As a female member of my family lay in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) of a hospital, I was waiting for my turn to see her. The reception hall was pretty crowded. It was visiting hour when one could go to see the patient in the ICU.

The number of visitors having exceeded the number of chairs, many were pacing back and forth. I was one of them. Some sat on the stairs or other available places. Luckily, I saw a chair being vacated. As if it was a game of musical chairs, I quickly dumped myself in it.

Heaving a sigh of relief, I settled down only to realise that I was sandwiched between two women. It looked embarrassing. I reminded myself of my greying hair and decided to stay put, making sure that I did not use the common handrest of the chairs to avoid any trouble.

On my right sat a teenager, dressed in tight garments. Her boyfriend was in the ICU with suspected dengue. The lady on my left was a 21-year-old housewife, donning a bright red sari with sparkling silvery motifs on it. Her sense of dress indicated that she belonged to what is known here as the lower middle rung of our caste-conscious society.

The wait for the call from the ICU appeared too long. In the anxiety to see the patient at the earliest, for me, like others, killing time was becoming a problem. So I spent time observing the movement of people — and of the wall clock.

Bored as I was, I started fiddling with a file of my relative’s earlier medical records. I noticed that the gaudily dressed housewife on my left was making extra effort to peep into the papers. But I did not bother thinking that all that medical material would be Greek and Latin to her.

But she gave me a shock when she correctly pronounced the medical names and terminology of the ailments afflicting my relative and asked me, “Uncle, how long has she been suffering from these illnesses?” I gave the answer but the woman gave me another jolt.

“So, you also have been to Dr XYZ. I had taken my mother to him but we had a bad experience,” she told me with a frown. “I can see that instead of taking care of your patient’s high blood pressure, that doctor has prescribed high doses of medicines for diabetes which seemed to be under control at that time.”

I looked at her in amazement and nodded in approval of her observations. She had demolished my wrong notions about her. I could not restrain myself and bluntly asked her, “How come you know about all this? Are you in any way connected with the medical profession?”

“No, I am simply a housewife — a graduate. But somehow I had an aptitude to know about health problems and their treatment. My mother’s prolonged illness has taught me so many things. I had no doctor or paramedic in my family or on my inlaws’ side,” she told me with pride and glint in her eyes.

The lady had not completed the sentence when she suddenly got up, pulled up her sari on the shoulder to turn it into a ‘ghoonghat’ (veil).

Her husband’s father and mother had made an unscheduled visit to the hospital to see their son lodged in the ICU. She touched their feet as a mark of respect for them.

When they asked about the present state of his condition, the veiled woman deciphered the medical terminology in simple Hindi for the benefit of the seemingly illiterate old couple. She surprised me again. The family had come from a town in Uttar Pradesh, about 150 km away from Delhi, for the family breadwinner’s treatment.

What I was witnessing was a mix of tradition and modernity. The woman came from a semi-urban social background which had remained steeped in age-old practices including purdah (covering of the face). But with growing exposure to the outside world through means of communication, the new generation is shedding customs and practices that are becoming obsolete and unworkable.

Moving with the times, this generation is changing and going for the “new” and the “latest”. Despite her social background, the woman (who might be exceptional) managed to acquire knowledge, which I was not expecting from her. But tradition and customs overtook her when she found herself face to face with her inlaws.

Lalit Raizada is a journalist based in India.