Butter chicken with bullets

I sat at a table at The Tandoor in Bengaluru and ordered an old favourite from my youth, butter chicken and naan. The aromas flooded my mind with memories of my days in Punjab. 

I walked into the portals of Brown Memorial Hospital in Ludhiana, and the first thing that struck me was the large sign above the reception: “PLEASE DEPOSIT YOUR FIREARMS HERE!”

I had joined a postgraduate programme in orthopaedics. I was allotted a room with a bath and shown a malodorous room which served as the “mess”. The speciality of the day was butter chicken; on Sundays, we were served tandoori chicken. I soon realised why tandoori chicken was jocularly called the National Bird of Punjab! On occasion it was Irish stew floating in oil.

Work was hard, and I spent the first year scrubbing the operative site with soap and water, making me wonder if this was a Master of Surgery programme or a Master of Scrubbing!

Punjab can get stuffy in the summer, and the local populace prefer to travel on the roof of the bus. It was not uncommon to see an empty bus with the rooftop packed with people.

The British had allowed Sikhs to bear arms, so one often saw men and even a few women fully armed. Since alcohol is a favourite beverage after hours, this led to several gunfights. Often one saw a father bringing a son or a son bringing in a father whom he had shot following an inebriated argument. One day, the skirmishes spread to the ward, and I was greeted by a shower of gunshots. I ducked under a bed. The police came and disarmed two members of a rival gang, bedridden but still warring.

The tragedy of Punjab is a result of the Green Revolution. Bountiful harvests need threshers and fodder cutters to process the produce. Farmers hire these machines by the hour and, to keep working through the night, often resort to opium and dangerous practices like manually feeding the machine with their hands and feet. This results in horrific injuries. I was wonderstruck to see a tall, burly Sikh walk into the ER carrying his mangled limb or another limping in on a crushed foot. Alas, they were crushed beyond repair, and the only answer was an amputation. We once had a distressing “amputation night” where we had to conduct a dozen amputations.

The people of Punjab have an earthy sense of humour. A particularly unpopular village elder when subjected to multiple rectal examinations for an enlarged prostate exclaimed indignantly, “Doctor Saab, if this is the treatment for my malady, I could have got my villagers to give it!” Another elder, when asked if he smoked while he was undergoing a colonoscopy, remarked, “Why, is there smoke emanating from down there?”

I finished my meal and walked into the Bengaluru sunshine, pensive but smiling.