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A life as exciting and eventful as Nergesh Tejani MD has led certainly has all the necessary ingredients of a very readable memoir. Entitled I Hear a Song in My Head, A Memoir in Stories of Love, Fear, Doctoring and Flight, Tejani blends, with the judicious assistance of photographs and drawings, the personal and the professional with great dexterity.

 

 

 

 

In the early 1950s, a boy of 16 and a girl of probably the same age joined Grant Medical College. He was a poor Muslim youth from Africa; she, a Parsi brought up in a relatively wealthy family. He was the son of a school teacher turned shopkeeper; she, the daughter of an army doctor. He lived in a small house adjoining a mosque in Sultanhamood in Kenya; she, in a spacious flat in South Bombay overlooking the Oval Maidan. He studied at the prestigious (at that time) Elphinstone College; and she, at the less prestigious (at that time) Jai Hind College. This ill-matched pair fell in love, married and lived not only "happily ever after” (to use a cliché) but also led very exciting and useful lives as doctors.
Their marriage was fixed for December 1959. Amir showed his resourcefulness by obtaining permission from the Aga Khan by promising to bring up his children as Ismailis; he simultaneously wrote to his future father-in-law swearing that his children would be brought up as Parsis. As Nergesh was busy with her registrar’s job, the unpleasant job of informing the Parsi dowagers fell to the lot of her sisters. Amazingly they met with an "enlightened response — these are modern times they said.”
After their marriage, the couple moved to Kampala. Life was not easy to begin with. Nergesh was not domesticated and the Gujarati that her in-laws spoke was alien to her. She joined Mulago Hospital, the teaching hospital of the Makerere Medical School as a house physician in internal medicine as preparation for the MRCOG, an advanced British degree in obstetrics and gynecology. She spent an initially unhappy time under Dr G who firmly believed that Indians were only capable of shop-keeping till her luck changed and she joined Prof Arthur Williams.
Nergesh then describes several surgeries and case histories: a man whose extremities were covered with guinea worms which had to be scooped out, head and all; patients, occasionally many members of a family, suffering from smallpox; a man with a swollen tongue and with hardly any neck which made a tracheotomy impossible; ‘melon’ and ‘orange’ sized ovarian abscesses. Some of the descriptions are particularly distressing like that of a brave girl of three who has been raped by her cousin and submits to examination and treatment without a murmur. But some of the episodes can be quite amusing as well. A patient complains of a song in his head; he suffers from an arterio-venous malformation. The operation for this condition could be dangerous so the patient is happy to go home with merely a confirmation of his ailment. There is also an incident of vaginismus where, after sexual intercourse a woman continues to hold her partner in a ‘vice-like grip,’ and the couple has to be taken to hospital in this curious condition to be extricated.
But not all of the book is about doctoring. There are hilarious accounts of Nergesh’s attempts to run a household, her attempts to make meals from the Time and Talents recipe book (which had a small misprint advising the use of one-and-a-half pounds of ghee instead of one-and-a-half tablespoons) till she realized that cooking was merely ‘common sense mixed with flexibility,’ the description of a journey where the passengers were abandoned by an irate driver, and a dish of overcooked cheese fondue which Jacques, the Frenchman entertaining them throws out because, in his opinion, it had degenerated into chewing gum.
Nergesh and her family migrated to the USA in June 1971. A year later, in August 1972, following Idi Amin’s edict of expelling all Asians from Uganda, all of Amir’s family went to the West and the stories of his sisters and the tensions and humiliation they suffered while leaving the country are poignantly described more or less in their own words.
Nergesh had to re-educate herself when she went to the USA. She also had to learn Americanisms like ‘elevator’ instead of ‘lift’ and ‘Demerol’ instead of ‘pethedine,’ to say ‘cesarean’ instead of ‘cesarean section;’ however, this has not prevented her from using ‘cesarean section’ almost till the last page of her memoir. Old habits seem to die hard.
Memoirs often seem to be a bit self-indulgent and one has the tendency to include much more recollections and reminiscences than are necessary. The book could have been further edited; there seems to be a bit of repetition in several of the medical cases and some incidents described like that of LL, a distant relative who visits her in Uganda, do not really add any great insight to the memoirs and one wonders why they have been included. The stories of Amir’s parents at the end of the book seem to be a bit of an awkward add-on and would have been better had it been integrated within the framework of the book.
However, Nergesh can write with great pathos and sensitivity without being melodramatic. This is evident in her description of the premature loss of her child, the death of her father, the last journey to the Towers of Silence and especially her feelings on seeing ‘his silver hair on the wooden-handled pig-bristled hairbrush’ he had always used. There is also the perceptive realization that ‘home’ has not much to do with the length of time one inhabits a place nor necessarily where children are born. Home for her is the USA where her husband, Amir, is buried. She mentions in her acknowledgements that after Amir’s death the only peace she has known is when asleep or writing about their life together in Africa. This, she confesses, "might be the only positive thing that was born as a result of his death.” For the lay reader, it is these personal anecdotes which will make a lasting impression.