Why does god give children leprosy?

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. Only to have Rachel shipped off to Molokai for ever and she lands on island full of grotesquely deformed people, all alone and had to stop reading all over again. I abandoned it for the rest of the journey. But then it only gets better from there.

Rachel grows up...... adults and pain, we can deal with. Only as Sister Catherine asks, why does god give children leprosy. She later decides that what god gave us was the spirit to endure leprosy, to discover antibiotics, and make miracles as were happening in the world of technology and science in early 20th century (not sure how much I subscribe to that view). The inhabitants of Kaluapapa are far removed from all these miracles, they only hear about it and see it years later when it slowly finds its way to Molokai, electric lights, moving pictures.... They do see the smoke rising from Pearl Harbour when it gets bombed but otherwise their life runs in a parallel world. They live, love, get ravaged by disease and die there, in their mini universe. If babies are born, by accident in all this activity, they get shipped off to the outside world to prevent the spread of the disease eventually. Thus Rachel too has to give up her child Ruth, if she is to survive.

Rachel is the spirit that outlives all her contemporaries, her friends, her aunt and uncle, her husband..... She lives to see the arrival of the antibiotics. She lives to leave the island, when it is becomes finally possible to do so. And the last chapters are all happy and gay, so much so that you begin to find it not in the spirit of the whole book.

Reading about it I was reminded of my childhood in Delhi, where I remember seeing lepers, with their hands and face eaten away by the bacteria, ill-concealed by swathes of bandanges begging in the streets. I remember seeing the 'leper colony' built by Laurie Baker. I began to wonder, and am still wondering why in the 1980s and probably even today we have so many people with such late stages of the disease and why they are living in a 'leper colony' albeit in the middle of the city, but nonetheless shunned by ignorant people like us.

Image by aishahillbilly from Pixabay