Deathly hollows

Dentist8217;s drill that yanks the wisdom out of you

Wisdom lies in not extracting one8217;s wisdom teeth. The reader will not be subjected to the harrowing tale of torture that these clueless gums, teeth and jaw had to undergo. But yes, the day Harry Potter had fans shrieking with excitement and awaiting their copies of the Deathly Hallows, I was shrieking with pain and shrinking further into the deathly hollows of my dental chair!

It is baffling why Koreans refer to them as 8216;love teeth8217; 8212; perhaps to mark the pain of first love. The Japanese relate the eruption to the age at which a child no longer lives with his or her parents 8212; the term literally translates to 8216;unknown to parents8217;. The Turks, who call it the 8216;20th-year tooth8217;, put it more logically, as the term refers to the age at which the tooth appears. In India it is known as 8216;akal daant8217; 8212; the tooth that supposedly makes one wise!

Normally people have four wisdom teeth. But truly blessed are those whose third molars are congenitally missing. Apart from being the last teeth to erupt, what is their role but to cause the utmost discomfort?

Maybe I was lucky I had only three. Sadly, the dentist recommended the extraction of this unfavourably positioned wisdom tooth, as it was knocking the hell out of the next tooth.

It takes much time to kill a tooth. To borrow from Gieve Patel8217;s poem 8216;On Killing a Tree8217;, 8220;Not a simple jab of the knife will do it.8221; It was high-speed drills, burrs and the availability of sedation that yanked it out of its bed. The bone had to be cut and the tooth had to be broken. Stars danced in front of my eyes and vague thoughts of the dentist with a hammer and chisel floated in my head.

Praise be to God, the tooth finally gave way. Never mind that my jaws had been stretched to their maximum and would not shut after the surgery or the unimaginable swelling of a left cheek that made me want to enact the role of Lord Hanuman. It was a relief to get that damn tooth knocked off even as it confined me to bed, salt-water gargling, semi-solid food not to mention a four- year-old kid who failed to understand why mama8217;s left cheek was bigger than the right!