Baba Amarnath Davakhana

Our place, Baba Amarnath Davakhana, is right in Village Namunda in Samalkha. It’s a busy little spot in Panipat. People in the village know us well. We open up early in the morning because farmers usually want to get their check-ups done before they go out to the fields. The air is often dusty from the roads, so we spend a lot of time dusting off the medicine bottles and the benches. It is not like those big city clinics where everything is made of glass. Here, it is mostly concrete and fans spinning on the ceiling to keep the heat away. There is a tea stall just down the road, and sometimes the smell of ginger tea drifts in. You can hear the tractors rumbling past all day long. We have been here in Samalkha for a while now. Most people just walk over from their houses. We know which family lives in which lane. Sometimes children come in running and we have to tell them to slow down. We keep a stock of the usual medicines people need for fever or stomach aches. The 132101 area gets quite cold in the winters and very hot in the summers, so the types of problems people bring to us change with the seasons. We just sit here and do what needs to be done. There is no receptionist with a computer, just us and our registers where we write everything down by hand. It feels right that way. We don't try to be anything we aren't.