In the Throes of AIDS

J.J. Hospital, a government hospital in Mumbai, has the largest A.R.T (antiretroviral therapy) center in Mumbai, with about 7000 patients currently enrolled. So many people were crammed into the waiting room of the center: Hindus, Muslims, young wives, old men, children, and all of them were HIV positive. I had never felt the force of the epidemic as I did that day. Standing in that crowded waiting room, being jostled by a crush of people trying to get life-saving medicines, I understood the scope of HIV. It wasn’t striking indiscriminately, and no one was to blame, but at the same time, I couldn’t help but be angry at the husbands who infected their wives and children. I know that this anger is not justified and this is not a question of fairness—no one deserves to get HIV, regardless of how risky their behaviors are—but I just felt like these women and children didn’t even have a chance to protect themselves.

My co-worker took me to the HIV wards, and one case I saw there made me cry. A woman, Supriya, lay on a bed in the last stages of AIDS. She had perhaps days left in her life, couldn’t talk, move, or respond, and was probably going to become comatose within hours. The flesh had just melted off her bones, and all that was left on the bed was a mass of jutting bones and taut, jaundiced skin. She had been in the hospital for 10 days, and the doctors hadn’t even bothered to give her any medications because according to them, there was no hope for her, as her CD4 count was disastrously low and her viral load was too high. So they left her on a bed in a dead end hallway to die, and she lay dying minute by agonizing minute, belaboring every breath she took.

Her mother and aunt were with her, and her mother told me Supriya’s story. Supriya’s husband was a truck driver employed by the Bombay Municipal Government and nine months ago, he had fallen ill. He died three weeks ago from full-blown AIDS, which he had probably contracted from a sex worker.

Supriya loyally took care of him, even though her own health was not as good as it had been, and Supriya’s mother pleaded with her to come to Bombay to get tests done to determine why she wasn’t feeling well. However Supriya said she didn’t want to leave her sick husband because she was afraid of what the in-laws would say if she left him; she did not want them to think that she left her husband when he needed her in order to get treatment for herself. She didn’t know about his sexual history, nor did she know he had AIDS—although he and his family knew and never told her. So she remained in a village hours away from her family, caring for her dying husband while she was slowly falling prey to the same killer that had ravaged her husband’s body. It was finally when he died that she learned the truth, but by the time she came to Bombay to get tested and treated, the only thing the doctors told her mother to do was pray.

Her mother sat watch over her daughter’s body, fanning away flies and straightening the blanket over the wasted flesh. She told me she only had two children, and now one lay dying before her. Supriya was barely 40 years old, and she had three children, the youngest of whom was eight years old. Her mother wanted to take care of these soon to be orphans, but barely made Rs. 2000 per month working as a maid and was struggling to pay for necessities for herself and her son as it was. She could not contemplate how to pay for the education and needs of three young children in addition to her already significant expenditures.

As she contemplated the future, this brave woman broke down into tears, and I put my arms around her and was so overwhelmed with emotion that I started to cry, too. It was not very professional of me, but there was nothing I could for this woman or her daughter in a professional capacity; the only thing left for me to do was mourn with her in a human capacity.

Brothers

We celebrate Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, but there is no day set aside for our siblings, perhaps hinting at the complexity and depth of sibling relationships. Relationships with parents seem relatively straightforward when compared with the ones we share with our siblings. Siblings hone in on our flaws, while parents may be unwilling or unable to recognize the truth that our siblings, closer to us in age and less forgiving of our inadequacies, so readily see. Siblings are also a source of comfort and friendship—that is what my younger brother is to me. He is my best friend, and in honor of his 23rd birthday, I would like to dedicate this column to him and to all the other younger brothers who have alternately beat the crap out of and unconditionally loved their older sisters.
Among my brother’s first childhood memories is my experiment with Newton’s law that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. I was a five-year-old brat, and he was a stubborn four-year-old. We were locked in a mortal tug of war over a hideous, bubble gum pink winter jacket that neither of us really wanted. We struggled over it until a rather nasty thought popped into my head: “What would happen if I just let go?” So I did, and my brother didn’t even have time to savor the sweetness of unexpected victory before he flew head first into the sharp, jutting corner of our sofas. He stood up, a pool of blood streaming down his face. “I’ve killed him!” was my first remorseful thought. The second was an instinct for self-preservation: I had seen enough of the show “Cops” to know what they did to the bad guys. As my uncle frantically dialed 911, I knew it was all over, and so I did the only thing I could do: I hid under my aunt’s bed for hours, until my brother came home with his forehead held together by 4 tiny stitches. He still has the scar to this day.
Our relationship evolved as we grew older, and he grew taller and stronger. More often that not, I was on the receiving end of the violence, although the most he would do was try to smother me with his smelly socks. We fought like rabid dogs over toys, the radio (I was a Backstreet Boys fan and he wanted to listen to Metallica, and we only had one radio), even clothes (I’ll admit that this was all my fault; I stole his clothes during my thankfully brief tomboy phase). My mother despaired that we would kill each other. Then one day, it all just stopped. One day in high school I remember sitting with him at the kitchen table at 1am frantically trying to study for my Latin final the next day. All of a sudden, he said something, and it was either really funny or I was really tired, but I laughed so hard that I fell off my chair, landed on the kitchen floor, and kept laughing. At 2 in the morning, we were still swapping dumb stories and jokes. That night marked the beginning of a friendship that has sustained me through some of the most difficult and wonderful times of my life.
My brother has been there for me at every turning point in my life, alternately providing comfort and solace and deflating my ego and ensuring that I remain humble. When I got my first proposal as a geeky teenager with braces and my brother found out, he laughed so hard that he could barely gasp out the words: “That auntie must have been blind!” which promptly deflated any pride I could have taken in finally getting a proposal after years of being the ugly duckling in my family. When I was having gastrointestinal problems just thinking about going to college and living so far away from home, he helped me move a van full of boxes into my new dorm room and came to visit me at least once a year at college, often driving five hours just to see me for two days. When I obsessed over academics, he reminded me that there was more to life than just studying and told me to be spontaneous…so we planned a trip to Ireland together. When our grandfather died, the only person who could really understand what I was feeling was him.
With his sardonic wisdom, he analyzes exactly what I’m feeling when I myself can’t figure it out. He patiently puts up with me when I’m being a bossy, overprotective older sister. He reflects the person I wish to be and encourages me to develop into that person. He has taught me how to enjoy the present moment. For all that, little brother, I want to thank you.