The Black Hawk Tile

Bombay is still Bombay at first glance: BEST buses leaning into traffic as if late for an argument, black-and-yellow taxis nosing through puddles of coconut water and petrol sheen, paan spit making red constellations along compound walls, and the Arabian Sea keeping its damp thumb pressed over everything. The newspapers at Churchgate said Mumbai in some places and Bombay in others, with the usual civic hesitation of a city that has changed its name but not yet decided what to do with old stationery. I came in by local train with my bag pressed to my ribs, trying not to let the repaired brass clip bite any deeper into my forearm, and was immediately mistaken for a man from a shipping office, a patent office, or a charitable German mission, depending on who wanted my attention.

I am in fact here to get passage out before the coast becomes administratively inconvenient. A cargo vessel is supposed to leave from Ballard Pier within two days, carrying machine parts, tinned mango pulp, and perhaps one temporally displaced observer if the clerk accepts my money and does not ask why my papers have the confidence of a library card and the face of a drowned uncle. My second reason for being here is less practical and therefore more dangerous: I wanted to see how this city made medicine speak. Those two aims spent the day pulling at me like quarrelling porters. The ship wanted me westward, toward docks, manifests, and men with rubber stamps. Curiosity wanted me northeast, toward Parel, Haffkine, and the tiled verandas everyone here treats as ordinary public furniture.

Curiosity won for most of the morning, which is how I found myself outside a municipal dispensary near Lalbaug, watching a woman in a green sari follow the clinic path with her toes. Not barefoot exactly; her chappals slapped at each tile and paused where the picture changed. A stomach. Three tablets. A sun half-up, a sun overhead, a moon. A little steel tumbler. A crossed-out chili. A face with swelling around the eyes. She had a child on her hip and an older boy carrying the prescription folded like examination results. Nobody announced that this was instruction. The layout did it. The veranda narrowed as the queue approached the counter, so people could only move single file past the ceramic panels. The exit widened again but not until after a final tile: a black hawk painted over a gate, wings stiff as brackets.

At that point the clerk did not look up from the register. He simply held his pencil over a column and waited.

“Two after food, morning and night, five days. If rash here, here, or breathing tight, come back,” the boy said, touching his throat for tightness because the tile showed a blue chest and alarm lines. The clerk made a tick in what must have been the hawk column and passed them through.

In my own line of work one learns to distrust ceremonies that claim to be merely helpful. They often turn out to be cages with murals. Here, irritatingly, the thing seemed to be what it claimed. People grumbled about delay, but the delay was measured in seconds and distributed with almost comic fairness. A man in a white shirt and gold watch had to repeat his father’s eye-drop schedule just as a mill worker had to repeat an iron tablet schedule. The gold watch did it badly and received no mercy.

“Not four drops. One drop, four times,” the clerk said.

The father, seated on the veranda bench, looked away in luxurious shame. It is a fine thing to be able to feel humiliated on behalf of someone else while knowing the queue will not punish you for the extra half-minute. The son laughed apologetically, not at his father but at the world, the way elite-adjacent men do when they want the rules softened without being seen to ask. He had a potter’s hands, not metaphorically: dry clay remained in the lines around his nails, and two repaired brass lotas clinked in the cloth bag at his side. Yet the clerk called him “Sheth” once, perhaps because he had recently supplied vessels to some municipal office, perhaps because one lawsuit over land can polish a surname faster than three generations of actual wealth.

“My father reads old accounts only,” the man said. “Pictures make him suspicious.”

“Pictures make him alive,” the clerk replied, and ticked the column after the old man repeated the instruction in a low, offended mumble.

Outside, the son drew me into his orbit because my shoes were foreign enough to invite advice and my silence was useful. He assumed I had come for the Haffkine Picture Room, as people here seem to assume any wandering foreigner with papers must be interested in either plague history or trade restrictions. I did not correct him. It is often best to let a city choose your disguise; it will fit better than anything packed.

“You should go before lunch,” he said. “After lunch the company men come. They bring boxes with no shame.”

“Boxes?”

“Doctor-only packs. Imported. Clean in their country, andhuli here.” He said the word with the faint distaste one reserves for a spoon dropped on a railway platform. “Then they ask why we need gate sheet for tablets costing fifty rupees. As if expensive stomach knows English.”

This was said with great satisfaction by a man whose own father had nearly failed a one-drop test in public. Social reform, I note, is always most attractive when it has just inconvenienced someone else.

