She looked me up and down with the air of a prospective owner eyeing a particularly flea-ridden mongrel. A slight smirk flitted across her face, to be replaced almost instantly by a patent sympathetic mask. I squirmed, wishing I was anywhere else in the world except in this terrible room with the gleaming white floors and the stark white tubelights and the sleek little glass cupboards all around holding pink plaster casts of a hundred unlucky jaws.
“The doctor will see you now”, she trilled, and led me into an ante-chamber. I visualized lightning outside, in accompaniment to eerie organ music. I rose, gulped, and walked in. Ladies and gentlemen, the most defining moment of my life. The Dentist’s Chamber.
The doctor, an exquisite woman with the most perfect haircut in the world, made the mistake of smiling at me. I smiled back and watched her face assume the expression of incredulousness that a pope would accord a heretic. The problem? I was an innocent kid, and one of my milk teeth wouldn’t fall off. It’d shake and quiver and provide me with numerous hours of tooth-wobbling entertainment, but wouldn’t pop out. My parents, both sets of grandparents, and an enthusiastic cousin all tried to pull it out, coming up with ingenious (and, occasionally, unmentionable) ideas, but to no avail. It stayed put, and off I toddled to the doctor. She tugged at it with a torturous pliers-like thing till it came off with a loud scrunch, stuck a wad of cotton into the crater, and told me to go off and eat an ice-cream. She even gave me a kinder smile.
The smile grew wider when I came back a second time. Another little sucker wouldn’t vacate. She pulled it out, and off I went. Then came a third, and a fourth, and a fifth, and her smiles grew wider. To put it subtly, I made the dentist rich. Not one of my milk teeth fell off of their own accord, and she pulled them all out till I was convinced I had set a new world record.
A new set of teeth came up, and I thought I’d been given a new lease on life. Turns out I was too optimistic. Back I went to The Woman for a filling. Then another, and another. Fillings were a different kind of pain – not only did they hurt like the dickens, but the noise was like a pneumatic drill, and the moment the sneering assistant stuck a little suction pipe into my mouth to drain out the excess saliva, I knew I’d lost all dignity. Oh, the ignominy.
Finally, Perfect Hair gave up on me, and referred me to another dentist, whose chamber was a lot, lot worse. It had beautifully framed certificates of all the degrees that allowed her to torture humans dentally, and it put me off immediately. This lady I christened Plastic Smile. She fake-smiled her way to my mother’s heart by introducing me to cartoon versions of all my teeth on a candy-coloured chart on her wall (Meet Mr. Molar! And his friend Carrie Canine!). Then she pulled on a pair of snazzy blue gloves, and plunged her hands into my mouth as if it were the most fashionable thing in the world. Then came the dramatic sigh, followed by a revelation: She couldn’t help me either, except by filling up another two cavities (one of them in my right-hand Mr. Molar). What I needed, she stated, starry-eyed, was an orthodontist.
Imagine an equatorial forest. Imagine the trees battling it out for that one patch of sunlight, straining to outgrow each other, shooting up willy-nilly all over the place. Imagine them all crowded together, trying to twist around each other, putting out branches at odd angles, jostling each other for space. And then, try to imagine a mouthful of teeth trying to kid themselves into believing that they are an equatorial forest. That, in short, was my mouth.
What I needed, she chirped, was braces. Then she waved the reference letter at my mother, and deprived us of a lot of money that, if saved, could have bought me a cartload of big-boxed birthday presents.
The orthodontist was a lot nicer than I thought. I took to him immediately because he said “Why, there’s nothing wrong with you! Nothing that we can’t fix, at any rate.” I sighed. I was human after all, and not the victim of an inordinately sinful past life. But as they say, there are different forms of evil. A nurse with two mismatched colours of nail enamel on each hand (hyperventilation alert number one) brought what looked like a box of pink paste along with two kidney-shaped hollow metal thingies (hyperventilation alert number two), and proceeded to spoon the paste into the metal containers, nodding sagely at me all the time (hyperventilation alert number three).
I should have run when I had the chance. The paste-filled metal things were then clapped onto my teeth, and held there for a bleeding five minutes till they solidified. I waited there with little pieces of pink gunk dripping down my throat and trying to get the Benadryl-ish taste out of my mind, till the evil nurse pulled the things off. And I finally realized what I’d been stupid enough not to notice earlier: that this was how they got those jaw impressions in the glass cases.
Then came a most interesting operation to pull down the hidden Carrie Canine that never quite poked its way through my gums. It is strange to see a surgeon putting a hooked needle into your mouth and pulling it out, drawing out a pattern of black thread going in and out, in and out, and to know that it is technically your flesh that he is cutting open and sewing up like a neat little seamstress, and yet not to be able to feel the pain. The wonders of local anaesthesia. My face for a week afterwards resembled that of a troll with mumps, but we’ll pass over that.
To cut an epic story short (and to refrain from grossing a lot of people out) I shall pass over the fitting of the metal wires, the glueing of the bases, the little rubber bands that held the braces together, the pain and the numbness and the standard diet of soup and ice-cream (I had the teeth, mind you, but couldn’t use them. Humph.) that followed. I stuck to it. I came to view the clinic as a monthly pilgrimage site. I learnt the various dental departments on the signboards off by heart (although I can’t remember them now, so don’t bother) and learnt to speak coherently with two hands and a metal instrument inside my mouth. I also learnt the ecstasy of having the braces taken off, and the delirious relief of smiling and watching a smile composed mostly of the colour white, as opposed to the earlier combinations of yellow, green, blue and grey. I learnt to wear my retainer religiously for a month, and then to bury it in a place where it would never be found.
It’s a pity that a smile got me into so much trouble, but it’s a little better to live with now that I know I look passably decent when I grin. The equatorial jungle is straightened out, and I have all twenty-eight teeth intact - four were removed to allow for the Great Purge. I still have a line of dental cement holding four of my front teeth together (someone must have forgotten about it, conveniently), but lets not tell anyone that. To remove it would mean another visit to another clinic, and I’m willing to take a chance that the cement will remain where it is for the rest of my life, or at least until all four teeth fall out together, whichever comes first.
I'm trying to stop her from meditatively chewing a magazine. She was, in effect, masticating bits of Benazir Bhutto's face. Most unhealthy.
Iceland. A landscape exploding in fire and ice, and the first on my Robert Kincaid list. Don't worry, I'll get there all right.
