63. OUR DAD WAS OUR ONLY DOCTOR UNTIL HE LIVED.

To give treatment to my ailing mom, my dad took a month’s leave from his career and he started pouring over the Arabic version of Mateira Medica known in Arabic as Tibb e Qass and the Persian biaz ul amraz. He had his certified training and license from the Hamdard College and dawakhana. Now it is a university running medical and tech courses. He tried some qurs or tablets, which he himself prepared out of the ingredients known with peculiar Arabic or Persian names. Diet restriction was a strict ordeal. We all had observed and the effect was wonderful. Indeed. Maybe those drugs had steroids in them, who knows?

My mom started responding very positively to our utmost joy. Before every dispensation my dad would make, he would have religious rituals of ablution, and he would resort to divine invocation.  He would say dawa wa dua only would make the ultimate cure.

 Fortunately, for us all, before long my mom had completely recovered long before my dad’s leave had expired. It was not only a great reprieve for us but also a joyfulness of high order.

In addition, it was a triumph especially to my dad. Dad’s mental anguish and our sorrow were unspeakably great .When he took to a project, come what may; he had his faith in Allah and he focused onto the project until he accomplished it with a bash. That was my dad. We never saw a doctor for any of our bad health in our family until our dad lived with us. That was great, and that made all of us proud of him.

I remember and it might be so, that a patient was brought from Udumalpet with sexually transmitted disease. Might be he had syphilis or gonorrhea. Who knows it could have been Chlamydia or genital herpes. May be it was Lympho granuloma proctitis. H.I.V was unknown at that time. My father had his ‘tashqees that is diagnosing symptoms for his supposed disease.  He would put a list of probable diseases and filter it by elimination after precise investigation.

After a week, my dad commenced his treatment. Scarcely do I remember him to have used betel leaves, lizard’s tails which I had caught for the purpose and several other Delhi based ingredients that went in to the preparations of the final qurs.   I felt horrible to have seen him used the lizard tail as an ingredient for the medicine, but later on, I was convinced that the Far East had been using snakes, scorpions, horrible looking insects and marine reptiles as ingredients for various medicines.

 My dad had administered the patient with the qurs and safoof and he gave ordeals of the food items that should be restricted during the treatment. The treatment took a forty days strict schedule. The patient returned completely recovered hale and hearty to my dad’s pleasure. My dad was then invited to his place with all of us for a grand celebration as a token of blissful response to his becoming fully cured.