A Tale of Three Encounters
Narinder Jarial
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Apoptosis — a fall, like a leaf. Not into an abyss, but back into the ground that made it.
— N. Jarial
The debt remains. The face changes.
— The Beggar of Bathinda
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Part I — The Curse of the Full Sack
Bopa was ten — perhaps eleven — the age when pride begins to sprout, like the first coarse hairs on a boy’s chin. It was summer, dry and searing, the kind of heat that turns every sound brittle. He was outside his house, squatting in the dust, drawing lines with a broken twig, when a voice cut through the stillness.
“Bhiksha de, beta.”
He looked up. Not a frail figure, not a man reduced by hunger or disease. This beggar was broad, upright, and carried a heavy sack of flour slung across his back — more, Bopa knew instantly, than what was left in their own kitchen. His mother had just scraped the last handful of flour for the noon meal.
The injustice struck like a slap.
Before the boy could speak, the door behind him opened. His mother stood there, flour still dusting her palms. She had heard the exchange forming in his body before the words came. She said nothing to Bopa. She went inside. She came back with the last handful of flour — the very flour she had scraped for the noon meal — and placed it silently in the beggar’s sack. No words. No theatre. Just the gesture.
The beggar looked at the mother. Then at Bopa. And Bopa, who had watched his mother give away their last flour to a man who carried more than them, felt the injustice sharpen into something hard and hot.
“You have more than us,”
Bopa said, standing now, hands balled.
“And you ask for alms? You are no beggar — you are a tax collector in disguise. May your gods choke on your ghee!”
The man said nothing for a long time. Then he smiled — a strange, unreadable smile, equal parts pity and steel.
“You speak with fire, boy. May your wife be dark,”
he said. And then, after a beat:
“Not in color… but in karma.”
And he walked away.
Years passed. Bopa grew. Served. Married. At first, things were fine. Then came the slow unraveling — threads of misunderstanding, days that passed in cold silence, affection rationed like kerosene during wartime. His wife, he would say later, was not cruel — but she withheld light. Every kindness had a ledger. Every gesture a cost.
“Dark, not in color…”
The beggar’s words came back, sharp as the day they were spoken. And though Bopa never quite believed in curses, there were nights — many nights — when he sat with a tumbler of weak rum, staring into the flickering fan shadow, and whispered:
“I was right about the taxation. But he was right about the price.”
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Part II — The Second Encounter
It had been decades since the beggar with the flour sack had cursed him. Bopa had been through it all since — a uniformed life, a fractured marriage, the polite solitude of the divorced. He had his rituals now: one tumbler in the evening, one careful shave every third day, one trip to the market where he never bargained, as if penance could be done in full price.
The Woman Who Did Not Fall
There was an old woman in the village whom the children called Dadi, though she was beyond all precise reckoning of relation. She was a great, great-grandmother. All her contemporaries and even her younger contemporaries were dead. Nobody knew quite how she fitted into the equation — her references were all gone. She was like that cell in a living body which, at a certain point, does the single task of existing: tolerated, peripheral, and almost forgotten.
She lived in a one-room mud house with a mud chulha. The cupboards were excavated from the same mud walls. Some utensils near the hearth, a small trunk — that was all she had. Her bed was in front of the chulha. She slept on her side, bent double, alone.
When children reached her courtyard, she would raise her face to look up at the walnut tree. Her beady little eyes smiled as the young ones towered over her. Sometimes they came and sat by her chulha and went quiet — receiving something they could not name and would not understand until decades later, when they would sit by their own fires and feel her absence as a specific, located warmth that was no longer there.
She would pull a potato from the ash and embers and hand it to them. She said almost nothing. But something passed in that quiet. It was a blessing, a flowing of kindness, a secreting of life outward — as some old things do near the end, releasing more than they seem to hold. She was venerated like the silent goddesses strewn around the village — quiet and comforting stones, present without explanation, offering grace without transaction.
On another hearth nearby, someone mentioned that Dadi had not been seen. They quickly realized nobody had seen her in four days. No smoke from her chimney. The lady of the hearth said: Take the blathiya — that bundle of stripped cane sticks, white as bone — and go check on her.
A boy was sent. He found the house as neat as before. She lay unresponsive next to the hearth. His heart sank and he ran back to announce she was dead. The women came and sat for the vigil. The next day, someone picked her up in his arms and carried her to the cremation pyre. He said she seemed to weigh less than twenty kilograms. That is the weight of a five-year-old child.
Her face was like a walnut — ancient and wrinkled and containing within it, in compressed form, everything needed to become something again. A ghost of a smile lingered. Her bent form looked closely at the earth, already in conversation with the ground that would receive her. No smell. No bloating. A shriveled stick. The programmed dissolution of something that had completed its work.
Nobody used her mud house again. It too fell, bit by bit, till it was finally swept away. The space was reabsorbed into the surrounding earth as if it had never been. This is apoptosis — the fall of a leaf, not into an abyss, but back into the tree’s roots. It happens silently and barely leaves a trace. There was something here. And then there was not.
The Beggar Again
Bopa had thought of Dadi on the morning he saw the second beggar — this one older, leaner, seated on a charpoy outside the Shiv temple. He had no sack of flour. Just a brass bowl. His teeth were few, his eyes watery. But something in his face — or perhaps in the posture — awoke an old itch in Bopa’s memory.
“Baba, bhiksha chahiye?”
The beggar looked up and smiled.
“Kya tum Bopa ho?”
The bag of vegetables slipped a little in Bopa’s hand. He knelt. The beggar did not accuse, nor bless, nor quote. He simply extended the bowl. Bopa, without a word, opened his wallet. Gave all the cash he had. Then reached into the bag and handed over the ripest guava, the brinjal, even the green chili — for heat.
