The Best Travelers' Tales 2004 - True Stories from Around the World

Sample Chapter: Mohammed Ali, Ear Cleaner

by Brad Newsham

He tunes more than your sense of sound.

I planned to spend my last Indian afternoon in the sun on the lawn of New Delhi’s Connaught Circle. I would write in my notebook and finish the last few pages of Midnight’s Children. But the instant I moved my foot from the sidewalk to the lawn I felt scores of eyes lock onto me. When I chose a spot and sat, I saw in my peripheral view a dozen bodies rise from the shade of the park’s trees and begin moving toward me. Beggars, shoeshine boys, massage men, fortune tellers. Surrounded, I let a boy named Jungi scrub my shoes. A man named Dasgupta massaged my neck and shoulders. Another, who said his name was Ali Baba, read my palm: “You have been sick with stomach, but now you are well. You are missing a woman. You will soon be rich.” The combined talents of these men cost me two dollars.

They drifted off until only a single man remained. Earlier I had noticed him at the back of the mob, smiling patiently but saying nothing. Now he sat on the grass, two arm lengths away, grinning shyly—as though he had some unbearably good secret.

“Hello, Baba.” He had long eyelashes, teeth as bright and straight as piano ivories, and, etched along his upper lip, the world’s narrowest mustache. His smile was so sweet it might have graced India’s tourist posters. His name, too, was a classic: Mohammed Ali. He was not young—he had three sons—but if playfulness was something barterable, I’d have traded my money belt for a dose of his.

The Q-tip-like swabs tucked under the lip of his turban revealed his trade—ear cleaner. It’s a common sight in India: an Indian man wielding cotton swabs and long forceps, bent like a lab technician over the cocked head of a kneeling European. Indian people rarely submit to this quackery; it’s a tourist phenomenon. I’d known travelers who had allowed it and swore they could hear better for days afterwards, but I had always regarded them as suspect. Imagine, in India of all places, letting a stranger—some man in a park, on a beach, in a train station—stick something in your ear!

When Mohammed Ali said, “Ears cleaning, Baba?” I only snorted.

“Oh, but it is nice, Baba,” he said. “See my book?”

I looked to see what sort of idiots had risked their eardrums:

We New Yorkers have seen all the scams. I laughed when Mohammed said he would make me hear better, but he wore me down. He is such a nice man. Now my ears are vibrating with noises I haven’t heard since I was a child, and I’m recommending that you go ahead and do what I wouldn’t have dreamed of doing half an hour ago.
— Linda, Brooklyn

A year ago I went to an ear-nose-and-throat guy at home. He charged me $95 to do what Mohammed Ali just did for twenty rupees. And was nowhere near as personable.
— J.T. Robbins, Dallas, Texas

I’m a sixties child, and I thought I’d done it all. But ears—Momma never told me ears could feel so good. Or be so dirty. Sure, I use Q-tips, but Mohammed pulled stuff out of me I couldn’t believe. A little tiny stone—now where did that come from?
— Paula Spitz, Santa Cruz, CA

“Pretty happy customers,” I said.

“Yes, Baba. Everyone happy. Have you ever...”

“No,” I said. “I clean my own ears.” I pointed at the swabs sticking out from under his turban. “I have those, too.”

“But dirt is hard,” he said. He opened his pouch and pulled out a small vial. From the moment he sat down his smile had not left him. “I put some drops in your ear, wait some minutes, then I can clean. Sometimes people have things in ears for many years, and they don’t know.”

But he might as well have been offering to tattoo Krishna’s portrait onto my forehead. “I can hear just fine,” I said.

He folded his hands and sat there, smiling, as though content to wait for sunset and then dawn and then sunset again if necessary.

“What’s the best thing that ever happened to you?” I asked him.

He considered for a moment. “People.” He nodded at his book. “So many people. From all over the world. People from every country come to Connaught.”

“What’s the worst thing?”

He mulled it over. With that smile of his, if he were to answer that nothing bad had ever happened to him, I was prepared to believe him.

Finally his smile faded a notch. Uncertainly: “I cannot read or write.”

Since childhood my entire life has been a blur of words: daily newspapers, overdue books, half-finished stories. Subtract the written word from my life and what remains? What use would it be? Yet here was Mohammed Ali, illiterate father of three, radiating a serenity I have rarely known.

“Can you read numbers?” I asked.

“Some numbers.”

“Does your wife read and write?”

“No.”

“Do your children?”

“They are too young,” he said. “Baba, you read and write, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe you can help me.” Mohammed Ali pulled an aerogram from his bag and handed it to me. “Baba, maybe you can read to me?”

It was from a Japanese woman and was written in English. Kiyoko had vacationed in New Delhi a month earlier, and Mohammed Ali had cleaned her ears. Now she was back in Tokyo, wishing that her trip had been longer and wishing health and happiness to Mohammed Ali, his wife and children, and to all of Mohammed Ali’s Connaught Circle colleagues.