He walked with me as far as a litho stall under a blue tarpaulin, where picture strips hung from string in two-color rows: antibiotics, cough mixtures, pregnancy iron, malaria, worm tablets, blood pressure pills. The paper smelled of wet ink and frying besan from the snack cart next door. A schoolgirl in a navy pinafore stood on a crate reading one aloud for an old woman who had bought tablets from a chemist but wanted a second voice at the chawl entrance. The girl’s reading had the crisp, bored righteousness of someone paid in coins and adult trust.

“After meals means after actual meals,” she told a younger woman behind them, who looked barely old enough to be managing anyone’s kitchen but wore the glass bangles and guarded expression of a new in-law. “Tea and two glucose biscuits is not meal for this one.”

The younger woman clutched a packet of tablets and a small cloth parcel that smelled of cumin. Her eyes flicked toward a man waiting near a lamppost, then back to the strip. “If mother says no onion today?”

“Then dal, rice, curd. Not empty. You know.”

“I know,” she snapped, too quickly. Then softer, because relief had escaped before pride could stop it: “Stamp it.”

The stall owner slid the leaflet toward an ink pad and pressed a rubber mark onto the corner: DHULA in block letters, the vowel slightly clogged. I had watched enough by then to understand the elegant illegality. The prescription had likely come from a relative, or the tablets had been bought loose, or some household taboo had collided with dosing. Instead of pretending innocence, she paid to make the explanation public enough to be acceptable. Everyone saw; no one accused. The approved way to break a small rule is to make the danger signs larger.

The stall owner charged her fifty paise, then waved away the schoolgirl’s request for change with an expression that said children should learn charity when adults can afford to demand it. The girl took a strip of roasted chana instead and counted the pills again with a forefinger shiny from salt.

I bought an antibiotic chitra-patti for ₹1.25 though I had no antibiotic and no infection unless one counts curiosity, which is chronic. The strip folded into six panels. The body part was drawn with blunt modesty. The dose was not beautiful, but beauty is overrated in matters of not poisoning oneself. On the back someone had printed a warning about finishing the course, illustrated by three little germs surviving under an umbrella when the patient stopped early. I admired the umbrella. Bacteria in this universe receive better visual metaphors than many ministers.

At Haffkine the gate was crowded but not frantic. The old stone buildings sat behind wet trees, and clerks moved between rooms carrying bundles tied in red tape. Near the entrance, a board listed approved symbols with additions pasted over older ones. The past was not erased; it was layered, which is more honest and less tidy. One tile showed the hawk boundary in a newer style, sharper and more dramatic than the worn version at the dispensary. A man beside me tapped it and said, “After Kalyan, every exit got a bird. Even where no bird ever comes.”

He spoke as if referring to a cricket score everyone knew. I had heard the name in the queue twice already: Kalyan, rain, chloroquine, whole packet. The girl survived, people said, which allowed the story to become policy instead of ghost story. There are worlds where a child’s near death becomes a statistic and vanishes. Here it became a ceramic bird that stops grandfathers, gold watches, and impatient mothers at the door. A modest improvement in the human habit of learning late.

Inside the Picture Room, if that is not too grand a translation, master copies were being sold across a counter polished by elbows. Printers waited with tubes. Drug company representatives waited with briefcases. Health activists waited with cloth bags full of annotated leaflets and the dangerous calm of people who have read the fine print for sport. The room had fans, but they mostly stirred the smell of gum arabic, damp paper, and old disinfectant.

A foreign firm’s man argued in English that a mechanism picture for a new patented ulcer drug would “disclose proprietary teaching.” A local woman in a handloom sari asked whether the proprietary teaching entered the patient’s stomach blindfolded. This pleased the room, though quietly. Bureaucratic rooms enjoy wit only when it can be denied later.

“Dose and danger signs we provide,” the man said. “Mechanism is for physicians.”

“Then public sale is for physicians,” she replied.

A clerk at the counter continued aligning stamps as if the future of pharmaceutical trade were a mild inconvenience to his afternoon tea. New Delhi’s patent changes were in every newspaper, tucked between cricket and coalition anxieties. Here the treaty had arrived not as an abstraction but as a dispute over whether a pill may leave a shop without showing the body where it intends to interfere. I have seen empires demand tribute in grain, silver, sons, maps, and silence. This was the first time I had seen sovereignty defended through a demand for a decent diagram.

Not all virtue here is pure, of course. The local manufacturers praised public knowledge with the ringing sincerity of men who had discovered that morality could also protect market share. Chemists liked the rule because a read-aloud and stamp made them minor priests for fifty paise. Printers liked it because paper multiplies faster than doctrine. Yet the patient at the veranda end did leave knowing whether to swallow one tablet or four. Mixed motives are still motives; sometimes they accidentally save lives, which is rude of them because it complicates cynicism.

