The Chaos Within - One Day
Two thousand people?
A thousand?
We don’t have an accurate estimate. Yet. But they looked and felt like thousands on MG Road Walking Plaza last Sunday evening. They looked and felt good.
Inox (cinema multiplex) gave us over a thousand too. We ran an event there all Sunday. Street theatre, live music, banners being signed to support PLHIV, live exhibits, games to identify where we stand on condoms and unprotected sex… It looked and felt good.
New volunteers taken by the drive and passion of the Wake Up Pune team (pretty girls included) emerged that day… “How can we join you?” “Let us be a part of this.” “I want to come and work with you.” Random. All very random. Good random… once the chaff of sleazy random was separated.
That very night when candles for those who have fallen were lit some of the movie goers joined us. They joined families that had come for a stroll, couples eating ice cream, men watching the girls. They also joined over 200 people living with HIV.
Did they know we were so close?
Did they know that they were probably that close everyday?
The 200 were the PLHIV we knew, from NGOs and positive networks. How many more stood there that day in silence, in fear?
‘It could be you’ ‘Be responsible’ ‘PLHIV need support NOT discrimination’
Our messages. Give consistent messages. ‘Messaging!’ We have to get the balance right. It’s like any campaign. Capture their imaginations. Sell HIV prevention. Sell support for people living with HIV. Selling is the reality we operate within… a reality that demands this of us if we are to help eyes open. Help eyes see. And minds… minds understand.
The candles burnt stubbornly in the wind. And war cries demanding our right to life grew silent as we remembered those who had passed and vowed that somehow it would end…one day. Somehow it would not be me. Somehow those of us who choose life will have access to life (read antiretroviral therapy, read good nutrition, read love and acceptance).
It was a good day. A good beginning. It lifted us all.
The stubborn candles are a great metaphor. The only problem is that stubborn candles are also extinguished by forces greater than it… him. her.
A stubborn candle was extinguished yesterday. Hemant Pandit.
Hemant was our client. A dancing client. No monthly gathering on the Deep Griha terrace was complete without Hemant in his ill fitting black suit and passion for his wife. He danced with her, serenaded her, loved her. Epic love. Inspirational love. Love that surrounded her and lifted her and made her sit by his side whenever she could at Sahara Aalhad. Love that protected her.
When I saw Hemant on Thursday I knew it was over. His skin was stretched taught over his tall wiry frame. As they cleaned his bed sores I wondered at how this man no longer had buttocks. His diseased skin was thin and frail and looked like kite paper badly glued on to his pelvic bone.
His last words to Maya that day were “Take my wife and mother away, they don’t need to see this.” Words that were forced through severe oral thrush, pus.
I don’t give a fuck about whether I should or should not be writing this. I don’t care that people find death depressing when there are ‘so many good things happening now’… it is the deaths that fuel us, make us fight. Deaths fuel us and paradoxically empties us. Deaths that no one knows about or wants to know about. Candles in the end so easily extinguished.
WHY ARE PEOPLE DYING OF HIV?
IT IS A CHRONIC DISORDER MUCH LIKE DIABETES.
The World Health Organisation said that. Not us in the field... us in Pune. Chronic apathy and ignorance is our reality.
We must change this. And it is changing. Slowly. There is hope. And hope will not dry up. We will fight till we can fight no more. Till we are broken and cannot be mended. But there will always be hope. There will always be someone to stand up until one day we don’t need to rally and scream, but only remember those who fell and give thanks that we, so indiscriminately and cruelly, fall no more.
Hope does not mean that there is no pain now.
Last night as we sat by Hemant’s body we heard his young wife lament at her loss, laugh through her tears at how much he loved her, and grow desperate with the fear of what was to come.
The MEN then moved into the crematorium where Hemant was placed on the bed of metal rollers to be pushed in to fire. There was a delay. I heard her screams. My body went cold. Scared cold. Powerless cold. Someone came scampering through and bits of red glass and what looked like silver rings were hurriedly scattered on to his body as it trundled into the fire.
They had broken her bangles. They had ripped her golden mangal sutra from her neck, and pulled off her silver toe rings.
The trappings of a married woman.
It began when we were seated outside and they came and marked her as a widow with red and saffron coloured powder. She had a yellowed nose and a bloodied forehead as the powder marred her tear strained face.
The rollers came out empty and shuddered to a halt. Crushed marigolds that had somehow escaped the electric pyre scattered onto the floor. He was gone.
Her cries drowned out the machine.
He was no longer there to love her and protect her and make her laugh.
There is often no fucking continuum of care that prepares us for the abuse of our cultures. What happened to her was not about HIV, it was about death. Hemant could have been knocked down by a bus and the same thing would have happened to her.
But Hemant was not knocked down by a bus. He died of HIV and AIDS at 35. He died because he had no access to the levels of care and support that could have protected him from HIV and turned it into a chronic condition rather than fatal.
Another random man died of AIDS in India. He has become a statistic.
To his wife an aching terrifying hole.
To us a dancing client swallowed whole.
I am tired of writing how much we will miss those who pass like some fucking morbid Hallmark card, and you are probably tired of reading it… but we do. We do miss them. And we always will.
The dancing clients remain, and Hemant’s wife is one of them. Hopelessness has taken her and now our challenge is to release her from its cold dead grip. Let us hope that she will one day learn to dance again. Let us hope for her. She can’t. Not today, and maybe not tomorrow. One day.
One day Hemant won’t have to die.
One day the government will take HIV seriously enough to actually do something rather than allow for corruption and misappropriation of the ‘cash-cow’ HIV has become.
One day we will realize that HIV is not the poor man’s ‘scourge’ but a socio-economic reality that threatens to carry us away to a place we don’t want to be.
Ask Swaziland.
Until that one day we cannot rest.