He sighed when I was finished reading, and put his hand to his chest. “Oh, I miss her so much. She was so kind person. Every day she sits here in the park with all of us. We would talk, oh, of so many things.”

I asked for his book and turned back several pages:

Meeting Mr. Mohammed Ali is the best part of my journey. I thought he would open my ears, but also he opens my heart. This is a very special man.
— KIYOKO OHKUBO, Tokyo

I imagined Kiyoko, sitting in an office building in downtown Tokyo, staring out the window and daydreaming of her all-too-short holiday. What traveler does not know the post-trip letdown, the clutching rhythms of job and home claiming their due? Often I have sat at home, recalling the kindness and simplicity of people in foreign places, and ached to be back with them again, sitting in their park or rickshaw or silk shop, and soaking in their presence.

Mohammed Ali took a fresh, blank aerogram from his pouch. “Baba, maybe you will write for me? To her.”

I took the aerogram, wrote Dear Kiyoko, and poised my pen. “What do you want me to tell her?”

He was smiling. “You write.”

“But I don’t know her,” I said. “You spent many days with her.”

“You write many letters, yes?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I never write, Baba. You write.”

Dear Kiyoko,

It is a beautiful afternoon here. The only way it could be better would be if you were here. Since you left, the sun seems not so bright in New Delhi. There are no clouds in the sky today, only some airplanes, and everyone here in the park wishes that one of them was bringing you back to us. Since you have gone back to Japan, we talk about you every day and wonder when you will return. We miss you very badly. There are cows wandering nearby. Most days they make a sound like ‘Mooo,’ but today it is different. Today they are saying, ‘We miss Kiyoko. We miss Kiyoko.’ Yes, even the cows miss you.

I was so excited today when I received your letter. The postman told me it was from Japan, and a man from America read it to me. You write so beautifully—your words are like Indian rubies. Thank you for your kind thoughts for my family. Yes, everyone is doing well, everyone except me and all your friends here in the park—we miss you so much. Me most of all. I hope that your parents and your brothers and sisters are all healthy and that you are not working your lovely head too very hard. If you cannot come soon, I hope you will write again.
Your friend, Mohammed Ali

“Oh, Baba!” Mohammed Ali pressed his palms together and bowed his head. “Oh, Baba! Thank you. That is beautiful.”

“It’s nothing,” I said. But actually it was one of the most satisfying things I’ve ever done. Mohammed Ali’s first letter. Japan!—he would be known now in Japan. There were whole days when this trip of mine seemed devoid of purpose: I’m here, but why? Moments like this reminded me: The being needs travel—new sights, new people, new experience—the way the body needs food, touch, an occasional soak in a backwoods hot spring. I was a collector. The Mohammed Alis of the world would come home with me in my heart, the same way others had come home with me from China and Afghanistan and Russia. Time would airbrush away the shitty streets, foul water, and the fact that all these cultures were drowning in babies. Someday soon I would, I knew, be sitting in my taxi or in some office like Kiyoko’s, fretting about the present and idealizing my past. I should go back, the thought would surely come. I should go SOMEWHERE.

“Baba,” said Mohammed Ali. “Now you must let me do something for you.”

I sat up straight and tipped my head to the right. Mohammed Ali uncorked a small vial and eye-dropped a fizzing seltzer into my left ear. We sat and let it soak in. The press conference reconvened around us.

“Please be careful,” I said, when Mohammed Ali took out his forceps.

“Very careful, Baba.”

For a moment I felt nothing, just a tickling in the ear canal. Then, with forceps and the softest of tugs, Mohammed Ali lifted out of my ear something incredible—a brown scrap curled in the shape of my eardrum—and held it in front of my eyes. I opened my hand and he set it in my palm. It was as thin and crisp as a flake of onion skin; longer than my thumbnail, wider than the toothpick on my Swiss Army Knife. Had he extracted and presented to me my liver I would have been only slightly more dumbfounded.

“Yes,” he said. “Many are surprised.”

The crowd of men were laughing.

“Do you clean their ears?” I asked Mohammed Ali.

“No, but they always like to watch.”

He fizzed and cleaned the other ear—no trophies there—and then toweled my neck dry. The press conference disbanded, people scattering away.

Mohammed Ali and I sat quietly for a few moments in an intense, symphonic silence. It seemed as though someone had clamped conch shells over my ears. I could hear everything: the cows munching the lawn; men from one side of New Delhi to the other pissing on walls; boys at the train station screaming “Chai! Chai! Chai!”; the shriek of airplane tires nicking down on the runway out at the airport; even trickles of snowmelt on the glaciers up in Kashmir. Never before, and not since, have my ears felt so good, so new.


Brad Newsham is a San Francisco cab driver and author of two round-the-world travel memoirs—All the Right Places and Take Me With You. On September 11, 2002, he founded Backpack Nation, an organization whose aim is to dispatch globe-roaming ambassadors to act as agents of peace in the world. For more information or to contact Brad, go to www.backpacknation.org or www.bradnewsham.com.

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