A Visit to a Dentist’s Clinic

I walked into the dentist’s clinic as though into a house. It was in an apartment in a small building. A three-storied building is small in our time. Its height is meagre, even if falling off the balcony of the third floor would be fatal or near-fatal for anyone. As a result, the clinic didn’t quite appear a clinic. I had been used to clinics being on the ground floor in the cities in which I had lived. These would have an ante-room where a receptionist maintained order and sequence among the clients, whose moods varied as much as the traffic and seasons. The ante-room gave one a sense of the rush at the dentist’s, and if the clinic was close by to where you lived you could always peep in, gauge the scene, and return later. If it was far, you made appointments in advance. But the outer façade of the clinic usually had a dull and serious neon sign indicating the dreariness of what one might find within. 

One found inside a doctor, assistants and strange equipment that towered over the patient struggling like an insect on their seat. White dominated the interior of these clinics, sometimes pink. A suffocating smell of uptight disinfection also pervaded the interior, which true to its function, allowed one to bask in the absolute externality of sensory experience: blood, smell, spit, and sight straining into the white light. There, even if one had momentarily remembered one’s troubles: a gnawing lie or some overweening person’s insult, or even—god forbid—the threatening thrum of existence itself, one could cast a veil over this world just as one closed one’s eyes under the white light. But one mustn’t generalise: a person who had a full belly night and day might still be being beaten at home, or may have come close to losing their mind, and maybe the elegant drill of the dentist’s equipment only took them deeper into the detail of their condition. 

In short, the dentist’s clinic in the city was a situation into which one stepped as though into a dream. Dreaming came with its own confusions, thrill and indecipherable passages, but soon one would find oneself awake—with better or wiser teeth. One would also squeeze out the money as per the aesthetics of the situation.  

Before walking into this clinic, I had gotten out of a car. Outside, the sky wasn’t just ink-blue, it was awash with a layer of egg-white and grey. I didn’t know how to be in cars because walking seemed elementally appropriate for movement, so I darted out of the car joyously, stretching my legs. It was a parking lot of course, filled with other saturnine cars, cars with unlooked-at faces, but it was desolate nonetheless. Faint white light emerged weakly from the darkness. I hated the tall monstrous buildings on the other side of the road. Even as a visitor, I felt overpowered by them. The electric lights bursting forth from their façade made me feel ashamed. They turned this dingy little parking lot of a small three-storied building into a hiding place. I walked a few steps along the passage, and felt increasingly at unease as though the functional aspect of this visit to the dentist, which I had hoped would give me a feeling of some ridiculously enlarged sense of accomplishment, as simply some work being done, a destination being reached—suddenly metamorphosed into an experience I had no name for.

In the shadow near the flight of stairs, the watchman was smiling at me. It wasn’t because I was a woman. The fact that I appeared to be a woman played a part in the expression he communicated to me, but it was incidental. 

“That huge building’s made for people like you.”

He didn’t have to say more. I tried to avoid his gaze. My sense of shame at being dwarfed by the building was being forced into an identification which I just couldn’t make. I felt more ashamed. I thought of the garish lights in the rooms on its top floors, maybe the fifteenth. From the balconies of such houses, you could see always a surfeit of lights, lights on the ceiling, hanging lights, bathroom lights. I thought of a woman my age in a nightie with tousled hair working in the kitchen as children milled around her. 

It was then that the shame disappeared. The unfamiliar dark of the parking lot acquired a transcendent quality. 

“But, I came here to see the doctor,” I essayed. Neither here nor there. Not even a compromise. Both he and I knew that our conversation was unreal, in the sense of being socially impossible. My response was defensive. He continued to grin.

I walked ahead with invisible eyes on the back of my head as I passed him. At the front of my mind’s eye was the woman in the nightie… But along the sides of my vision, it was as if others looked at me questioningly. As I climbed the steps I looked into the shadows and crevices, a blue light on the ceiling, and a brown patch on the wall that seemed to move. The watchman coughed, and it was as if I was being called back to myself.

When the door of the clinic opened, I felt as if I could now rest into familiar codes. The television, with a tube, was ensconced in a stand mounted on the wall. A film from the seventies played: it was an indoor scene where a conversation turned into spite and conflict, and the soundtrack squirmed with vehemence. There were two other clients who watched the scene with a distracted focus. I heard a crow’s caw which struck this television conversation like a gong. The walls were coloured peach and the ante-room was the size of a matchbox. The television was the size of a smaller matchbox. Since this room did not resemble the brightly lit clinics I had been used to visiting, I became perturbed. Was it the décor of the room and its placement in this building that estranged me, or the men who satisfiedly watched the TV scene? Weren’t the two connected? Where was I? Would I emerge from this place whole?

I began to think of a green sea, in which a motorboat droned for hours without moving very fast. There was a whale beside the boat, and we were terrified of its enormity. These were fragments of a dream I had dreamt the previous night, which I had forgotten upon waking. In the dream, we were moving not in a sea but a lake surrounded by trees on all sides, but moving from one end of the lake to another took several hours, and moreover there were whirlpools which we had to skirt so as to avoid the boat from capsizing. The whale became a trusty companion, but the lake itself could not be trusted. Its water resembled the marble-green of the sea.

