A tale of caring

One night, she phoned him at home, distraught that she had run out of milk powder.

After retirement, we chose to live in Mysuru, a small town like R K Narayan’s Malgudi, where my wife was born and grew up.

The novelist’s family had a house close to that of my in-laws’. Old Mysore had no metropolitan aspirations in the years after Independence, content to be a green median between the rural-urban divide, a city of palaces and country charm, with touristy lures like the Krishna Raja Sagar dam, silks by the soft yard, sandalwood and ivory carvings, lacquerware toys, the Chamundi Hill and small cafes where one could sup on idli, masala-dose, ragi mudde, Maddur vade and enticing delicacies like Mysore-Pak. 

Temples, churches and mosques; pilgrims, festivals and concerts; and Dasara kept folks in good spirits and in tranquil tolerance of all creeds and castes. Prosperous families sent children to convent schools to imbibe education in English. The prevailing ethos valued dignity (ganyathe) and respect for elders and peers. Domestic animals, especially cattle, sheep, cart-horses and pets, were indulged and amply fed, though the deplorable whip hand was also used.

Healthcare drew people to doctors and healers, including native cures and allopathy. Middle class home-makers frequented the clinics of general practitioners. Thus began the popularity of pharmacies, ‘dispensers and compounders’, who could read the hardly legible medical prescriptions and instantly concoct ‘mixtures’ and give customers bottles of liquid Bismuth, with the ounces marked on the glass.

In the few main streets, small shops and shacks sold branded goods like shampoo, shaving cream and hair oil. Huntley and Palmers biscuits, milk powder, Band-Aid strips, aspirin and items like Dettol, Horlicks, cough syrup and tincture of iodine were much in demand. For decades, we relied on a lean, elderly man who ran a pharmacy with his sons.  He cared for his customers. Shopping in small towns was congenial to personal rapport. When we could not go to his shop, he would home-deliver our urgently required aspirin or antiseptic.

Once, he was taken ill, but the tough oldster came back to work in a fortnight.  When we saw him next, my wife asked him to recall any customer he personally felt happy to have served. Typically, he said it was for a little child, the first-born of a recently married friend.

The young mother came to him with the babe, barely six-months-old, and so winsomely cute, he doted on it. One night, she phoned him at home, distraught and grief-stricken that she had run out of milk powder. A little later, she pleaded with him to procure a couple of tins at once, since the babe was crying inconsolably. Could he open his shop and find any substitute packet at once?

The old pharmacist was a tradesman, but he was also something more. He wheeled his bicycle out and pedalled three kilometers to his shop, opened it, found one last tin of milk powder. He then woke up his son to deliver it pronto to the young couple.

For us, this tale of caring and compassion is a token that all is not lost in our land and in the city that has adopted us. The composer Thyagaraja, then in his eighties, begins a prayerful kriti with the word ‘paritapamu’, meaning sympathy. Whenever I listen to this rare song in raga Manohari on a CD, I am reminded of the compassionate old pharmacist.