JAIPUR, India - A street dentist, a 25-year veteran of his trade, crouched on a hot and dusty sidewalk, hard by M.I. Road, a main thoroughfare in this fabled pink city in northwestern India.

He plucked the fruits of his labor, a long yellowed incisor, out of a metal bowl and held it aloft.

"It wasn't working right," the dentist, Mahender Singh, said. "It kept turning left and right when he ate."

Mr. Singh gestured toward his patient, a 48-year-old from Lucknow who was spitting streams of blood into the gutter.

Mr. Singh, a Sikh whose family immigrated to India from Lahore, Pakistan, many decades ago, is brisk and understated when discussing his trade. He is the poor man's dentist, he says, and he likes it that way.