The Interpreter – by Mariam Tokhi
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY
Mir was a patient man. When the receptionist glanced up at the waiting room, she barely noticed him, quietly slumped over his phone. He was used to clinic waiting rooms with their bustle, anxiety and constantly ringing phones; their warning posters of sad, unvaccinated children; the griefs and elations of the people who swung out of the clinic rooms. When Mir was younger, an aspiring doctor himself, he loved watching people, playing a game with his sister Aliza where they guessed the stories of those around them. They would giggle as they waited for their mother to emerge from her appointments, whispering and pointing to the people pacing around them. She’s been told her baby is half-cat, half-human, Aliza would whisper to him, almost falling out of her chair, laughing. That old man, he’s actually a ghost, haunting the hospital.
Forty years later, Mir was tired of people and their stories. He knew them all now. He knew their secrets: their intimate physical complaints, their antidepressant doses, their toenail fungus. Sometimes he felt like the shaman of Dandenong East. On Friday, he had been to the masjid for Jumma prayers, and at least half a dozen people had turned their backs in shyness (or was it shame?) when he arrived. He couldn’t break their confidence, he wanted to tell them. The doctor was at the entry to the waiting room now, calling the next patient. Mrs AHMYREYE. Oh, shit, yes, it was one of his jobs. Mir stuffed his phone in his pocket, turned on his smile, greeted the doctor and patient with his hand to his chest, and followed them into the doctor’s room.
Mir wasn’t really patient, though he worked hard to make sure his façade was inscrutable. He was frustrated by the turntable of doctors at these clinics. They all did their time here, at this crowded, badly run public clinic for poor people. From the outside the clinic looked nice. But Mir knew what it was really like. Since Mir had been working, the clinic had morphed from a little caravan in a paddock next to the old shopping strip, to a light-filled architecturally designed ‘super-clinic’. Mir didn’t think it was particularly super. It was still full of poor people. Despite the shiny new plastic seats in the waiting room, there weren’t enough doctors. Most of the consulting rooms were empty. A couple of the old stalwarts doddered around still, but the new doctors – even the best of them, the most earnest of them – they stayed for a while but eventually disappeared into the plush, well-paid world of private health care. They didn’t need interpreters in those places.
Honestly, he could have told the doctor what was wrong with Mrs Amiri before he started interpreting. He’d known Farida Amiri for longer than this young, green doctor had been practising medicine: she had only started working at the clinic four weeks ago. Mrs Amiri looked much older than she actually was, and these young doctors were always quite deferential towards her. When Mir first met her, he’d thought she was his mother’s age. But she was only a few years older than him. They had a lot in common, actually, except that Farida had a horrible ex-husband – a bastard of a man – and an even worse childhood. And now her kids were being awful to her, too. Mir and Farida shared a mother tongue, a birth country, and a love for the poetry of Hafez. Two years ago, before one appointment, Farida and Mir had worked out that they were actually related, via his mother’s cousin. She’d been a bit more reserved in that appointment, hadn’t spoken about the itinerant son whose drug addiction was causing her all sorts of headaches.
Today Farida was talking about her migraines. Mir wanted to tell the doctor to take Farida’s blood pressure. He knew that she’d stopped her medications again. She was always running out of money, or giving it away to the stupid son, or sometimes she just plain forgot. The young girl did eventually take out the blood pressure cuff, just as he thought the consultation was finishing. He kept his face blank. It would be another thirty minutes now, while they stuffed around working out why her blood pressure was so high. He could just tell them, he knew, but it wasn’t professional. Even if he had another job to get to, and it was halfway across town. He wouldn’t be paid if he didn’t get there in time.
Mir was invisible. He was only an interpreter, and interpreters are shadow-people. He had a medical degree from Peshawar University that no-one knew about or cared about. His in-laws still called him doctor-sahib, but it was only an unthinking, respectful habit. Zeina, his eldest daughter, called him Baba the Babel Fish, which he felt annoyed about, until he Googled it. He spoke nine languages fluently, and a little bit of Tagalog and Indonesian, too. You’re a hero, Baba, she’d said. You save lives as much as any doctor. Zeina was sweet, he thought to himself, he didn’t know where she had inherited her impishness. It wasn’t from her mother, whose nature was serious, earnest. Zeina was just like Aliza, God rest her soul.
One day, though, he would be out of a job, because these doctors would have the Babel Fishies implanted in their brains. Ha! One day these doctors would be out of job, too, Mir had read on his phone, just this morning, because the artificial intelligence would be smarter than any medical graduate.
If he were really honest, he didn’t miss practising medicine much. The memories of medicine and war were enmeshed: those early days of his medical residency in rural Kandahar had felt like never-ending exhaustion, as devastation rained down around him. He had been totally unequipped for all of it, just mimicking the more senior doctors until he, too, worked out the patterns of care for elderly villagers gasping for breath, the malnourished patients, the young landmine victims, the widows whose perfectly functioning bodies betrayed their mental anguish. And yet, in some moments, he felt a yearning. A yearning for the role of healer, of leader, for the old white coat and stethoscope, for the purposefulness of it all. What would his life have looked like if he hadn’t listened to Safi urging him to flee? When Zeina had told him that she was applying for medical school, he was proud just like her grandfather had been, but then he felt stricken. Had he pushed this on her, his warm, cheeky girl, with his bitter yearning?
The doctor was smiling now, relieved because Mrs Amiri had agreed to start taking her medication again. Dutifully, she told Mrs Amiri about the risk of strokes if she didn’t take her tablets. Farida frowned bitterly at him, though he was only a messenger of these words, and she intoned in slow, pathetic, poetic Dari. What is the point of living this sad and lonely existence? A stroke would at least kill me quickly. Mir wanted to roll his eyes at her and laugh. (Maybe quote some Hafez: a heart brought to life with love never dies | our persistence is written in the skies.) But the doctor was looking at him expectantly, so he interpreted it quickly, blankly. The young woman, to her credit, was unfazed. Matter of fact. The doctor thrust a bundle of papers toward Mir. No, she replied, turning to the patient, you might just walk with a limp and be unable to speak ever again. When Mir translated, Mrs Amiri startled at this curtness, then choked on her reply, and nodded. Thank you, Doctor-jan, she mumbled. Mir bowed his head at the young doctor, and passed Farida the prescription, a slip for some blood tests, and the fee waiver form, and they walked together to the reception desk to book her next appointment. ▼
Image: Andreas Komodromos
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