The doctor as sufferer

My Mirror column, sixth in my series on films about doctors:

Based on AJ Cronin’s famous 1937 novel The Citadel, Vijay Anand’s medical melodrama Tere Mere Sapne (1971) casts doctors as the ailing ones

Like several of the films I've written about in recent weeks, Vijay Anand’s Tere Mere Sapne (1971) had as its protagonist not a doctor, but the medical profession itself. And thus, perhaps necessarily, several doctors. The director's brother Dev Anand may have supplied the film's star quotient (as the rather unimaginatively named hero Dr Anand), but within the film's opening ten minutes we meet three other doctors. These are the characters that actually give us the lay of the land

First up is Dr Anand's medical batchmate, who delivers the first line of dialogue in the film: “Jise tum aadarsh kehte ho, usse main paagalpan kehta hoon [What you call principle, I call madness].” He suggests establishing a moneymaking practice in the city together, but the idealistic Anand mocks him for being a businessman instead of a doctor - and leaves for a remote mining village. The second doctor we meet is the ageing Dr Prasad (the marvellous Mahesh Kaul), employed by the mining company for 35 years, but now so ill that he hires younger doctors as ‘assistants’ to work in his stead - while his paranoid wife attempts to keep his illness a secret. The third doctor is also interesting: Dr Prasad’s other assistant, one Dr Jagannath Kothari, played by Vijay Anand himself. A gynaecologist with a fancy degree from London, Jagan now spends most of his waking hours drinking himself into a stupor.

What is common to these very different characters – and what eventually comes to drive our hero as well – is money, or the lack of it. The idealists are led by the old Dr Prasad, who has spent a lifetime in the service of poor mine workers, but without being able to realise his dream of improving the medical facilities in the area. The unruly-haired Dr Jagan, meanwhile, is only on his way to middle age, but already embittered by the bureaucratic and other restrictions that kept a young doctor from rising in a socialist India [these are complaints about the system that continued to appear in later films I’ve written about, like Bemisaal (1981) and Ek Doctor Ki Maut (1989)]. Our hero arrives in the village full of reformist zeal, initially even managing to rouse Jagan out of his alcoholic self-pity - but his honesty and hard work are of no avail either in his career, or when he finds himself up in court against a powerful rich man.

Thus the corruption of the system – and we’re talking 50 years ago – is blamed for Dr Anand’s moral decline. Which is how the film leads us back to the first doctor it showed us, the one who has no compunctions about using his qualifications as a way to mint money. In the second half, it is his network of fashionable city doctors catering to the rich and famous that an angry Dev Anand becomes part of. “Aaj tak mere aadarsh hi meri daulat thhe, lekin aaj se daulat hi mera aadarsh ban jayegi [Till today my principles were my wealth, from now on wealth will be my principle],” he announces to his increasingly distressed wife Nisha (Mumtaz).

There are many things that relegate this film to its time: the paternalistic take on mine workers as easily misguided/corrupted; the dismissal of the village midwife as necessarily knowing less about delivering a baby than any doctor – even one not trained in gynaecology; the portrayal of Dr Prasad as the generous, open-hearted idealist at the mercy of a small-minded, penny-pinching wife.

But despite these, within its melodramatic dialogue-baazi, something still rings true. And again, as in Anuradha, which I wrote about last week, it is only a doctor who can manage to get through to another doctor. This is true of the pre-climactic scenes, featuring Dr Anand’s restoration to the milk of human kindness. But Tere Mere Sapne’s most moving scene might be between the ailing Dr Prasad and Jagan, his black sheep doctor employee. “Does such a capable doctor not recognise his own symptoms?” asks Jagan. And when the old man says he does, but has decided to wait for death, Jagan’s response is: “Yeh ek mareez baat kar raha hai, doctor nahi. [This is a patient speaking, not a doctor.]” This exhorting of the doctor to a special status recurs through the film, as for instance when a famous actress (Hema Malini in a fetching part) tells Dev Anand to cheer up because “if a doctor speaks like this, what will the patient do?”

The doctor in Hindi cinema, it seems, must not only carry the god-like mantle of giver of life, but hide his own emotional travails. The mantle is a veil.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 25 Oct 2020.

The care of others

My Mirror column:

Two recent documentaries – Everywhere We Are from Germany and About Love from India – provide thoughtful multiple perspectives on dealing with the illness of a loved one.

