste and good recycling practices we have come to a time when all such waste merely finds its way down the sewers.



Again when eating off plates we were expected to finish every thing on the plate and leave nothing behind, no waste was tolerated and we had to wash our plates and put them away. Things were different if we ate off banana leaves then we had to leave some food leftover. The leaves would be thrown away after the meal and stray dogs would come to search for food leaving some ensured that they found something, after the dogs would come the cattle to eat the banana leaves. All life was respected it was not all me my. Nowadays dead cows are found with plastic in their rumen.



Yet another concept was called the thinai in Tamil. This was a small platform built along the outer wall in the front of a house. This served as a sit-out for members of the household during the cooler parts of the day where they could sit and exchange gossip with others ensconced on their own thinais.



The thinai served another purpose also; it was a place a wayfarer could rest. It had characteristics of both a private and a public space. Its public function is emphasized by the term for a miser in Tamil “ he built a house without a thinai “. The Hindi term for miser “makkichuse refers to the attempt of a miser to recover what he had lost to a fly while the Tamil phrase points to his lack of concern for others, even strangers.



The Englishman’s home was his castle, not quite Indian homes. They were expected to provide for the outsider. I have been told that travelers, strangers could and would invite themselves for a meal at somebody’s home and share what was available. The Hindi word for guest athithi seems appropriate it can be broken into two as a-thithi without a date, unscheduled.



Food was also available at many temples. This food was available both to travelers and people who needed it. This food became available because most temples owned land, land endowed to them by rulers and by philanthropists. The produce and income from such land was used to feed people. Philanthropy was encouraged by the notion that a man’s standing was not gauged by what he owned but by how much he did by way of providing livelihood and help to others. Such land in many cases has be transferred, by way of “progressive” legislation to private hands from being a sort of public property and food is not available at temples anymore. We are now in the process of establishing a safety net for the poor especially in the rural areas after having destroyed a system that had been in place.

   

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