Excerpted with permission from Homecoming by Omair Ahmad, published by Speaking Tiger.Call him Ahmed sahib, even if that was not his real name. This one is a simple substitute, just enough to draw a thin cloth over his identity. I don’t think it would have offended him. There is no shortage of people with the name, but somehow it has not become merely common. Simple though it is, the name has its own rich legacy, and it is said that the Prophet also wore it. Even across the vast gulf of Sunni and Shia and the cleavages of innumerable sects, one can be an Ahmed and not be commented upon.He came to me in pain, but I am a dentist and there is nothing new in that. Pain, or the fear of it, is what has drawn most people to my door. I could gather little from him at the time. His pain rendered him incoherent, and the people who brought him were an odd assortment, shopkeepers and paan-walas, some of whom I recognized from my daily walk to the clinic. I could not have told you, then, where exactly they sat, or which shop they owned, just that I had seen their faces sometime in the last five years that I had been working there.It was not the first time that bystanders had brought somebody to the clinic, nor would it be the last, but this collection of people was an unusual one, something I noticed but did not recognize at that time. It would come to me later that while I had seen all of these people before, I had not seen them in each other’s company. Only their concern for the elderly man bound them together.Omair AhmadHomecomingSpeaking Tiger Books, 2026So, I registered their presence, but did not understand. My focus was on the man in pain before me. There is a poem my father had been fond of, by Harivansh Rai Bachchan, about Buddhism and how it speaks of dealing with the pain of existence. Something about how when you are wounded, you do not ask where the arrow came from, who shot it, or why, but are only focussed on the pain of the arrow and removing it. During my medical studies those half-remembered verses would come back to me, stronger than the Hippocratic oath, as the whole point of a doctor’s duty. Ask not where the wound comes from, who is responsible, what is the cause, but heal. Heal the wound.But as any decent doctor will tell you, you treat the patient, not the disease. It is a bit like playing detective or a hunter, tracking the cause of ruination by the spoor it leaves behind. In this case it was a tiny pebble, as small as suspicion in a lover’s heart, and as dangerous. It was hidden in a paan, Ahmed sahib murmured, though the remains were there in his mouth, both of the paan and the pebble, and I did not need his words to tell me. As I worked to clean out the detritus of a broken tooth that had exposed a cavity and an infected nerve, making way only to signal Monisha and Kavi to shine a light or offer a sip of water to Ahmed sahib, I felt a small bit of admiration for the man. Maybe it was his mumbled explanation, almost an apology for the paan, unnecessary in terms of information but important in terms of courtesy, that touched me. He was in a great deal of pain, and sought to explain despite that.I have seen brave men quail at the tools I wield. Some have fainted, some wept, though I can tell you that they had little reason for it. I’m a careful man, and work with a gentle touch. People come to me broken and in pain, I do my best to heal them, to comfort them, yet they tremble at the thought of my touch. This man did none of that, and seemed only to want to apologize for his shame. I shushed him, soothing him, even though that was a bit ridiculous too. He was far older than me, old enough that even my father, had he been alive, would have addressed him as an elder brother. But doctors are allowed this transgression, to speak to those far older to them as children.As he revealed his teeth, I saw more than the cavity that he had ignored, although it must have been causing him discomfort for some time. Teeth are our strongest tools. Our nails are nothing, even our bones are fragile in comparison. Our teeth are our history of violence that we have carried from the savannah of tens of thousands of years ago. We dentists tell people to come every six months to have their teeth checked, but very few do. It is an avoidable expense for the rich, and for the poor it is just another tax on their paltry means. Teeth may be our greatest weapons, that we keep hidden politely behind our lips, but we no longer use them as such, and they rust and decay as weapons are wont to.I found two more cavities and a great deal of plaque in Ahmed sahib’s mouth, and it took me nearly an hour to attend to it all. During that time, he registered barely a protest, just a murmur now and then when I tapped a tooth to ask him if it was sensitive, or when I x-rayed his teeth and the metal in his mouth caused him discomfort.When I stood back after the work and finally really looked at him, I understood something of the character of the man. Ahmed sahib may have been deeply hurt, but he was not broken, nor was he defeated. That much was obvious. It is only the young who are broken by sudden tragedy, who have not yet been taught humility by life, or the futility of too much hope. The man before me had weathered losses before, and while the pain had been intense, he had mastered it.And then he told me he could not pay.