‘Lin! Lin!’ my neighbour Jeetendra called out in a frightened shriek, and we turned to see him clambering over the rocks toward us. ‘Lin! My wife! My Radha! She is very sick!’
‘What is it? What’s the matter?’
‘She has bad loose motions. She is very hot with fever. And she is vomiting,’ Jeetendra puffed. ‘She’s looking bad. She’s looking very bad.’
‘Let’s go,’ I grunted, jumping up and leaping from stone to stone until I reached the broken path leading back to the slum.
We found Radha lying on a thin blanket in her hut. Her body was twisted into a knot of pain. Her hair was wet, saturated with sweat, as was the pink sari she wore. The smell in the hut was terrible. Chandrika, Jeetendra’s mother, was trying to keep her clean, but Radha’s fever rendered her incoherent and incontinent. She vomited again violently as we watched, and that provoked a new dribble of diarrhoea.
‘When did it start?’
‘Two days ago,’ Jeetendra answered, desperation drawing down the corners of his mouth in a grimace.
‘Two
‘You were out some place, with tourists, very late. Then you were at Qasim Ali, his house, until late last night. Then you were also gone today from very early. You were not here. At the first I thought it was just a loose motions. But she is very sick, Linbaba. I tried three times to get her in the hospital, but they will not take her.’
‘She has to go back to hospital,’ I said flatly. ‘She’s in trouble, Jeetu.’
‘What to do? What to do, Linbaba?’ he whined, tears filling his eyes and spilling on his cheeks. ‘They will not take her. There are too many people at the hospital. Too many people. I waited for six hours today altogether-six hours! In the open, with all other sick peoples. In the end, she was begging me to come back to here, to her house. So ashamed, she was. So, I came back, just now. That’s why I went searching for you, and called you only. I’m very worried, Linbaba.’
I told him to throw out the water in his matka, wash it out thoroughly, and get fresh water. I instructed Chandrika to boil fresh water until it bubbled for ten minutes and then to use that water, when it cooled, as drinking water for Radha. Jeetendra and Johnny came with me to my hut, where I collected glucose tablets and a paracetamol-codeine mixture. I hoped to reduce her pain and fever with them. Jeetendra was just leaving with the medicine when Prabaker rushed in. There was anguish in his eyes and in the hands that grasped me.
‘Lin! Lin! Parvati is sick! Very sick! Please come too fast!’
The girl was writhing in the spasm of an agony that centred on her stomach. She clutched at her belly and curled up in a ball, only to fling her arms and legs outward in a back-arching convulsion. Her temperature was very high. She was slippery with sweat. The smells of diarrhoea and vomit were so strong in the deserted chai shop that the girl’s parents and sister held cloths to their mouths and noses. Parvati’s parents, Kumar and Nandita Patak, were trying to cope with the illness, but their expressions were equally helpless and defeated. It was a measure of their despondency and their fear that dread had banished modesty, and they allowed the girl to be examined in a flimsy undergarment that revealed her shoulders and most of one breast.
Terror filled the eyes of Parvati’s sister, Sita. She hunched in a corner of the hut, her pretty face pinched and cramped by the horror she felt. It wasn’t an ordinary sickness, and she knew it.
Johnny Cigar spoke to the girl in Hindi. His tone was harsh, almost brutal. He warned her that her sister’s life was in her hands, and he admonished her for her cowardice. Moment by moment, his voice guided her out of the forest of her black fear. At last she looked up and into his eyes, as if seeing him for the first time. She shook herself, and then crawled across the floor to wipe her sister’s mouth with a piece of wet towelling. With that call to arms from Johnny Cigar, and the simple, solicitous gesture from Sita, the battle began.
Cholera. By nightfall there were ten serious cases, and a dozen more possible. By dawn the next day there were sixty advanced cases, and as many as a hundred with some symptoms. By noon, on that day, the first of the victims died. It was Radha, my next-door neighbour.
The official from the Bombay Municipal Corporation’s Department of Health was a tired, astute, condolent man in his early forties named Sandeep Jyoti. His compassionate eyes were almost the same shade of dark tan as his glistening, sweat-oily skin. His hair was unkempt, and he pushed it back frequently with the long fingers of his right hand. Around his neck there was a mask, which he lifted to his mouth whenever he entered a hut or encountered one of the victims of the illness. He stood together with Doctor Hamid, Qasim Ali Hussein, Prabaker, and me near my hut after making his first examination of the slum.
