PEREGRINATIONS

Sister Catherine, a nun working at the home for girls with the disease finds herself asking when plagued with doubts. Recently read Molokai by Alan Brennert . It is the story of Rachel from Honolulu who contracts leprosy in the late 1800s and is packed off to the island of Molokai where the government has set up an isolation settlement called the Kaluapapa. I started reading it on my way back from DC on the train. I had just had a wonderful time with family, hogged on the thanksgiving turkey, with an Indian flavour and was heading back to home to Boston. I tried reading a few pages and soon I was embarrassing myself with tears streaming down. I had to stop reading. Rachel, then six years old erupts in a pink coloured rash on her thigh which has lost all sensation. She is transferred to the quarantine testing facility in the city. Her parents deposit her there and she cannot understand why they are abandoning here here alone. I recovered for a while and picked up where I left off. On...

I picked my way gingerly, dodging the still cool evidence of the monsoon showers Hitching my skirt up, no glance to spare for the faces I had come looking for. A naked toddler stumbled, carried by the inertia of his steps, Curious, towards a pair of pigeons pecking intently At the leftover of the street kids who live on crumbs. My mind caught in the ‘simplicity’ of the moment, Perhaps should capture it for my ‘experimental travelogue’. Eyes traveled down the curves towards that most endearing part of the human body And, arrested there, at his now not so endearing bottom An immediate sidestep, I danced a tango with the still warm evidence of his effluence Eyes snapped back to the ground Jumped over the pools and rushed towards the parking lot All but fell into the airconditioned interior As if sucked in by the vacuum created by the difference in temperature Sitting back and rolling my tinted windows up I sighed and looked out affectionately at the poetic beauty that had beckoned me here...