My Experiences with the teeth

I jumped up when I heard the door bell ringing. I was nearing the climax of a detective novel. I threw the book aside and went to answer the door. Now who in the world is this? Her face seemed so familiar , but..then it suddenly dawned on me..”jenny!” I screamed and we hugged each other and we laughed and I invited her in. jenny had changed a lot. She looked so different from how she had when she left school. I just couldn’t point out what made her so different. The same hairstyle, same eyes, nose, beautiful smile..wait a minute! Did I say beautiful smile?? When she was in school she was popular for her so called “Dracula teeth”. Now here she was sitting next to me with shinning white teeth all set in a beautiful straight row. I was green with jealousy as I listened to her boast about the number of boyfriends she had in college. After she left I ran upstairs to my room and looked at myself in the mirror. I looked at my features one by one very closely and after about half an hour of close examination from different angles I made a great discovery. I had just then found the answers to all my major problems( which included why I didn’t have a single boy friend when people around me had three or four). My teeth was my problem. Not only were they large, they were “outstanding” too ( by which I mean standing out of my mouth). How could I have not noticed it till now? Why didn’t anyone point it out to me? At least my parents could have given me a hint. As soon my mother reached home I told her about my latest discovery. After giving her an hour’s lecture on the defects of my teeth I came to the point which I had to present before her. I wanted to put braces on my teeth and they have to look perfect before I enter my new course. Though my mother disagreed to the whole matter in the beginning, after a week long strike and satyagraha she finally agreed.

It was then after a day or two that my elder cousin sister decided to stay with me for a month. To my surprise she too had decided to put on braces. And that is how I got to witness the entire series of torture that was awaiting me…

On our way to the dentist she made me sick with her boasting(non-stop). What did she think of herself? She thinks her teeth is her only defect and once that is all put in right order she would look exactly like Aishwarya Rai. I felt like stuffing some cotton into my ears( though easier and soothing would have been into her mouth). An hour of waiting outside the doctor’s cabin almost drove me crazy. And after two long hours we met the doctor. There were two of them. Both had very serious expression on their faces. I had a sudden dislike to one of them. I know why. He closely resembled my maths teacher in school and since he has not gifted me any pleasant memories I couldn’t help hating him. My cousin climbed into a very high seat and the doctor’s poured their head into her mouth. What happened next was a series of incidents that somewhat looked like scenes from a wrestling competition. Hammer, plier, syringes one by one each found its way to my cousins mouth. By now she was screaming loudly. The doctors were trying to pull not one or two but 4 large teeth out of her. They were pulling the teeth as if in the middle of some tug of war. Blood was dripping from her mouth. I felt dizzy and my view was becoming blurred. I ran out of the nearest exit I saw. When I came to my normal state , the cabin door opened and my cousin or I rather say someone who looked like her came out. Honestly speaking she looked uglier than ever. Her mouth was filled with cotton soaked in blood and her makeup was smeared in tears. Her hair looked as if she had received a shock. That day she didn’t eat anything or I better say she couldn’t eat anything for a week. She lived on liquid food. All my irritation towards her slowly melted away. I was filled with sympathy and pity for her though I never knew then that worse was in store for her.

This time I let her go inside the cabin alone. I chose to sit in the waiting room. Why should I scare myself ? I don’t know why but I have always felt a doctor’s cabin isn’t a great place to explore. I chewed through the magazines kept there (twice). I was nearly falling asleep( as usual) when the door clicked open. Then something that looked like an extra territorial emerged from it. I craned my neck to see where my cousin was. “fan-fe-fo?”it said. “ what!” I suddenly realized this so called alien was my cousin. I could hardly make out what she was trying to say. Her face was pale and mouth filled with steel fences that went zig-zag and it was all decorated with colourful rubber bands. She was so tired and weak that she couldn’t even stand straight. I stood there rooted as if I was seeing a ghost image of her or something. By the time we reached home she was running a very high temperature. The doctors prescribed a handful of medicines for her all of which looked like bullets to me. She could barely eat anything. All this worried me so much.

What is teeth for if you can’t eat anything? I don’t think all this pain is worth the result. After she went back to the hostel I re examined my teeth again. May be they stand out a little. May be they are not so perfect or arranged perfectly in a row. May be I wont get to be popular in college. But who cares? My teeth weren’t an issue to me any more. Thus ended my experiences with teeth.