"In this life, we do what we can to improve ourselves."
Hamid also laughed, clapping his hands together once in pleased surprise.
"Well, Mr. Lin, I think I may be able to help you. I am on duty here two days a week, but the rest of the time I can be found at my surgery, in Fourth Pasta Lane." "I know Fourth Pasta Lane. That's very close to us."
"Precisely, and, after speaking to Khaderbhai, I have agreed that you should begin referring your patients to me, when you need it, and I will arrange treatment at St. George Hospital when I think it is required. We can begin from tomorrow, if you wish."
"Yes, I do," I said quickly. "I mean, it's great, thank you, thank you very much. I don't know how we're going to go about paying you but..."
"No need for thanks, and no need to worry about payment," he replied, glancing at Abdullah. "My services will be free for your people. Perhaps you would like to join me for tea? I take a break here soon. There is a restaurant across the road from the hospital. If you can wait for me there, I will come across and join you. We have, I think, much to discuss."
Abdullah and I left him, and waited for twenty minutes in the restaurant, watching through a large window as poor patients hobbled to the entrance of the hospital, and rich patients were delivered in taxis and private cars. Doctor Hamid joined us, and outlined the procedures I was to follow in referring the slum- dwellers to his practice in Fourth Pasta Lane.
Good doctors have at least three things in common: they know how to observe, they know how to listen, and they're very tired.
Hamid was a good doctor, and when, after an hour of discussion, I looked into his prematurely lined face, the eyes burned and reddened by lack of sleep, I felt shamed by his honest exhaustion. He could accumulate wealth, I knew, and surround himself with luxury, in private practice in Germany or Canada or America, yet he chose to be there, with his own people, for a fraction of the reward. He was one of thousands of health professionals working in the city, with careers as distinguished in what they denied themselves as in what they achieved every working day. And what they achieved was no less than the survival of the city.
When Abdullah took us into the plaited traffic once more, his bike weaving a haphazard progress through the threads of buses, cars, trucks, bicycles, bullock wagons, and pedestrians, he called over his shoulder to tell me that Doctor Hamid had once lived in a slum himself. He said that Khaderbhai had taken especially gifted slum children from several slums throughout the city, and paid for their enrolment in private colleges. Through secondary and then tertiary studies, the children were provided for and encouraged. They graduated to become physicians, surgeons, nurses, teachers, lawyers, and engineers. Hamid was one of those gifted children who'd been selected more than twenty years before. In response to the needs of my small clinic, Khaderbhai was calling in some dues.
"Khaderbhai is a man who makes the future," Abdullah concluded, as we stopped for a traffic signal. "Most of us-me and you, my brother-we wait for the future to come to us. But Abdel Khader Khan dreams the future, and then he plans it, and then he makes it happen. That is the difference between him and the rest of us."
"What about you, Abdullah?" I asked him in a shout as we roared off with the traffic once more. "Did Khaderbhai plan you!"
He laughed out loud, his chest heaving with the pleasure and the force of the laugh.
"I think he did!" he replied.
"Hey! This isn't the way back to the slum. Where are we going now?"
"We are going to visit the place where you will be getting your medicines."
"My what?"
"Khaderbhai has arranged for you to get medicines, every week.
The things I brought you today-those are the first. We are going to the medicine black market."
"A black market for medicine? Where is it?"
"In the slum of the lepers," Abdullah answered, matter-of-factly.
Then he laughed again as he pushed the bike to greater speed through a gap in the traffic that opened for him, even as he reached it. "Just leave it to me, Lin brother. Now you are part of the plan, isn't it so?"
