The Chaos Within - A Week Ago
Missed my blog entry last week… Thursday, December 1st, World AIDS Day.
In a word: Fantastic!
If you weren’t there you should have been. We were drenched in colour. The rhythm of humanity overcame us. We had no choice. It was torrential, heavy, soaking, but it made us dance with a lightness that I haven’t felt in so long. All that we ascribe to divinity was there moving about us and through us, pulsating and real. There was nothing transcendent or beyond us. The otherness we felt were the hands that touched, the smiles that touched deeper, and the shouts and screams of a community that reverberated in that innermost place!
Dostoevsky, Kahlil Gibran, and undoubtedly others wise and sage-like have spoken of thoughts betrayed by words. (Another great unavoidable paradox!) Yes! I can’t begin to fucking tell you what we felt this very night a week ago. After the planning the agonising the decisions the hope… fuck! I just wish you were there. Errol, he danced! He had Tadiwala road dancing! Fuck the kidney op, I ran onto stage and danced with him and the Sahara team. My team looked on with concern as they saw me take the stage, but soon they knew and the smiles returned. Fuck, if my doctor saw me he would have danced! Like I said we were overcome. We were taken by that which we will never understand and in trying to explain only dilute and even bastardise.
Jyoti and Manisha and Anita took the stage and declared before a crowd of over 2000 people that they were HIV+. Their courage, their determination to do this drenched us again, with silence with awe with wonder. Life overflowed. Donne’s sonnet on death began a playback… but fuck, death, the living death that HIV/AIDS is likened to in this part of the world was overcome not by a promise of heaven, moulting wings and harps of discord, it was overcome by the will to live by these three dancing stars that refused to stop dancing. My head was bowed in reverence.
Our international volunteers moving with lighted candles to Cindy Lauper’s ‘True Colours’ followed this, and while cheesiness could have daubed itself gooey and smelly all over us, it worked. It did. The community didn’t understand all the lyrics, but the music they heard came together in their minds with the words they had just heard by three women, their own, who had stood up and asked to be loved, to not be rejected.
At the end of the night after I hugged Avinash and kissed all the women on the team much to their red faced embarrassment, we sat in the white light of the street lamps as the lights and sound equipment and chairs were packed away. The open-air stage returned to its innocuous beforeness. The community returned to chapattis and vicarious living through cable TV. But we knew that we had a new beginning. DISHA had taken another step forward against the pandemic, against ignorance and its spawn - stigma.
On the Sunday that followed Randhir died at Naidu hospital. We lost our fifth client. This is how real life is. This is how real HIV/AIDS is in our community. We will not go quietly. The dancing stars will burn brilliantly in the night as they fall from the sky.
Words… next week we will have a slide show for you on our website of the march we had in the morning of World AIDS day and of the Celebration of life. You will see the colour. You will hear the music. And if you want to feel the rhythm inside you, come visit us, and touch and smell what Deep Griha is trying to do. Join us. Walk with us. Fight with us. Dance with us.
deepgriha@gmail.com
Tel: +91 20 26125773
In a word: Fantastic!
If you weren’t there you should have been. We were drenched in colour. The rhythm of humanity overcame us. We had no choice. It was torrential, heavy, soaking, but it made us dance with a lightness that I haven’t felt in so long. All that we ascribe to divinity was there moving about us and through us, pulsating and real. There was nothing transcendent or beyond us. The otherness we felt were the hands that touched, the smiles that touched deeper, and the shouts and screams of a community that reverberated in that innermost place!
Dostoevsky, Kahlil Gibran, and undoubtedly others wise and sage-like have spoken of thoughts betrayed by words. (Another great unavoidable paradox!) Yes! I can’t begin to fucking tell you what we felt this very night a week ago. After the planning the agonising the decisions the hope… fuck! I just wish you were there. Errol, he danced! He had Tadiwala road dancing! Fuck the kidney op, I ran onto stage and danced with him and the Sahara team. My team looked on with concern as they saw me take the stage, but soon they knew and the smiles returned. Fuck, if my doctor saw me he would have danced! Like I said we were overcome. We were taken by that which we will never understand and in trying to explain only dilute and even bastardise.
Jyoti and Manisha and Anita took the stage and declared before a crowd of over 2000 people that they were HIV+. Their courage, their determination to do this drenched us again, with silence with awe with wonder. Life overflowed. Donne’s sonnet on death began a playback… but fuck, death, the living death that HIV/AIDS is likened to in this part of the world was overcome not by a promise of heaven, moulting wings and harps of discord, it was overcome by the will to live by these three dancing stars that refused to stop dancing. My head was bowed in reverence.
Our international volunteers moving with lighted candles to Cindy Lauper’s ‘True Colours’ followed this, and while cheesiness could have daubed itself gooey and smelly all over us, it worked. It did. The community didn’t understand all the lyrics, but the music they heard came together in their minds with the words they had just heard by three women, their own, who had stood up and asked to be loved, to not be rejected.
At the end of the night after I hugged Avinash and kissed all the women on the team much to their red faced embarrassment, we sat in the white light of the street lamps as the lights and sound equipment and chairs were packed away. The open-air stage returned to its innocuous beforeness. The community returned to chapattis and vicarious living through cable TV. But we knew that we had a new beginning. DISHA had taken another step forward against the pandemic, against ignorance and its spawn - stigma.
On the Sunday that followed Randhir died at Naidu hospital. We lost our fifth client. This is how real life is. This is how real HIV/AIDS is in our community. We will not go quietly. The dancing stars will burn brilliantly in the night as they fall from the sky.
Words… next week we will have a slide show for you on our website of the march we had in the morning of World AIDS day and of the Celebration of life. You will see the colour. You will hear the music. And if you want to feel the rhythm inside you, come visit us, and touch and smell what Deep Griha is trying to do. Join us. Walk with us. Fight with us. Dance with us.
deepgriha@gmail.com
Tel: +91 20 26125773
posted by Deep Griha at 7:47 am
2 Comments:
Hi! I'm a Pune-ite myself who's currently studying international development in Canada, and just stumbled upon your site. It has been both entertaining and inspiring to read your stories, and to find out about this incredible work going on in Pune. I'd love to see it firsthand someday. Keep up the great work!
Hello,
I read your account with a sadness knowing how much I wanted to have been there. I was so close. It looks like you had a fantastic time. I am so glad it all went well. It looks like a great time was had by all. I know how important it is to remove the stimgma and it looks like you have just taken a big step forward. I know the other volunteers enjoyed it enourmously. Well, I wish you all the best of luck and I will be back out there!!
Lots of love
sarah x
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