Western-trained doctor in the other world - poem - Web Chapbook Issue: www.webdelsol.com/tlr/

Literary Review, Spring, 1998 by Reetika Vazirani

He bolted out of bed full of ideas and impatience.

Bathed and groomed he snapped at his chauffeur.

At the Clinic he hammered at his desk

and out came surgical implements he designed,

patents pending if there were time to file.

He dashed off case studies, the strange abscess

on the cheek of a child.

Urging prevention, he drained it expertly.

The child died a year later of malnutrition,

and the mother paid the bill with eggs and roti.

What a village! He dreamt up a national autoclave

and vast greenhouses on the lips of the lazy gods.

He was a minnow in a tank the size of Asia.

To persist in that place he dreamt of emigration,

less dust on better roads,

where crops smelled like the cash of forgetting,

and you led your wife in an elegant fox-trot,

and saw yourself in the ads for tuxedos.