It is probably for the first time in decades that Dr Behramshah Mazda’s clinic on Dahanu’s Irani Road has been shuttered for three weeks straight. The last time he took a vacation was with his wife Roxana — who also spends half the day assisting him — and close friends, to Kashmir for less than a week. This was four years ago. He didn’t believe in the weekly off, taking in patients for a better part of Sunday, too. When he’d down the shutters, having seen an average of 100 patients a day, a trickle would spill over. The ailing, several of them adivasis from the padas around, would knock on the door of Moti Manzil, his ancestral bungalow, a five-minute walk away from his clinic. The rest of the time, he was consulting on phone.

He’d fly as far as the adjoining coastal town of Gholvad