The Tree and the Patients

I have been basking in the thin sunshine since half past five, and I tell you this not as boast nor as pastoral affectation, but as the most essential fact about the kind of doctor I have managed, across thirty years of trying, to remain.

The beach is a ten-minute walk from the hospital. I have been taking the golden shower of early sunshine on this beach since my first year of practice, when a dying patient told me that a physician who does not tend his own soul tends his patients’ bodies with unruly equipment. I did not fully understand him then. I have thereafter spent three decades understanding him more completely with each passing year.

I have been to a golden kingdom in those early hours. I have been beautified inside and outside — I use this word without embarrassment, for what other word accurately describes the operation that the thin, clean, early sunshine performs upon a man who arrives at the beach carrying the accumulated weight of yesterday’s diagnoses, yesterday’s insufficient answers, and yesterday’s faces in the moment of being told? Within those tall walls of casuarina and sea-grape lies a garden consummate in beauty and colour. In the centre lies a tree. I recline against it and feel the early sun on my face, and it is a dream world at that hour, and I sit therein in what I can only call moody contemplation.

Wherefore does this matter? Because thereafter, I see my patients. Herein lies the whole philosophy of the tree and the sunshine and the thirty years of unreasonable early rising: that medicine is not a transaction between a repository of clinical knowledge and a malfunctioning body. It is an encounter between two human beings, one of whom is frightened and one of whom must thereafter be, in some quality that no curriculum adequately names, present. Not merely competent. Present.

The tree gives me that. The thin sunshine replenishes it. The beach returns me, each morning, to the person who is capable of walking into a ward and genuinely, fully, seeing the frightened human being in the bed.

Then it is time to see my patients. And I go to them, thereafter, with something more than knowledge.

Onwards March

The cool, aquarium light of dawn fell on our shoulders like a rich transparent curtain.

The day was fresh and pink like a newborn baby, that most overused of comparisons which I deploy here nonetheless because it is, on this particular morning, simply accurate. There is a quality of newness in certain dawns that the word new entirely fails to contain. The air smelled of chlorophyll and resin.

Button mushrooms had surfaced on a nearby anthill in the night, and our party was thereafter headed in that direction to gather these goodies with the purposeful eagerness of people who have been given, by the morning, something specific and benevolent to do with themselves. Shy squirrels peeped from behind branches and hid away, conducting their surveillance of our expedition with the cautious intelligence of those assessing human intention before committing to proximity. The wood was filled with the sweet chorus of a thousand chirpings.

Onwards march, said Desai, who always said it, who had been saying it on these morning expeditions since we were young men and said it still with undiminished conviction, as though the phrase were not merely directional instruction but philosophical declaration.

Thereafter this occupied me more than the mushrooms, more than the squirrels, more than the morning’s generous inventory of small wonders: that this was available. That it had always been available. That the aquarium light fell on the forest every dawn regardless of whether we were present to receive it, and that we had, on the great majority of dawns, thereafter chosen the indoor alternative.

The mushrooms filled the basket. The squirrels deliberated. The thousand birds continued their magnificent, unrefereed debate.

Onwards march.

What other instruction, on a morning such as this, could possibly suffice?

Someone Tell Me

The virulently red raspberryade arrived on the veranda in a clay cup still cool from the earthen pot, and I have thereafter measured every subsequent pleasure of my adult life against that standard and found most of them, in the final accounting, somewhat bureaucratic by comparison.

Summers at Granny’s were the only education that ever truly took. At Granny’s, one loitered like a tramp the whole morning. One picked nuts from the low branches with the selective discrimination of a connoisseur. One smelled flowers not in the performative manner of the nature-walk. One chased lizards. One pursued flying beetles with the comprehensive commitment of a naturalist to whom the specimen is, in this moment, the most important object in the known world. One chased them not to catch them, necessarily, but because the chasing was itself the point.

And when one had, at last, had enough — that most luxurious of all possible conditions, having had enough, which the scheduled life almost never permits one to reach organically — one sat on the veranda with the farm hands and sipped the virulently red raspberryade. Delicious, angry-looking, and the colour of something that meant business. The farm hands spoke of things I did not understand and thereafter never forgot. The afternoon conducted itself at the pace that afternoons, given proper latitude, prefer.

Wherefore, I demand, with increasing frequency and decreasing rhetorical restraint as the years accumulate, does there need to be school at all? I pose this question not in ignorance of the counter-arguments, but as a genuine provocation. Herein is what Granny’s summers taught that no curriculum has since replicated: that knowledge entered through the body (through the fingers on the nut, the nose in the flower, the legs in pursuit of the beetle, the tongue meeting the virulent red) adheres in a manner that knowledge entered through the ear and thereafter examined on paper does not.

I knew the raspberry. I knew it completely. Someone tell me what examination could have done that better.