Free In the Bonesetter's Waiting Room by Aarathi Prasad

‘dream’ bodies. But it’s no longer just about the more complex surgeries allowing women (and men) to emerge with better breasts or smaller waistlines. The cultural change Dr Arolkar had described to me had also, in recent years, extended to an explosion in what he called ‘office-procedures’ – faster, easier, cheaper and less risky quick fixes that take minutes instead of hours.
    â€˜Once you look good, you only want to look better. Human nature! If something is available and affordable the beneficiary of a previous cosmetic procedure hankers for more. So people are opting more and more for these – like lasers for quick fixes, Botox and fillers.’
    The first dermal filler approved for cosmetic use was collagen derived from cows. That was in the USA in 1981, since which time dozens of laboratory-made injectable filling agents have been developed. Botox was first used in Canada in 1992 and the big boom in ‘office procedures’ started building in India around a decade later. Today, with China, India has the fastest-growing market in Asia for such off-the-shelf cosmetic work.
    I decided to meet a doctor who had filled, layered smoothed and sculpted Mumbai’s elite without ever lifting a scalpel. As my taxi pulled up outside her Bandra apartment on a pretty, tree-lined street, Dr Rashmi Shetty waved to my daughter and me, guiding us up from her second-floor balcony. Around forty, with clear skin, lustrous black hair and a conventional Indian beauty, she could easily be mistaken for an actress or model herself, an image which must also have been an excellent advertisement for her own practice.
    Though she had been an accomplished dancer, Rashmi’s real talent was in medicine. I had been corresponding with her by email, trying to find a time when she wouldn’t be studying for further professional qualifications, writing articles for medical journals or lecturing at national or international conferences and seminars. We’d managed to find a slot and met over breakfast. Disarmingly friendly and whip-smart, she made the interview feel more like a relaxed conversation with a good friend than a rushed session with a woman who had everyone who was anyone in Bollywood knocking at her clinic door.
    â€˜I always wanted to be a surgeon,’ Dr Shetty began as we, and our daughters tucked into aloo parathas and chai. ‘I got into general surgery and my initial postings were in plastic surgery – that’s where I started liking tissue reconstruction, realising how we can put a face back together in a beautiful way. I realised how important looks were to people. To a patient, that small mark on a face could be a reminder of abuse, or a burning, or a disease. For many people beauty is not just vanity. The way you look can change your whole life course.’
    As Rashmi recounted stories from her surgical training and of her voluntary work for Smile Train – a charity providing corrective surgery for children with cleft lips and palates – she also alluded to the rapidly growing appetite of Mumbaikars for cosmetic surgery. Fourteen years earlier, when she stopped working as a surgeon proper and first set up as an ‘aesthetic physician’, ‘I sat there for six hours a day and not a patient turned up. So gradually I went down to two hours a day on alternate days,’ she said. ‘A few years later patients started spilling over. I never advertise, I don’t even have a board outside my clinic. Now, I see up to sixteen patients a day. A consultation takes twenty minutes and the treatments, if they decide to have one, take twenty minutes to an hour.’
    Rashmi’s clientele includes some of Bollywood’s biggest names, male and female, and they have not been shy in praising what ‘Bollywood’s favourite aesthetic physician’ has been able to do for them. On the ratings-topping chat show Koffee with Karan , Rakhi Sawant, a