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The Hills of Angheri
This is the setting for this fictional work based on a very real phenomenon that touches life itself—doctors and the treatment they give us. The Hills of Angheri by Kavery Nambisan gives us the life and work of Nalli, a surgeon from a small village called Angheri, near Mysore. We are shown Nalli’s transformation from a shy village girl who stood before the gods and asked for "that thing, not knowing what it was (she) asked for", to a confident surgeon who diagnosed with her "eyes, her hands and her mind, and confirmed with X-rays and scans". Although largely about medicine and treatment, the book goes beyond mere narration, sending a strong message about the need to follow one’s dream. The dream may or may not come true but one must make the effort and maybe achieve success, for in the words of Paulo Coelho, "when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it". Nalli has always dreamed of becoming a doctor, an improbable profession considering her background. Whether it was her own persistence, her father’s tolerance or the ineffectiveness of the village quacks that helped her, or the hills themselves that intervened, she succeeds in her desire. The hills girding her village have always been her guardian angels and the ones to whom she instinctively turns for guidance. Her grandfather has given her an improbable tale of the hills being a family that settled there after the Sun asked them to stop flying as they did for aeons. The mother hill, a rebel, like Nalli, refused to settle down, leading to her wings being burned by an angry Sun, thus being lost to her family forever. In all her years away from home, it is the hills she yearns for the most, her heart aching for "Gilibetta", the mother hill. It is a parable that shows us truth in its bare, unembellished form—the world does not tolerate dreamers, women are often asked to make the difficult choice between their families and their desires. Yet, for some the very act of rebelling is in itself a rewarding experience. Nalli’s disillusionment at discovering that her village doesn’t need her services anymore and at realising that the medical profession is not all glory but with shades of black and grey as well, is only incidental. The point is that she has achieved what she set out to do. With that she must be satisfied until she can set forward once more. Her stay in England, her work there and in Keshavganj, her relationships with various people, all add colour and life to an otherwise prosaic subject. The details of medical college in Madras, where Nalli’s career begins, with her first cadaver, christened "Subbu" by the class, appearing to follow her around and pranks like putting pulpy livers in someone’s pocket or hanging a withered finger from a plait are all written with such tolerant understanding and humour as can only stem from personal experience. Nambisan—though she insists the work is fictional—somewhere down the line also appears to have succumbed to the need of most writers to put down an account of their own lives. Though she has authored a number of other women-centric novels as well as children’s literature, it is Nalli that seems to echo her own life as a surgeon and an FRCS from England. A warm and sensitive work, told imaginatively with a touch of humour, about individual and family, village and city, tradition and modernity, ambition and its limits —and finally, about those who settle down, and the few who fly on restlessly. |
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