Bollywood, obstetric surgery, and swimming in the rain.

Working saturdays is not so bad - I completed the set of deliveries by seeing a breech birth (legs first, uncomfortable), two emergency caesarean sections (which Charlotte had been hoping to see) and an ectopic thrown in for good measure. There are four reasons I like obstetric surgery - first, the patients generally aren't too decrepit and so tend to do better afterwards. Second, caesareans (which make up a sizeable chunk of the caseload) are quite like opening a matryoshka - you keep opening successive layers (admittedly of flesh rather than painted wooden doll) until the final layer reveals a baby (I should warn you all, though, that it initially looks a lot worse than the final doll in a matryoshka, and is much harder to put back). Third, it's all quite necessary - the things that get taken out or sewn back up really need to come out or get repaired. Finally, it's very quick - I've seen an emergency caesarean at St. Thomas' done in a little over a minute from opening the skin to production of baby, and as somone prone to falling asleep during particularly interminable vascular surgery (even though the consultant was a bit of a hero and a keen teacher), this is good.

The only slight downside of saturday was that things went crazy around lunchtime and stayed that way for several hours. When that happens you have two choices - decide now would be an excellent time to sneak away for lunch while everyone's too busy to notice, or go hungry and eat when things are quiet again. Partly because Charlotte and I are so wonderfully conscientious, and partly because the four of us are planning to skive the thursday and friday (and arguably saturday) of the last week to go and sit on the beach and eat seafood, we stuck it out. Charlotte and I had different outcomes from this. She was given the chance to scrub in (get gloved & gowned and in this case help deliver a baby) first by Rohit, a tall, skinny junior doctor who spends the minutes between finishing one thing and being told to go and do something else in the incubator room playing with the babies. He has an almost supernatural way of quietening down the bawlers. Anyway, the woman he and Charlotte scrubbed in for promptly stopped moca-ing, and shortly before she was abandoned by the medical staff to a few more hours of "Amaaa! Amaaaargh!" one of the consultants appeared and ticked Rohit off for allowing these incompetent gora to scrub in. Happily this didn't stop the other junior doctor, Debánjali, from getting me scrubbed in on the next woman who looked on the verge of giving birth, and she duly did - so as well as a tick in the "assisted with a delivery" box, I did a bit of suturing afterwards.

There were two bad things about the busy spell at lunch, though – I’m not sure if it’s now 26 or 27 deliveries, and we didn’t leave until past 4pm, which was a bit rough for a Saturday. We then went to get presents for Rohit and Debánjali, which involved visiting the Street of Low-Rent Beggars. These are perfectly normal people going about their business until they spot a gora, whereupon they stick out a hand and do their best to look hungry. It is fairly easy to distinguish them from actual beggars, however, as they are invariably quite fat. The more wily example is the boy who has now approached me twice to ask if I can help him with his hobby – collecting foreign banknotes.

By the time all this was out the way, it was half five or so, and we decided to take in a bit of culture. Toyin had wanted all week to go and see Don, a Bollywood film featuring Shahrukh Khan, whose face adorns the bag she keeps her underwear in (as Charlotte somewhat indiscreetly revealed). So we bounced our way in an autorickshaw to part of Vellore which was particularly slummy even for a place composed largely of compacted excrement, open sewers, and an improbably good hospital. The equivalent of 30p got you access to a huge screen with a concrete roof, rows of benches, and twin cesspools each side which you had to cross on sandbag stepping stones to get to the urinals or the popcorn vendors. The audience was 95% male, with the exceptions including two burqa-ed up girls in the row in front who progressively removed articles of clothing through the film until they were completely normally dressed. The film itself was extraordinary – a deeply silly plot (which used roughly the same trick twice to bring two different characters back from apparently fiery/sticky ends, in one case quite blatantly to set up Don II, and awkwardly shoehorned an entirely superfluous character into the plot so they could get another star on screen), some hugely enjoyable song-and-dance set pieces, a leading man (Khan) who has done alright for a short bloke with a nose it wouldn’t be uncharitable to call bulbous, and proper whooping and cheering from the audience when the actors broke into song and/or when a new star hit the big screen. I should have mentioned that the film was entirely in Hindi, but we followed the plot fairly well for three reasons. First, Toyin got chatting to the person next to her and had him explain the bits we hadn’t understood. Second, there were regular injections of amusingly-pronounced English in the script:

“Gentlemen, I’ll get straight to the point.”
“Do you think I’m some kind of fool?!”
“Don’t worry, I’ll handle it.”

Third, whenever we should have realised someone had been revealed as a baddie (as happened roughly every 20 minutes through the film), they abruptly became much better-dressed, with the police chief going from grey nylon suits to ray-bans and leather jacket and Don favouring open-necked patterned shirts with ties of identical material.

The first dance scene was particularly special, as it involved lots of frantic and inelegant jiggling, coupled with the repeated assumption of overtly sexual positions for a couple of seconds, whereupon the dancers would separate and indulge in some chaste not-quite-kissing. The overall effect was a little like watching Beyoncé have an epileptic fit. My favourite scene, though, was right at the outset at the first (roof-raising) appearance of the villain (Don/Khan was definitely a baddie from the outset) when he’s practising his golf driving on the beach as a group of henchmen arrive.

Don: hurba-hurba-hurba-hurba-hurba. [whacks golf ball straight into the middle of one of the lackey’s foreheads, killing them stone dead] Now that’s what I call a good shot!
Main henchmen, resplendent in bushy moustache: hurba-hurba-hurba?
Don: -hurba-hurba-hurba-hurba police informer!

All in all, though, it was actually fantastic, particularly because the cinema was packed with people really getting into the film, and we plan to go again.

Today (Sunday) involved sleeping till close to noon, and then heading over the road to the pool which our landlady owns. It is an absolute oasis – impeccable lawns, hedged paths paved in stone rather than the Vellore default, a gym which we all studiously ignored, billiards, table-tennis, and a pool which must be 30m x 10m and is crystal clear. The snag was that it’s also a favoured spot for the local mozzies, who having only bitten me twice in the first six days trebled their record this afternoon. After that we had dinner in the canteen, where we are constantly finding new ways of convincing the woman behind the counter that gora (NB: Ron – I mean ‘white person’ here, not ‘little horse’) are imbeciles. Tonight I tried to order pongal after Ashok (a guy we met at the pool) had said it was his favourite food; she smiled pityingly, shook her head, and said very slowly: “No – it’s only for breakfast.”

Just before bed we plotted to escape Vellore next weekend for Pondicherry, a former French colony on the coast which oddly only became part of India in the 1950s. Ben’s guidebook says it “manages to retain a mildly Gallic air superimposed on a typical Indian background”; I’m curious to find out if this means they dust the turds with icing sugar. Despite today being relatively idyllic, I think we’re all keen to spend some time away from Vellore – when I asked Debánjali where to go here she shrugged and said: “There’s nothing to do here. I’m from the North so I don’t even like the food – so you work, go home, sleep, and come to work again.” For the junior doctors here that means 12-hour shifts seven days a week, too.

However, if I’m tiring slightly of the sight (there is a fort here), sounds (see Monopoly money, traffic horns, and go-karting), and smells of Vellore, I’m switching to gynaecology this week, so Ed Genochio, who commented that he had “never read a blog about gynaecology in india before, but perhaps it is time”, will be pleased. Given that no one had ever read a blog about a solo winter crossing of the Tibetan plateau on a bicycle as part of a journey from Shanghai to London before Ed wrote his, I thought this was rather generous of him. So I will keep you posted on how the gynaecology goes, will continue to spare you the photos as the computers here won’t upload them from my camera, and will tell you about the food at some point. Bye for now.