One of the funniest things I heard last year was how the pandemic was making us nostalgic about visits to the dentist. It was probably meant to cheer us up or make the average dentist feel good.
Maybe I come from another planet, but one of the few consolations for me was not having to visit the dentist. And suffer thrice each time – before the visit shaking with nervousness, during the visit for obvious reasons, and after the visit while dealing with the post-visit pain.
It has been years since I visited the dentist – like the details of the PM Cares Fund, the precise number is not available to you, dear public – but memories of earlier visits have carved images in my mind like those of the animals our ancestors carved on their cave walls.
I can forgive the jollity of the dentist just before he shoves a drill into my mouth; he probably looked up a joke for the occasion. And I can, with effort, ignore the messages all his instruments send out just by sitting quietly around me: this one for knocking out teeth ha ha, that for searching for them in my stomach, and so on.
But what of that tiny mirror and the torch on his head (or am I confusing him with a miner?) And the superior air with which he says, “Hmmm, this one must go,” or “Don’t you ever floss?”
Then there’s the business of the x-ray. “Hope you are not pregnant,” he would joke while asking his lady assistant to leave the room. And afterwards he would wave the x-ray in my face with: “Do you see what I mean?” The inside of my mouth looked like the side road leading to the cricket stadium with cars parked on either flank, but I couldn’t tell him that.
He once told me (I told you dentists were funny): “If your teeth become more yellow, you will have to wear a brown tie to go with it.” Fashion advice, free of cost. Sometimes he cracked jokes about the gaps in my teeth. “I could drive a car through,” he would say. I had a brilliant reply to that – but he always had his hand in my mouth just then, and I couldn’t speak. Later of course it was too late.
And worst of all is when my mouth fills up with all kinds of liquids and it seems like an eternity before I can spit into that little toilet beside the chair.
People have done different things during the pandemic. Some have learnt music, others have learnt how to cook. Many have written poetry. But no one has written a poem on dentists or a sonnet on how they missed these smile-destroyers.
Do dentists make a lot of money? I don’t know. They live a hand-to-mouth existence, after all. On the other hand, they have so much to bribe the tooth fairy with. I missed many things last year. The dentist wasn’t one of them.