Moving in and out of the images of the dream had probably allowed me to adjust to the environs of the ante-room. Who else was with me on the boat? I couldn’t remember. 

When I came to, I hoped that the two men engrossed in the television had somehow not noticed how far I had gone. It didn’t matter even if they did. But I was in no mood to reveal the smallest parts of who I truly was in those moments of sharing room with them. Like I did on many occasions, with many people, it was more important for me to be stiff like a cardboard cut-out, with marks for eyes and hands and ears and nose. It was only by being as invisible as possible that I could in fact observe them, instead of being the object of their gaze.

There were posters on the wall, glossy with the news of the arrival of the future. News that seemed out of place there in a flat with a TV blaring a film from the seventies. The women in the posters looked unbearably unreal. They were either smiling, or dressed in the image of what an airbrushed perfect Indian woman would look like. The clothes, eyebrows, lips, the frozen flick of the hands, all spoke to me like degraded signs—but perhaps I was assuming too much. I inherently felt a distaste for these fictitious women. I wanted to tear the posters up into a pleasurably large number of paper bits. This—I realised—would be excellent viewing for my clinic-companions. I stood up from the force of this idea, and when the eyes of my companions caught up with me, I reached for the television remote control and reduced the volume.

This failure to respond to the atmosphere around me did not affect me very deeply. I twisted my legs, sitting back into the plastic chair. At that moment, a red-wattled lapwing screamed so sharply that the night’s darkness pierced me. I looked for the window above the heads of my companions. Outside, when the sky was visible, one was dimly conscious of being encompassed by the rhythms of nature, however frequently one receded into one’s own preoccupations. The view of the grey sky from the window made me long for escape from this clinic. 

If I left the clinic now, the very purpose for which I had come would be denegated—it would not be a mere detour. My heart felt heavy, and my eyes were filling up with tears. I peeked into the doctor’s office, but he was further inside the clinic in the room where dental work took place. The bareness of the doctor’s office with its pink walls made me very uncomfortable as though I were in the waiting room for the sleeper class of the railway station, with poor folk sprawling on the floor, tied to each other and children playing with a joy that looked incommensurate to the well-to-do eye. The anxiety of being in transit and the guilt of having survived a cruel fate were concentrated in the pink colour of the wall. Thinking of no rose or lotus would free me of its original sense.

So, I decided to step out. I told myself it was simply a break from waiting en masse in the ante-room. This way, I could indulge the desire to leave the clinic and maybe even realise it. Downstairs, the watchman’s chair was empty. A radio’s incoherent static tumbled out of his chair. I felt lighter, as if my body had begun to disappear and I was floating. I saw a couple of persons walking towards me, but they simply passed me on their way up the stairs. I stiffened up, hid my breasts a bit further into my sternum, and pretended to belong in the area around the landing where the radio’s static allowed for a contextual distraction. As conscious as I was, the passers-by barely noticed me and their faces were half-covered. I was relieved when they had passed by, but ashamed that I had not even been noticed. Perhaps it was too dark.

I decided to walk away from this three-storied building. Walking was pleasurable because while walking I could forget many certainties, like that of my body being a besieged entity, or that I needed to return, or to go somewhere, that I was inessential in the world. Teeth, on the other hand, were not besieged. Teeth were teeth, no matter the kind of body they were affixed in. No one wanted to reach out for someone else’s molar so that they could see it from all its sides. Nor did they look for a chance to check the sharpness of canines. People did laugh at misshapen teeth, protruding ones and missing ones. So in that sense, even teeth weren’t spared. But because more often than not, they are fully revealed to sight, people are content to laugh at them. For all that is hidden, there is a greater price to pay.

I crossed the highway as cars sped by… monsters on wheels with apparent faces. I couldn’t speak to them and tell them that they didn’t deserve to exist. I had to suffer their presence. They were mere machines. The thought…did cross my mind as I stood on the divider. This was as or even more pleasurable than walking away from the building. The sea or a river, I thought, were more deserving… Yellow and white lights and horns steamed around me, and the highway dust cratered my vision. Wasn’t I in hell? Figures in the dark were approaching the divider from my back. I saw dangling neck-chains glinting in light, sneakers and grubby hands. I had that strange feeling of being sniffed out from a distance. I fled.

There was a mall on the other side of the road. Unlike the sprawl and swank of metropolitan malls, this was a highway mall—modest, grey, darkened by the city’s neglect. The national flag sputtered a welcome at the entrance one moment, and crumpled into a lean file in the next. I felt freer, as if now inside, I could wander without a care, I could wander infinitely. From the glass panes on the inside, the highway looked like a strange country, an outside where just about anything could happen. The parking lot was flooded with lights, and the cars therein looked like they were awake not asleep.