“Swāhā,”
the beggar said softly, as if accepting an offering at a yajna.
“But some offerings only burn.”
Bopa felt a strange cold. He asked:
“Was it you then? All those years ago? The sack of atta?”
The beggar chuckled.
“Could be. Could be not. We are many. The face changes. The debt remains.”
Bopa sat there for a while, next to him, in silence. Then he said:
“I was just a boy. I did not know.”
The beggar nodded.
“And now you are a man. And still you don’t.”
Bopa got up. He walked home lighter in hand, heavier in heart. He passed the Ghaggar River Clinic on the way — its modest sign catching his eye as it always did. He went in. Not as a patient exactly. His joints had been aching, and he was old now, a man of careful rituals and full prices paid.
The doctor saw him without delay. Asked only what was needed. Ordered nothing unnecessary. When Bopa rose to leave, he paid the full fee without waiting to be asked, as he always did now, everywhere. The doctor noticed — said nothing — but understood everything. Two men in the same room, both of whom had learned, through different roads, that the extraction of more than is owed is the beginning of darkness.
That night, Bopa took a matchstick and lit a spoonful of ghee on his balcony.
No gods. No chants. Just the whisper:
Swāhā.
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Part III — 3D Clinic
I. The Woman and the Weight of Pain
Mrs. W’s recovery from rheumatoid arthritis was nothing short of remarkable. At thirty-four, she was a pleasant and demure woman — plump if you may, buxom if you choose — the kind of soft vitality one associates with young motherhood. But her knees had become her prison.
For nearly two years, she lived under the slow siege of pain. It began as a twinge, became swelling, and then rigidity. The world shrank around her pain. She stopped going out, then climbing stairs, and finally even going up to the roof of her home seemed impossible. Sitting for salah became agony, ablutions intolerable, the act of rising from an Indian-style toilet terrifying.
The family adjusted their lives around her illness — new furniture, a Western-style lavatory, new routines. Every conversation at home echoed the same refrain. Gathiya, the common term for arthritis in the region, became a household word.
II. Gathiya — The Local Word for a Global Ailment
Gathiya is a word that carries the texture of both folklore and suffering. It covers every kind of joint pain — from ordinary osteoarthritis to the crippling rheumatoid variant.
Her neighbours had their own tales of cure and failure, of oils and blessings. She had tried them all: modern medicine, Ayurveda, blessings from a Pir, even the mutterings of a tantric. Nothing helped. Bereft of hope, she resigned herself to fate — until she heard of a new clinic that had opened nearby, on the edge of the Ghaggar River.
III. The Clinic Between Two Indias
The Ghaggar River Clinic was small but modern, built not for show but for service. Its modest signboard bore an unusual motto:
Do away with unnecessary investigations — keep medicine affordable.
The clinic stood between two Indias — one rural, one suburban — catering both to the villages around Ramgarh and to the tidy colonies of Panchkula. It aimed to bridge that divide: to offer modern medicine without intimidation, to be a place where the first question asked was not what tests can be ordered but what does this person need.
IV. The First Encounter
She arrived with her husband. He answered most questions; she watched silently, her eyes lowered. Only with patient coaxing did she begin to narrate her ordeal — the ache, the swelling, the fatigue that made every step feel heavier than the last.
On examination, there was bilateral knee effusion, severe restriction of flexion, and significant pain. She reported tiredness and intermittent fever, though she was afebrile that day. No deformities. No extra-articular signs. A provisional diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis was made. She was sent for basic investigations and asked to return the next day.
V. The Diagnosis
Her results spoke clearly. ESR and CRP were raised, indicating active inflammation. Rheumatoid Factor and Anti-CCP antibodies were both positive. These findings, together with her clinical picture, confirmed an RF-positive inflammatory arthritis — early in its course, but unmistakable.
She was started on a short course of corticosteroids for relief, and on Methotrexate and Hydroxychloroquine as Disease-Modifying Anti-Rheumatic Drugs.
VI. The Turnaround
The response was remarkable — so swift and complete that even cautious optimism gave way to astonishment. Within weeks, her pain eased. Within months, she could walk without effort. The stiffness dissolved as if winter had lifted from her joints.
Four months later, Mrs. W became the most vocal ambassador of the Ghaggar River Clinic. She spoke about her recovery to anyone who would listen — neighbours, relatives, shopkeepers — and soon they too came seeking help. None had her luck, or perhaps her timing. Her recovery remained singular: clean, unambiguous, and deeply satisfying.
VII. The Peanuts and the Lesson
Last week, Mrs. W and her husband returned — not as patients but as friends — carrying a small sack of home-grown peanuts. They were from their own land. Not bought. Grown, harvested, brought.
Such stories in medicine are rare. They heal the healer. In a profession filled with uncertainty and compromise, her recovery was a small triumph of trust — the kind that makes one believe, once again, in both science and grace.
There is a word for what she offered when she placed those peanuts on the desk. It is not payment. It is not gratitude performed for an audience. It is the overflow of giving — the offering that exceeds the transaction, that gives more than is required, more than can be accounted for.
The same word the beggar spoke on a balcony, above a small flame, in the dark.
Swāhā.
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A Note on Apoptosis
Apoptosis primarily signifies a fall. Ptosis translates to fall, while apo means away from — falling like a leaf from a branch. It is a process that happens silently and barely leaves a trace. It is mostly an inferred phenomenon. There was something here. The cell existed, performed its single task, secreted its kindness outward, and then — without inflammation, without rupture, without disturbing the neighbors — was reabsorbed. Dadi weighed less than twenty kilograms at the end. The weight of a five-year-old child. The circle closed. The mud house fell. The ground received her. The walnut tree remained.