A thousand?
We don’t have an accurate estimate. Yet. But they looked and felt like thousands on MG Road Walking Plaza last Sunday evening. They looked and felt good.
Inox (cinema multiplex) gave us over a thousand too. We ran an event there all Sunday. Street theatre, live music, banners being signed to support PLHIV, live exhibits, games to identify where we stand on condoms and unprotected sex… It looked and felt good.
New volunteers taken by the drive and passion of the Wake Up Pune team (pretty girls included) emerged that day… “How can we join you?” “Let us be a part of this.” “I want to come and work with you.” Random. All very random. Good random… once the chaff of sleazy random was separated.
That very night when candles for those who have fallen were lit some of the movie goers joined us. They joined families that had come for a stroll, couples eating ice cream, men watching the girls. They also joined over 200 people living with HIV.
Did they know we were so close?
Did they know that they were probably that close everyday?
The 200 were the PLHIV we knew, from NGOs and positive networks. How many more stood there that day in silence, in fear?
‘It could be you’ ‘Be responsible’ ‘PLHIV need support NOT discrimination’
Our messages. Give consistent messages. ‘Messaging!’ We have to get the balance right. It’s like any campaign. Capture their imaginations. Sell HIV prevention. Sell support for people living with HIV. Selling is the reality we operate within… a reality that demands this of us if we are to help eyes open. Help eyes see. And minds… minds understand.
The candles burnt stubbornly in the wind. And war cries demanding our right to life grew silent as we remembered those who had passed and vowed that somehow it would end…one day. Somehow it would not be me. Somehow those of us who choose life will have access to life (read antiretroviral therapy, read good nutrition, read love and acceptance).
It was a good day. A good beginning. It lifted us all.
The stubborn candles are a great metaphor. The only problem is that stubborn candles are also extinguished by forces greater than it… him. her.
A stubborn candle was extinguished yesterday. Hemant Pandit.
Hemant was our client. A dancing client. No monthly gathering on the Deep Griha terrace was complete without Hemant in his ill fitting black suit and passion for his wife. He danced with her, serenaded her, loved her. Epic love. Inspirational love. Love that surrounded her and lifted her and made her sit by his side whenever she could at Sahara Aalhad. Love that protected her.
When I saw Hemant on Thursday I knew it was over. His skin was stretched taught over his tall wiry frame. As they cleaned his bed sores I wondered at how this man no longer had buttocks. His diseased skin was thin and frail and looked like kite paper badly glued on to his pelvic bone.
His last words to Maya that day were “Take my wife and mother away, they don’t need to see this.” Words that were forced through severe oral thrush, pus.
I don’t give a fuck about whether I should or should not be writing this. I don’t care that people find death depressing when there are ‘so many good things happening now’… it is the deaths that fuel us, make us fight. Deaths fuel us and paradoxically empties us. Deaths that no one knows about or wants to know about. Candles in the end so easily extinguished.
WHY ARE PEOPLE DYING OF HIV?
IT IS A CHRONIC DISORDER MUCH LIKE DIABETES.
The World Health Organisation said that. Not us in the field... us in Pune. Chronic apathy and ignorance is our reality.
We must change this. And it is changing. Slowly. There is hope. And hope will not dry up. We will fight till we can fight no more. Till we are broken and cannot be mended. But there will always be hope. There will always be someone to stand up until one day we don’t need to rally and scream, but only remember those who fell and give thanks that we, so indiscriminately and cruelly, fall no more.
Hope does not mean that there is no pain now.
Last night as we sat by Hemant’s body we heard his young wife lament at her loss, laugh through her tears at how much he loved her, and grow desperate with the fear of what was to come.
The MEN then moved into the crematorium where Hemant was placed on the bed of metal rollers to be pushed in to fire. There was a delay. I heard her screams. My body went cold. Scared cold. Powerless cold. Someone came scampering through and bits of red glass and what looked like silver rings were hurriedly scattered on to his body as it trundled into the fire.
They had broken her bangles. They had ripped her golden mangal sutra from her neck, and pulled off her silver toe rings.
The trappings of a married woman.
It began when we were seated outside and they came and marked her as a widow with red and saffron coloured powder. She had a yellowed nose and a bloodied forehead as the powder marred her tear strained face.
The rollers came out empty and shuddered to a halt. Crushed marigolds that had somehow escaped the electric pyre scattered onto the floor. He was gone.
Her cries drowned out the machine.
He was no longer there to love her and protect her and make her laugh.
There is often no fucking continuum of care that prepares us for the abuse of our cultures. What happened to her was not about HIV, it was about death. Hemant could have been knocked down by a bus and the same thing would have happened to her.
But Hemant was not knocked down by a bus. He died of HIV and AIDS at 35. He died because he had no access to the levels of care and support that could have protected him from HIV and turned it into a chronic condition rather than fatal.
Another random man died of AIDS in India. He has become a statistic.
To his wife an aching terrifying hole.
To us a dancing client swallowed whole.
I am tired of writing how much we will miss those who pass like some fucking morbid Hallmark card, and you are probably tired of reading it… but we do. We do miss them. And we always will.
The dancing clients remain, and Hemant’s wife is one of them. Hopelessness has taken her and now our challenge is to release her from its cold dead grip. Let us hope that she will one day learn to dance again. Let us hope for her. She can’t. Not today, and maybe not tomorrow. One day.
One day Hemant won’t have to die.
One day the government will take HIV seriously enough to actually do something rather than allow for corruption and misappropriation of the ‘cash-cow’ HIV has become.
One day we will realize that HIV is not the poor man’s ‘scourge’ but a socio-economic reality that threatens to carry us away to a place we don’t want to be.
Ask Swaziland.
Until that one day we cannot rest.
posted by Deep Griha at 9:28 pm
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