By the time I enter the emergency ward my eyes are almost closed and parts of my body are numb. I muscle my way through the crowd into the clinic. It looks like the third-class passengers’ waiting-room of Delhi railway station. Men, women and children are sprawled all over the floor. A bearded patriarch lies on a stretcher tracing patterns on the wall with his legs. There is a cluster round the doctor’s table. I push my way through: I am more ‘emergency’ than most of them. Bee-stings on the neck and the ears can be fatal unless attended to at once. The doctor is talking on the phone. In his left hand he holds the instrument; in his right, a syringe. He talks away as he presses air bubbles out of the needle. Facing him is a fourteen-year-old girl with her chemise raised over her shoulders. My half-shut eyes focus on her young bosom-buds. Her mother glowers at me and turns angrily to the doctor: ‘You want to expose my child to the world?’ The doctor says, ‘One minute,’ puts the receiver on the table, stabs the needle into the girl’s belly and tells her to come again tomorrow. He picks up the phone. ‘Doctor, I’ve been stung by bees, please . . . ’ He says ‘Excuse me,’ into the phone in English and snaps at me in Punjabi. ‘You are not dying! Take your turn.’ He apologizes to the phone and lists his favourite restaurants: Moti Mahal, Gaylord, Laguna. He warns the fellow or lady at the other end of the line about crows being served instead of chicken and blobs of blotting-paper mixed in kulfi. Ha ha. I slap my numbed hands on the table and scream. The fellow says, ‘Sorry, too many patients. I’ll ring later. Ta-ta.’ Then he turns to me in a raging temper. ‘You beestingwalla, don’t you see I am busy?’ he says in Punjabi. I reply in my haw haw Oxbridge: ‘Busy, my fucking foot! Discussing restaurants and food with some broad while people here are in agony. I’ll report you to the Health Minister; I’ll write letters to every paper. Who the bloody hell do you thing you are?’ English works like magic in independent India. The bugger examines my stings, gives me a massive shot of something and tells me that I am lucky to be alive. Then adds humbly, ‘Please forgive me for the delay. I am only an intern.’

The shot does not improve my vision. I go out of the door closest to me. I find myself in a room with a corpse lying on a marble slab and a policeman counting the number of bruises on ‘the aforesaid deceased so-and-so’. He asks, ‘Are you a relative or something?’

‘No, I am the corpse. Count the stings on my dead body.’ Before he can retort, I retrace my steps and hurry back to the car.