The Medicine Man

Venu was one of the three compounders of the hospital in the industrial colony where I spent most of my life. This unassuming guy had a very special skill when it came to medical knowledge. He knew exactly which medicine treated which ailment best; what could be the possible side effects; and his encyclopedic knowledge far exceeded those of any of the doctors who served at the hospital.
I would say his way with medicine and illness came from a gut instinct and not from any medical course of study since he was not even a matriculate.
It was rumored that he once practised as a "doctor" (cum midwife) in some remote village in the hinterlands and it was there he brushed up his medical skills to finesse.
Venu was also my close friend. By some strange coincidence he always happened to be on night duty at the hospital, the nights before I had my crucial graduate exams. Those days I used to stay up late at nights and to break the montony made a casual visit to the dispensary. Venu played the genial host by pilfering some of the resident doctor's imported filter tipped cigarettes from the locked drawer in the consultation room (which was a welcome change from my cheap filterless cigarettes that I offered him).
Once in a while, he brought out some antacid pep fizz from the dispensary store and we both had our equivalent of pepsi at hospital cost of course!
While we both puffed guiltily at the cigarette sticks, Venu, more at ease, would recount the latest rumor in the colony. Working in a colony hospital exposes you to all sorts of people and you get to hear the strangest tales from the myriad of people who come in daily. Many of those who reported ill were hypochondriacs. It seems their unhappiness with life gave them all kinds of imaginary ills ranging from stomachaches and backaches to chronic headaches, and Venu realised that rather than seeing a shrink they would feign physical ills. He would try to lighten their load asking some inquisitive question that he could later share with some other visitor for a few laughs. Most of these guys poured out the woes to the patient Venu; and the grouses they had against their superiors, their wives or the guy next door.
So Venu was a walking encyclopaedia of not only medicine, but the who's who and what and when of the colony!
The doctor who served at the hospital was one of the greedy types and he had a special arrangement with the private medical store that was just a short walk away from the hospital. The doc had a habit of prescribing costly antibiotics or anti-virals for the most common of ills, which would not be available at the dispensary and for which the poor patient would have to shell out a good amount of money at the medical store. Of course, it was Venu who spread the rumor(from reliable sources) that the good Doctor took heavy commissions from the medical store keeper in return for the favor. Venu even told patients to first see the doctor, then see him. He would then reduce the long list of medicines on the doctor's prescription to a shorter list and add some of his own. He sure had guts! But he was never wrong.
His treatment was highly effective and some of the patients came to the hospital only when Venu was around. Pregnant women made a beeline to him and he would dispense the best he knew of the do's and dont's of pregnancy.
For me, he was almost like the medicine men of lore for his treatment of illness had a magic touch to it. If it was just gut instinct, well then the voodoo men had that too!