The Chaos Within - The taste of the crunch

Back from Lanka. Been back a week actually. I came back early because I couldn't sit in Sri Lanka and miss the lead-up to Wake Up Pune. Idiot. I should have enjoyed sitting at my dad's just outside Kandy with the sound of the river buzzing in my ears and got some reports done.

The reports are getting done but only amidst the frenzied activity of the campaign... its crunch time... crunch time... we can almost hear the crunch, feel it, smell it, taste it...

The team of Deep Griha volunteers has been outstanding, and even as I write this the clock is about to tick tock 8, and Coen from the Netherlands is working on posters and fliers for the Sahara band from Delhi who are doing three gigs in the city. The office is deserted. It’s just the both of us.

It is far from peaceful however because a bunch of kids in the community have found a secret cache of fireworks left over from Diwali... fireworks, a loose term for gunpowder, and there is noise. A lot of noise. It has been going on all evening. Paul threatened to go and piss on them... the fireworks that is, not the kids. I think. Anyway... Paul, Jenny, Sam and Coen have been working overtime, and so has Avinash.

Last night I accompanied five models for the Wake Up Pune photo shoot. Four of those models are HIV+ and the other was HIV Positive too. The studio was in a part of Pune we do not venture into often and when we got there was another photo shoot going on with rather glamorous young women all painted and preened and the six of us had a giggle at how scruffy we looked. Our models from Project Concern International, the HIV+ network in Pune and DISHA enjoyed themselves. They were as professional as anyone could ask for, and you would have thought they had done this all their life.

What is it in us that transforms us in front of a camera? The need to look our best for possible posterity? Pride? Self image? Vanity? No… as I watched them pose very seriously and listen to the directions of the photographer I could not say it was any of these. It was something else.

I don't know what that something was... but whatever it was, it was there in those five very special people who agreed to have their faces plastered all over Pune in the poster and billboard campaign. They risk stigma and discrimination in this city as a result but were still willing to come forward to educate people on how normal - I hate the word - HIV+ people can look. These are not sick, desperate, dying individuals that HIV is so often associated with our city.

But the sick and the dying and the desperate exist. My client Jyoti is currently at the Sahara Care Home, and her healing is slow, her gorgeous friend who was in the bed next to her died last week, the same woman that I sat with and shared dinner with on the night before Diwali. This has affected Jyoti, naturally, and her recovery both physically and emotionally will now take longer.

Raju Khirade and his family were kicked out of their house by his father, and were threatened with the streets before we finally found them respite at Sahara today. They were desperate, and desperation transforms people. There case is being put before the Human Rights Commission but the process is slow. His kids are oblivious to all but their mother’s tears. They appear to accept that the family is not wanted, and their smiles are ever at the ready for anyone who cares to look their way. Courage even if they do not consciously know what courage is.

Last evening Avinash came to me with the news that one of our HIV+ clients is working as a female sex worker in Tadiwala Road. This does not mean she is desperate, and for us the main issue is that she is protecting herself from repeat infection and her clients from HIV. There can be no moralising. My friends with the Asia Pacific Network of Sex Workers will echo this. “Don’t give us sewing machines give us human rights” remember. It is however a concern, especially since she is not willing to discuss it with us, and it will take a while for us to engage with her and let her know we are on her side without scaring her off. But we have to do it. And soon!

That taste of the 'crunch' fills our senses. It pushes at us and we push back. It is what we do best.