Real life story of a Rotary Volunteer who ventured against threats to his life to argue and convince aggressive mobs trapped by misinformation and fanaticism propagated by vested interests, political clouts and self styled medicos, that Oral Polio V...
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Jehangirnagar was a new settlement, at the outskirts of the Naipura village, which spread alongside the highway. It was set up to accommodate a large number of people from a slum spread on either side of the railway track, now reclaimed for laying an additional track on the busy rail route. The families in Jehangirnagar had little in common with the people of the village. Men had been working as head load workers, hawkers and petty traders, while women went around the town selling vegetables. There were construction workers like carpenters, masons and unskilled labourers who went to the town early in the morning, and waited at the Naipura bus station for being hired for casual work. The colony was named after their leader, Jehangir Miah, who spearheaded the resistance against evacuation and ultimately obtained necessary land and funds from the government to properly rehabilitate the slum-dwellers.
Jalaluddin belonged to a respectable family of Unani Hakeems (Traditional physicians who practiced both Unani and Ayurveda systems of medicine). Having failed to make any headway in learning medicine, he was sent to the town of Amroha as an apprentice to Shihabuddin Sui, a Master Tailor, whose father and uncles were the dress-makers to the Nawabs of the pre-independence era. He worked under Shihabuddin for two years and learnt the trade to some extent. Shihabuddin expected him to reach the perfection of a master cutter for sherwanis and suits in another year or so when he would earn on his own and was contemplating to give him in marriage, Fauzia, his eldest daughter. Her mother also liked the boy as he was handsome and hardworking.
Jalaluddin, however, was unaware of the thinking of the master and his wife. He eloped with the girl one night, and disappeared in the crowded lanes of Chandni Chowk, in Delhi. The mother was shocked by the ingratitude of the boy and the shame the girl brought to the family. She fell ill and never recovered from it.
It was some eight years later that Jalaluddin surfaced in Jehangirnagar with his two wives and six children and moved into a one-room plus kitchen portion of a small house as a tenant. He established himself as a tailor in a corner of the room that doubled as a living room for the day and bedroom for the night. His skills had not improved since he left the master's household, but had rather deteriorated.
He did not have to invent any new ways to supplement his meagre income from tailoring. The grand fathers' blood that ran through his veins carried the miraculous genes of medical wisdom with which he could cure any kind of paralysis, particularly the flaccidity caused by polio for which the allopathic system is yet to hit at a remedy.
He would disappear for days together, ostensibly to treat a rich man in Ramgarh or Hoshiarpur or somewhere in a nawabdom of the past, who lay paralysed for long. He would return only after the patient fully recovered; otherwise it was to prepare the concotions or medicinal oils to treat the patient with.
He brought along with him a big load of dried and green roots, leaves and neatly cut stems of shrubs which nobody in Jehangirnagar bothered to identify as jungle weeds or Himalayan herbs. The oilman in the Naipura village supplied him with pure oils of mustard and gingally and that was evident from the dozens of futile visits the supplier made in an effort to realize the cost of the oil he sold to Jalaluddin months ago.
