Back when I was a student in medical
college, in the trauma section of one of the textbooks, there was a photograph
of a child with its buttocks scalded raw.
According to the book, this wasn’t a
particularly rare thing to see in a burn unit, and the usual explanation is
that the child sat down in a bucket of hot water. According to the book, this
is something that almost never happens in real life, so it should immediately
arouse suspicions of child abuse.
Well, actually, it does happen in real
life. It happened to me.
I was at that time very young – I must have
been less than three and a half years old, because my grandfather was still
alive. It’s not my earliest memory, but it’s one of the earliest.
It was a hot and sunny day, just short of
noon. My dad had bought a goat’s head from the butcher’s and was dissecting it
out in the yard, and I was a very interested spectator. Meanwhile, my
grandfather was preparing for his bath.
In order to comprehend what happened next,
one needs to understand the (now thankfully long extinct) process by which men
of my grandfather’s generation bathed. They’d first strip down to a dhoti or
lungi – a cloth like a sarong, worn around the waist – rub themselves over with
mustard oil, and sun themselves for an hour or so. Then, they’d take a bucket
of hot water and pour it over themselves, without the use of any soap. That was
their idea of a bath.
Anyway, so there I was bending over the
fascinating goat’s head dissection, when someone put something down just behind
me that I saw only a shadow of, out of the corner of my eye. It looked to me
like a low cylindrical stool of the kind we used to use back then, and without a
second thought I plonked myself down on it.
It wasn’t a stool. It was a bucket of
boiling water, all ready for my grandfather’s bath.
I remember a white hot flash of agony, and
I think I remember screaming. The next thing I knew, it was late afternoon, and
I was lying in bed, sedated, and looking out at the yard where the goat’s head
still lay, half-dissected. My arse was cooked, but good.
That’s why that book doesn’t know what it’s
talking about.
Ouch!
ReplyDeleteOh! Poor boy!
ReplyDeleteAnd strange customs. I imagine the mustard oil burns the skin too. Especially in the sun. And then hot water... Was there no lake or river with cool, clear water?
Sorry to hear that you were the exception to the rule! In most cases, though, I would still immediately suspect child abuse.
ReplyDeleteYou know, with your true story blogs, it's often the things you don't dwell on that arouse the most interest in me.
ReplyDeleteFor example, referring to folks as "specimens" rather than "patients" in one of your recent blogs. I've never heard that before, and have been wondering whether it was a cultural thing for weeks. I almost asked my dentist about it last week!
This time out, it's the goat head. I know I OUGHT to be focusing on the burned ass, but... What was your father intending to do with the goat's head?
Nothing; I'd wanted to know what was inside a goat's head, so he was trying to show me.
DeleteThe "specimens" thing is just a personal quirk. A long time ago, on Multiply, I'd written why I call them specimens. Now it's just a term I like to use.
You write the most interesting stuff. Sorry for your arse, though.
ReplyDelete