VISIT TO THE DENTIST

A visit to the dentists’ is a dreaded affair for most, naturally so, like death and taxes the third certainty of life is the dentists’ chair. I have often wondered whether the electric chair would be as dreadful, may be less, because you do it just once as against the dentists’ where you are doomed to suffer ‘death through thousand cuts’. The pain itself is just one part of the problem, the agony commences with the culprit tooth giving first signals, which we try and ignore for as long as we can, little realising the inevitability of the event. Finally when we can no longer eat a morsel without crying out in pain, we drag ourselves to the executioner, hoping for a miracle. The looks of the waiting patients narrates the same anguish and resigned to their fate demeanour, obviously highly demoralising and de-motivating and one is tempted to scoot. It is the tooth which ties you down to await your turn for this torture chamber. While awaiting your turn, your life flashes before you, how as a child your mother tried so hard to instil good dental hygiene practises and how you managed to hoodwink her, alas, if only you had paid heed to those words of wisdom. But that was not to be! Toothpaste was too sweet to be wasted on the teeth and was naturally sucked away. Later in life the common refrain was ‘tigers don’t ever brush their teeth’ so why should you? O God save me this last time, from now on Brush, floss.......... and every other precaution will be taken. These resolves are oft repeated like those of addicts who quit smoking every day, so forgotten the moment the ache subsides and we get back to our bad old ways.. 

 The earliest memories of tooth care are of the advertisements, first the radio and then on cinema. Binaca geetmala was the standard fair every Wednesday, the Top 10 Hindi songs of the week, with Amin Sayani as the host of the show, Radio jockey of yester years. In fact Binaca had another sales gimmick to entice the kids, they used to have a miniature toy animal in the tooth paste packet, a hit with the kids. Then Vicco Vajradanti couple biting into the proverbial apple and the grand pa breaking a walnut with his strong and intact original teeth. My mother was a stickler, like most mothers are, she would not let me touch the glass of milk till I had brushed my teeth, even at the cost of antagonising my grandparents. She was of course wiser, having had her molars removed at an early age. I was a brat and would naturally throw a fit and look at my granny to come to my rescue, but to no avail. I was unceremoniously dumped in front of the wash basin with a tooth brush in hand for the dreadful ritual. A quick google revealed that there are almost 300 odd books in English alone trying to convince the kids into believing in the myth of good dentists. It is a takeoff from the ‘Tooth Fairy’ days when gullible kids were made to believe that the fairies were well meaning and their visits were never empty handed. We never entertained the fairies though because our milk teeth gave way to the permanent ones after we joined the school. Toothpaste in school was to put to many innovative uses, for sticking of posters, the nightly adventures where the tubes were utilised for nurturing our artistic talents on unsuspecting sleeping beauties, painting their faces. Thankfully this activity was restricted to end of term or mid-term periods. The teeth were subjected to greater torture and pain during boxing practises and the eventual bouts, when we ended up losing a few. 

So I landed up at the jawsmiths’ or should we call him a tooth yanker, more appropriate (!); a few days back, thought it was routine, some food particle stuck needed to be removed, but the dentist had other ideas, first, he knocked on it so hard that it almost got uprooted and then asked me to get an x-ray done, which itself was a painful exercise with a tube poking at you from an angle and the x-ray film pressed between your teeth. Now I was totally at the mercy of the dentist, having diagnosed a cavity, he went on to drill and scratch and with a suction tube inserted into the open mouth, no respite to even spit out and close the mouth for a second. I was convinced that mere open mouth with tongs inserted for couple of hours will qualify as fourth degree torture(!) “My curse upon your venom'd stang, That shoots my tortur'd gums alang, An' thro' my lug gies mony a twang, Wi' gnawing vengeance, Tearing my nerves wi' bitter pang, Like racking engines!” So aptly summed up by Robert Burns. Yet another troubled soul went on to create “Aunty Toothache”, deciding to address the devil as an aunt, hoping that would somehow soothe the pain.“Aunty Toothache” by Hans Christian Andersen is a parable about friendship and art. In the story, teeth serve as symbols of friendship, and losing a tooth foreshadows the death of a friend. 

Tooth pain accompanies, and is compared with, the pain of attempting to produce art. The story of tooth is the story of life and honestly it would give ‘Life of Pi’ a run for its money if there was a story on its life too. Teeth are preserved for posterity, we know Budhha’s teeth at least are, according to Sri Lankan legends, when the Lord Buddha died in BC 543, his body was cremated in a sandalwood pyre at Kusinagara in India and his left canine tooth was retrieved from the funeral pyre. Even I preserved the molars for a while, hoping that someday, that piece of my anatomy would also be exalted as a “relic”, till I realised I was after all a mere mortal. 

But to get back to the dentist, the Chinese had a way with dentistry as a science. In good old days, they were the ones who would relieve you of your tooth aches, extract them and even provide dentures. In India the goldsmiths were popular and the teeth were a measure of prosperity, with the glint of the canines reflecting whether it was a gold or silver tooth. I wish though we could invoke the bible and avenge our loss, “And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life, Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot. Burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe. -Bible (Old Testament) Exodus 21:23^4.