Delhi Professionals

Last night I chipped another tooth. You might know that I did this in London as well—eating chips with a little rock in them! Weird luck, huh?! In this case, I was eating something with nuts. Wow, I must really be getting old, and my teeth are all crumbling away. Anyway, as you can imagine, one gets a little nervous being in a foreign country and not knowing a good dentist. Luckily we’ve met a couple Dehliwallahs in the past few weeks. I was able to get a hold of Shubra who suggested that we go to Holy Angels hospital near campus. We’d heard before that it’s an outstanding hospital and that if we had an emergency we should feel very confident going there. But I had no idea they had a dentist in residence. So this morning we took an autorickshaw to Holy Angels and found the dentist in the basement. When I mentioned to the reception that I had a dental emergency she said to go right in to the dentist’s office.

There we were greeted by Dr. Sanjay Mehta, a fifty-something grinning guy. Luckily my tooth was not hurting, but of course I worried that if I didn’t do something is would hurt soon. He laughed and said, “No, but do you want it to hurt?” I have to say he was the most relaxed and confidence inspiring dentist I have ever encountered—and we have a really good one in Long Beach. He has this high tech camera that he puts in your mouth and you can watch the inside of your mouth on a screen right in front of you. He snaps pictures somehow and then saves them on the screen, so he can show different angles and explain exactly what is going on with your tooth. Very cool. He showed me how all he needed to do was smooth out the rough edges a bit. And he assured me that if it gets worse it will not hurt. Well, I almost believe him ;-). Anyway, he chatted with us quite a lot and told us about clients that were coming to see him today. A business woman, one of his regular patients, who is flying in from Darfur and would see him this afternoon. While we were there his cell phone rang and it was the police chief of Calcutta, who said, “Hey, I want to come over today and show you my teeth!” Apparently, he’s been Dr. Mehta’s patient for a long time. After he’d looked at my teeth, he suggested we come and sit at his desk so we could talk about what I should do. He worked out a price to get the whole thing repaired—probably 25% what we’d pay in the US. (We paid $12 for this visit.) But he was not at all pushing to have him do the work. Whatever I wanted—I could wait until the end of the year and do it in the US with no problem. He talked about his good life here in Delhi—working just 4 hours every day and 3 nights a week. He plays badminton every morning on the JNU campus, and he invited us to join him anytime. While we were there, the police chief showed up and we all chatted for a few minutes and then we were off. Talk about an enjoyable dentist visit!

Here are a few pictures of the audience at the India International Center (added later). IN this first one, Dr. Mehta would have fit right in. I just thought you'd like to see a few others too.





















8:05 pm—as I sit here at my desk working, I hear a little thump at the window right near me. I look over to the ledge outside and an eight-inch gecko is licking his lips (do gecko’s have lips?). It feels like he’s staring at me, but in fact he’s contemplating his next kill. Apparently the fact that I haven’t noticed that it’s now been dark for quite awhile and shut the curtains has provided him with a glorious feast. The light in here is attracting the moths. He just grabbed another moth with the lightening-fast snap of his neck, and now he’s racing up the window. For some reason I find geckos particularly amusing and was in fact not too bothered to find that one now lives in here with us. Occasionally we notice something move—and it makes us jump. We usually only manage to catch his tail flick, as he slithers to his next dark hideout.