Midway through the 2017 German documentary Everywhere We Are, there occurs a totally ordinary conversation between a pair of siblings. “Have you finished eating or do you still want a little bit?” the sister asks. “Still a little bit,” the brother responds. “OK,” she says. Then: “Should I put something behind your neck?” “Come on!” he says, sounding exasperated. The camera moves from her hesitant, concerned face to his almost immobile one. He is sitting up in bed, a small towel covering his bald head. We see the sister's face again as she quickly backs up: “Sorry, it’s too much again.” Sorry, she mutters almost to herself as she pets the family dog, sorry. But as her brother keeps sitting there with a half-eaten meal in front of him, she asks if he is tired, and whether she should take his plate. There is no response. “Yes, no, or maybe?” she persists. “No!” he yells, with a gesture of irritation. “OK,” she says finally. “I’ll leave you alone then.”

In Veronika Kaserer’s quietly observational film, the ordinariness of this scene is bookended by discussions of illness and impending death that are far from ordinary – just before this, for instance, we have seen the sister (Sonja) ask the brother (Heiko) whether there’s anything specific he wants said at his funeral. Dance instructor Heiko Lekutat, 29, has a particularly persistent cancer that forced him to amputate a leg early on, and now threatens to kill him any day. Sonja, his only sister, and their parents Jurgen and Karin, have brought him back from the hospital, “home to die”.

Heiko has fought his disease with fortitude for years: getting an artificial leg, continuing with his dance project. Even at this last stage, he and everyone around him try to keep their spirits up. There are conversations about his good appetite, laughter with visiting friends, and gently wry humour: in one domestic moment, as Heiko is wheeled past the dinner table, he stops at his father’s place and samples a bit from his plate, calling it “a quick stopover”.

Kaserer’s film, which was awarded the Compass-Perspektive-Award 2018 for best film at last year’s Berlinale, runs the risk of being seen as intrusive or exploitative because it focuses on the most painful aspect of life – death. There are not too many close-ups and the film contains more thoughtful conversations than teary ones: this is, after all, a middle class German milieu. But by cutting back and forth between the last days of Heiko’s life and the time soon after his death, Kaserer offers an intimate sense of what it’s like to deal with the loss of a loved one.

There is much to be learnt from the very different ways in which different people respond. The father, Jurgen, who is closest to Heiko, is mostly intent on keeping hope alive and helping Heiko fight: the only time he breaks down on camera is when talking about how apart from the unfairness of such a young person having to die, what he feels “is simply egoistic – that I will miss him so much”. The mother, Karin, is also deeply sad, but her way of strengthening her son involves trying to prepare him for the hereafter. She wants to tell him of her own near-death experience, when she was briefly in a coma. Sonja, the sister, gets her arm tattooed in Heiko’s handwriting, commemorating their siblinghood, and grapples constantly with wanting to help her brother at every turn – while coming up against the fact that illness does not prevent him from wanting his own space. “It is not a good sign if he lets me touch him.”

Heiko is prickly, but he’s far from being a rude patient, at least on camera. But anyone who’s ever taken care of a family member knows that familiarity, certainly in this context, breeds a great deal of contempt. Another recent personal documentary, Archana Phadke’s wonderful About Love, which won the New Talent award at the Sheffield Doc festival in June 2019 before playing at festivals from Mumbai to Dharamshala to Goyang, South Korea, takes us deep into the dynamics of Phadke’s own family. Her crabby octogenarian grandfather is a great “character”, especially on film. But even as you laugh out loud at his unconcerned swearing and almost comic berating of his wife, you remain powerfully aware of what it takes for Phadke’s almost equally aged grandmother to take care of him. Year upon year, feeding and bathing and helping him sleep, the intimate caregiver who enforces the discipline he needs to carry on living receives only abuse in return.

Closeness to someone who is suffering is a strange thing, producing unexpected forms of intimacy and sometimes necessary forms of distance. Phadke’s grandmother has resigned herself to her duties in a marital domestic milieu from which escape is not even imaginable. Sonja’s desire for greater closeness to her dying brother is experienced by him as excessive, making her insecure. Self-preservation is needed in both these cases.

Meanwhile a close friend of Heiko’s says he feels his energies dip when Heiko’s do, and rise when Heiko is feeling better. A possibly Buddhist mentor tells him that though he should not burden Heiko with his own experience, this level of empathy with someone can be seen as a gift. It may not be, he adds, “a gift from a secular perspective”. No modern rational belief system embraces the idea of experiencing pain willingly, not even the imagined pain of another’s body. And yet, how can we ever successfully care for anyone if we don’t at least try to imagine ourselves in their place?

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 19 Jan 2020.