No Pain, No Gain

This picture has nothing to do with this post. It is just a cool image. This man climbed a palm tree in the yard in front of our apartment with nothing more than his bare feet and hands. Twenty-five feet off the ground, he chopped down a few coconuts and then hopped back down and left.

For the past few days, Jenna has complained of a canker sore inside her bottom lip. She does not hesitate to show me the ulcer by pulling her lip down to her chin, pleading with me to judge the sore’s size and apparent redness. I can report from these many viewings that by Tuesday night, it was not getting any better.

So, I took a chance and walked to a nearby pharmacy just around the corner from our apartment on Tirur’s main road. It is a one-room stall with a walk-up counter. In many respects, it looks like an American pharmacy: white walls, dull green tables and chairs, a quilting of shelves along the back wall overflowing with pill bottles and ointment tubes.

A serene-looking man with glasses sat behind a desk talking in a low voice to a customer who stood on the outside of the stall leaning in over the counter. At a computer, another pharmacist was filling out an order. He had a silvery skein of pills—the likes of which you pull out of a box of Sudafed or Immodium in America—and he was cutting individual pills off with scissors and putting these separated pills into a small brown paper bag. Not exactly the procedure you would see in the US, but I had long ago stopped cataloging differences between an ‘American way’ and an ‘Indian way’.

The customer in front of me left with a small brown paper bag of his own, and I stepped forward. I pulled my lip down to my chin (just as I had seen Jenna demonstrate several dozen times over the previous few days) and I pointed animatedly at the exposed pink underside.

“Do you have something for canker sores?” I asked, though it came out something like, “Do yoo haf sumfing fer cankuh sorsh?”

Maybe my malformed words hit closer to Malayalam than my full-throated English because the man nodded passively, got up from his desk and walked to the wall of shelves. He picked over a few bags and boxes like a monk looking for an ancient text in a sacristy then he came back with several silvery packets of individually wrapped capsules. It looked as if he had just ripped a few from a box.

“One daily,” he said, putting the pills in a small brown paper bag. It’s not a good sign when the pharmacy makes you feel like your visiting a speakeasy.

“How much?” I asked, my lip no longer pulled down to my chin.

“Ten rupees,” he said. Ten rupees! A quarter in America!

I gladly and eagerly handed over a ten-rupee note. The man smiled and moved his benevolent gaze on the next customer in line.

I had just either solved Jenna’s canker sore problem or bought illegal drugs. Either way, I hadn’t been ripped off.