Read Online Bombay to Beijing by Bicycle by Russell McGilton - Free Book Online Page A

middle-aged woman with a bindi (red dot) in the middle of her forehead and a shawl draped around her as she sat at her reception–desk-cum-examination-area.
    ‘What do you want?’ she asked flatly.
    ‘I think I have malaria.’
    ‘Sit.’
    I did.
    ‘Open your mouth,’ she ordered, then shone a torch down my throat.
    ‘You have an infected throat.’
    ‘Yes, it’s sore.’
    ‘We shall do blood sample. Go,’ she said, waving me off to a small man with a thin moustache. She went back to her paperwork as I followed him into a room where nurses were standing over a woman in a purple sari lying on a table.
    ‘No!’ the doctor yelled at me. ‘There is someone there.’
    ‘But you just said to go —’
    ‘Sit. You must be waiting.’
    So I sat and stared at the floor. It was a small, quiet hospital and there only seemed to be me in it. When signalled to go in, I presented my arm. Three nurses took turns at tapping it until a bluish vessel reared up obediently. They popped the vein and bent the needle ridiculously, ignoring my worried face. One shouted out and an older nurse came in. She yanked hard on the syringe and filled it with my red insides, reminding me of the mosquitoes that had sucked my blood out in the first place.
    I returned to the doctor’s desk and sat down.
    ‘Go now. Be back here at three p.m. sharp.’
    When I did return, a happy, 50-something man (moustache, receding hair, round paunch) was sitting in her chair.
    ‘I am the husband of Dr Chawla,’ he said, shaking my hand. ‘Dr Chawla.’
    ‘Ah, the same.’
    ‘Not the same. Different,’ he frowned at me. ‘She is my wife.’
    He put on his glasses and showed me the blood-test result. A Latin term was badly typed across a thin piece of paper.
    ‘ Plasmodium falciparum . It is a strain of malaria. There are four types: Plasmodium vivax, ovale, malariae and the one you have – falciparum – the killer malaria!’ he said, smiling. His wife’s indifference was matched only by his joy at my illness.
    ‘Right,’ I said, trying to digest all of this as I replayed being bitten on the ankle in the hotel in Mumbai, the bites through the night in Aurangabad, the bites on my neck in … somewhere.
    ‘Injection! Injection is best for you! Inside!’ In the same manner as his wife, he waved me away to a cubicle.
    They laid me out on the table in the foyer of the hospital, flung a blanket over me, and popped a saline-solution drip into my surrendered forearm. The drip hung there draining itself like a bloated tick while, outside, the noxious sounds of traffic horns tore past.
    I began to think of other times I had been ill in foreign lands. The worst of it had been in Egypt, in the back of a taxi on the way to the temple of Abu Simbel, hot as hell in the middle of the Aswan desert. I had stabbing pains in my stomach and had been vomiting and crapping all day. A 40-something Israeli woman had an enlightened solution.
    ‘Russell, to take your mind off the pain, what you need to do is to masturbate!’
    At the time, I almost considered it, but I did wonder how well that would have gone down while middle-aged Americans in big shorts posed in front of the giant statues of Ramses II while I shat, vomited and jerked myself blue into a furious cloud of dust by their ankles … ‘George! What’s he doing? Do you think I should give him baksheesh to make him stop? It’s getting all over my Nikes!’
    As if to muffle such thoughts, a nurse came over and put another blanket over me. I didn’t realise I had been shivering. The nurse smiled, patted my arm, then disappeared upstairs, her purple sari waving behind her. Wishing for the soft hand of Bec to palm my forehead and tell me everything was going to be alright. I had dozed off to sleep when I heard: ‘Ah, you are awake!’
    It was Dr Chawla.
    What does he call it when your eyes are opened?
    He handed me a prescription and told me to go to the Pharmacy Market.
    In Khandwa (and like most towns in