In the Bonesetter's Waiting Room Read Free Page A

snapshot of ‘now’ is destined soon to become a mere record of practices, some of which, in just a few years’ time, may well be obsolete. The stories told here move between rural and urban settings, from healing traditions rooted in India’s religious, royal and colonial past to its twenty-first-century innovations. From neuroscience to jungle berries, ancient formulae to e-health, royal wrestlers to pioneering heart surgery, these are tales about medicine in India – as complex, vibrant, inspiring and bewildering as the country itself.

1
    Depressed in Dharavi
    WHERE ‘60-FEET ROAD’ rises over the rail tracks, a short bridge loaded with abandoned heavy building materials and concrete mixers is a conduit to a part of Mumbai that its casual visitors – and many locals – would struggle to identify with. It’s not that the slums of India’s most glamorous city are invisible. Brought to the world’s attention by the film Slumdog Millionaire , Mumbai’s vast shanty towns envelope its international airport, so that the only way to be personally oblivious to the sea of blue tarpaulin or galvanized roofs is to land into the city by night.
    ON THE GROUND , ask to be taken to Dharavi and a unidirectional shake of taxi drivers’ heads will swiftly dismiss you. The driver who finally agreed to take me – for around three times the correct fare – compensated by doubling up as a tour guide. ‘Dharavi is bigger than all slums,’ he offered in Hindi, as we were held up in traffic next to a giant concrete mixer. ‘Do you mean the biggest in Mumbai?’ I saw a broad smile flash in the rear-view mirror. Taking a hand off the steering wheel, finger pointed upwards in a gesture of proclamation, there was an irony in his proud pronouncement that we were entering not just the largest slum in the city, but the largest in all Asia. At 535 acres and with a population of over 700,000, Mumbai’s Dharavi is second only to the Neza-Chalco-Itza mega-slum in Mexico City.
    Located in the heart of a city in which rents are on a par with New York and London, the slum’s real-estate value is substantial. But towards 60-Feet Road, the Subways, Tataallianced Starbucks, indie cafés and boutiques that are now familiar sights in the fashionable city disappear. There is a branch of Domino’s Pizza just outside of Dharavi’s borders, but they refuse to deliver there. En route from the airport you will find only one ATM, a stark contrast with their availability in other parts of Mumbai and a move by India’s HDFC bank to capitalise on offering accounts to the many with little.
    Along 60-Feet Road, English writing on signs and shop fronts suddenly, and almost completely, gives way to Hindi. Sometimes, on top of the makeshift roofs of the shanties lining the littered, sewage-filled waterways, you can make out large English print. To keep the monsoon at bay, a lucky few residents have acquired huge rectangles of tarpaulin that in a former life were election posters or adverts for new Mumbai luxury developments. The larger than life-sized photographs of politicians staring skyward create an inadvertent satire, as do the luxury property slogans they sport: Have it all and save up to 72 lakh (£70,000); Serenity and blissful living . Other than these, the only English in evidence over the bridge is an ALFA BOYZ gang tag sprayed onto a dirty concrete wall (possible competitors, I later learn, to the SlumGods, Dharavi’s home-grown gang of breakdancing b-boys); and the words ‘Praise the Lord’, writ large on the windscreen of an old ambulance parked outside my destination.
    Officially ‘The Urban Health Centre in Dharavi’, Chota Sion Hospital was built in 1980 as the government of Maharashtra State (of which Mumbai is the capital) began building tower blocks to rehouse Dharavi’s early inhabitants and curb the slum’s spread. Some of the