Inside the mall, the lights were milder. Apart from some well-known brands, there were local upholstery outlets with crumbling plaster on walls, bauble shops, outlets for clothes and shoes which mimicked unsuccessfully the shop-world of big brands (the décor was aspirational but the rows of hung clothes looked out of place to my eye); I wanted to belong here but my mind kept reaching for the lure of the bigger brand-shops I had seen in the city. It was my eye that refused to see similarities, that maintained difference. Another eye, of say a walker in the mall, a woman who worked in one of the factories beyond the highway, a woman dressed almost like me, would enter these shops imagining herself to be a member of the great city, the polis, the ship of state, beyond the treacherous waters of a life buried away from the loud and blinding lights of the mall. She and I would be here in the same shop, we would exchange desirous glances at a skirt—I couldn’t think further. I would have to hunt to find a skirt I desired here. 

An ice-cream seller welcomed children and families as kids aggressively drove toy cars on the ground floor. The ceiling of the mall was so high that the hum of the crowds flared into a drone.  

I tried to remember what I was fleeing from. Soon enough, I realised that I had left the dental clinic far behind. I couldn’t conceal my joy, my teeth burst out of my mouth. At a shop corner, I stopped amid a cloud of mosquitoes. A man whose smile gleamed from the shop came to open the shop door for me.

“What are you looking for?”

“Nothing in particular.”

“Should I order some tea?”

“All right.”

When the tea came, I drank it quickly. Soon, sleep came over me. And in sleep, I was moving through mud and glass and pointed stones toward a horizon that was covered in smoke. I entered a street that contained rows, not of houses, but classrooms. I was a student in a grey room, aware of bobbing heads. The room had no windows but it was as if it was exposed to all natural forces. The movements of the students and the teachers and the fan happened by themselves, responding as if to a distant harmony. 

When I awoke, I saw the man lying on the shop floor in a pool of blood. He was asking for water. I tried to stand, but I couldn’t. The wares in the shop were all in their place and not a soul other than the two of us was in sight. This must be in my dream, I thought. I watched as the man gasped for breath and closed his eyes. 

An hour later, people began entering the shop. And then came the guards. A police officer took me by the hand and we walked out of the mall.  

While walking with her, I had the urge to jump over every wall I passed. I could not walk alongside walls. They did not signal a separation between regions, but rather an absolute obstruction. Even beating my body against the walls I passed would have been a satisfaction of that urge. And yet, with the police officer I felt safe, as if I were back in the womb of my natal home, my hand held, my path led. My voice sunk deeper inside, as if it could now rest, go to sleep. There was no need to talk. And yet my body experienced uncontrollable urges near walls. Leaving the mall was difficult because there were shop façades to pass before even reaching the main entrance. I wasn’t sure if the glass façade of a shop was a wall or not. Its transparency was bewitching. I could neither climb over it, nor have the world beyond it hidden from me. 

I asked the officer if I could go to the restroom. She and I, wakened by the possible extravagance of an empty bladder, sauntered into the public toilet. As soon as the door shut behind us, which I didn’t try to climb, there was a power cut. Women screamed with awful glee as if now their bodies could blend into the dark without the pincer-tipped gazes that light allowed. The air inside the toilet crumbled into absolute weightlessness. Ohh. 

All these women who walked around me seemed ephemeral. Here in the restroom, where blood, shit, snot, hair and urine found their place, here at last were women, relaxed. The thought of escape lingered in my mind, but I thought that instead of a jail, this was a fine place for me to spend my confinement. In every loo was a window from which the sky and a filigree of trees gazed into the unlit dark. We were like chicken in a poultry farm, clucking at the crowd of witnesses—our life was a clucking song. I walked further into the restroom, and I began to realise that if I would in fact sit in this closet, I would never come out into the outer world. This frightened me.

Make haste. Make haste. I looked for the police officer and held her hand, and looked at her with yearning eyes. Yes, she was some kind of an enemy to my condition, as an officer—but she was also a friend. I walked out of the restroom with her. 

I thought of the dentist’s clinic, and the unfinished task I had escaped, as we walked in the neon-strung darkness. I wanted to be bitten by a snake and to give myself to the throes of its poison’s dance. The snake’s teeth and human teeth… a row of teeth coursing through construction cement. The burial of human teeth under wet cement. Near the mall, a giant excavator machine was hollowing out the ground—someday into the future, there would be a new building here, maybe shops, restrooms, incessant footfall sanding the floor.

We passed a white fountain sputtering water. The rim of the basin was unpopulated. The water poured gently out of a large white tulip, whose petals looked like severed tongues.

Aishwarya Iyer has written a book of poems called The Grasp of Things (Copper Coin / Sublunary Editions; 2023). Her poems, fiction and critical prose are forthcoming or have appeared in journals such as The Bombay Literary Magazine, Humanities Underground, Almost Island, Muse India, Pratik, Firmament, Berfrois and Poetry at Sangam, among others. Her drawings have appeared most recently in Aainanagar. She teaches at O.P. Jindal Global University in Sonipat, India, and is working on a book of short stories.