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XIII
As Flory came through the gate of the hospital compound four ragged sweepers passed him, carrying
some dead coolie, wrapped in sackcloth, to a foot-deep grave in the jungle. Flory crossed the bricklike
earth of the yard between the hospital sheds. All down the wide verandas, on sheetless charpoys,
rows of grey-faced men lay silent and moveless. Some filthy-looking curs, which were said to devour
amputated limbs, dozed or snapped at their fleas among the piles of the buildings. The whole place
wore a sluttish and decaying air. Dr Veraswami struggled hard to keep it clean, but there was no
coping with the dust and the bad water-supply, and the inertia of sweepers and half-trained Assistant
Surgeons.
Flory was told that the doctor was in the out-patients’ department. It was a plaster-walled room
furnished only with a table and two chairs, and a dusty portrait of Queen Victoria, much awry. A
procession of Burmans, peasants with gnarled muscles beneath their faded rags, were filing into the
room and queueing up at the table. The doctor was in shirt-sleeves and sweating profusely. He sprang
to his feet with an exclamation of pleasure, and in his usual fussy haste thrust Flory into the vacant
chair and produced a tin of cigarettes from the drawer of the table.
‘What a delightful visit, Mr Flory! Please to make yourself comfortable–that iss, if one can
possibly be comfortable in such a place ass this, ha, ha! Afterwards, at my house, we will talk with
beer and amenities. Kindly excuse me while I attend to the populace.’
Flory sat down, and the hot sweat immediately burst out and drenched his shirt. The heat of the
room was stifling. The peasants steamed garlic from all their pores. As each man came to the table
the doctor would bounce from his chair, prod the patient in the back, lay a black ear to his chest, fire
off several questions in villainous Burmese, then bounce back to the table and scribble a prescription.
The patients took the prescriptions across the yard to the Compounder, who gave them bottles filled
with water and various vegetable dyes. The Compounder supported himself largely by the sale of
drugs, for the Government paid him only twenty-five rupees a month. However, the doctor knew
nothing of this.
On most mornings the doctor had not time to attend to the out-patients himself, and left them to one
of the Assistant Surgeons. The Assistant Surgeon’s methods of diagnosis were brief. He would simply
ask each patient, ‘Where is your pain? Head, back or belly?’ and at the reply hand out a prescription
from one of three piles that he had prepared beforehand. The patients much preferred this method to
the doctor’s. The doctor had a way of asking them whether they had suffered from venereal diseases–
an ungentlemanly, pointless question–and sometimes he horrified them still more by suggesting