By early afternoon I remembered the ship with a small professional panic. At Victoria Terminus, under stone gargoyles blackened by exhaust, I found a timetable clerk working from a narrow booth wedged between a tea seller and a poster about railway cleanliness. The clerk’s hair was cut close, their shirt collar carefully mended, and a black ribbon ring hung from one button. Widow or widower, I could not tell, and the city did not seem interested in telling me. They sold suburban tickets, corrected platform rumors, and kept a notebook under the counter that was plainly not an official railway document. Each time someone asked about a delayed train, they wrote a mark beside a chawl name or mill gate.

“Ballard Pier?” I asked.

“Taxi if you have luggage. Bus if you have time. Walking if someone has sent you away politely.”

“I need the docks office before closing.”

“Then taxi, but not from the front. From the side near the parcel gate.” They tore a scrap from an old timetable and drew a route around construction. “If they say ‘come tomorrow with family letter,’ they mean pay today or bring someone whose name frightens them.”

This was delivered in the tone one uses to recommend a less spicy chutney. Behind me, a woman balancing two tiffin carriers asked whether the 3:40 would stop at Byculla. The clerk said, “It will consider Byculla,” and wrote another mark in the hidden notebook after she left.

“What is that record?” I asked, because I enjoy risking perfectly useful assistance.

“Not record,” they said. “Memory. Records are for people who can wait.”

The answer deserved framing. They asked no fee for the scrap map, but I bought tea I did not want and left the change. Their urgency remained tucked behind etiquette, but I noticed how often people asked them questions that were really pleas: Will my husband know I waited? Will the milk spoil? Will the clinic close before my train arrives? Will the person with the key believe me? A timetable is a household instrument pretending to be public infrastructure.

The docks office, when I reached it, had its own permissions built into space. Men with passes entered through a shaded door. Men without passes stood in sun stripes between rope barriers. Those carrying invoices pressed forward; those carrying only hope kept to the wall. A painted board instructed applicants to present documents, photographs, and health declarations. Beneath it someone had pasted a small chitra-patti about seasickness tablets: one before boarding, not with alcohol, seek help for confusion or rash. Even escape came with six pictures.

The shipping clerk glanced at my papers, at my face, and then at the brass spring clip holding everything flat. The clip had bitten a crescent into my skin, visible where my sleeve had ridden up. He mistook the mark for some clinic stamp or injury worth politeness.

“You are with the medical sheet people?” he asked.

“For today, apparently.”

He grunted. “Then you know why the Swedish cargo doctor is shouting. His boxes need local sheets before customs lets crew medicine be issued to stevedores. Says sailors can read English. Maybe Swedish sailors. Our dock men read overtime.”

He did not ask for my library token, which was good, since I had no desire to test another world’s patience for stale portraits. He penciled my name—one of my safer names—onto a provisional list and told me to return tomorrow morning with the balance in cash. Passage was possible, not secure. A familiar condition. He also advised me, without lifting his eyes, not to carry loose tablets aboard unless I wanted “helpful trouble” from the port health man.

On the way back I stopped at a chemist near Crawford Market to buy paracetamol, partly as cover and partly because time travel gives one headaches of the ordinary and philosophical varieties. The chemist offered two options: a hospital-style bulk strip, cheaper if I had a doctor’s paper, or a blister with a Marathi-Hindi-English gate sheet for ₹3.75. I chose the latter. He read the sheet aloud so quickly that the words nearly fused, then stamped it DHULA with the air of a man blessing a bicycle tire. A regular customer beside me received the same service free and winked, as if I had been made to pay the tourist tax on clarity.

The packet was ordinary foil and plastic, yet it felt oddly civilised to have the tablet accompanied by a public promise not to make mystery profitable. I know better than to romanticize. There were still people counting coins, women negotiating food rules around medicine, clerks deciding which delay mattered, and company men trying to hide expensive ignorance under the word proprietary. But the costs were visible on counters and verandas. Fifty paise could be argued with. A tile could be pointed at. A bad leaflet could be mocked in a room full of witnesses. That is not justice complete; it is merely injustice kept within shouting distance.

My bag now contains the paracetamol gate sheet, the unnecessary antibiotic strip, and the uneaten little ring loaf that has survived more legal climates than most constitutions. The honeyed cloth tried again to adhere to my map, and I separated them in the dim corner of the lodge room before anyone could decide the stain meant I had pledged a route to a widow, a ship, or a god of municipal stationery. Outside, someone in the lane is still reading doses at a chawl entrance. The voice rises, pauses for correction, then repeats the last line louder, not for belief but for witnesses.