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
Comments
I never understood. My mom almost became hysteric when I uttered the name of the medicine that I took. She told me never to name the medicine. I was a kid. She didn't want others to know.
Mom and Dad were unusually quiet.
She knew it from the ads on the TV. the dermatologist sent me out and confirmed what she feared was true. what's all the fuss about this little pale patch on my left elbow.
I had no clue.
After many years, I googled and found out that Rimactane is Rifampicin, an antibitiotic against Mycobacterium.
The next time we met I told my mom that I knew that I had leprosy infection. It was a dramatic moment. I realized that she was protecting me. The knowledge could have affected me psychologically.
I also learned how others behaved when my mom gave the news from dermatologist to my relatives.
One aunt spread fear among other relatives that I could spread the disease.I pity her. She didn't know fear is the worst disease.
My grandpa gave me a bath with the soap that he uses. To prove the point to those stricken by fear.
It's painful to see. Ignorance and stigma do more damage than any disease. Be it leprosy or AIDS.
I hope I'll hear in my life time that leprosy has been wiped out.
That the bacterium exists only in labs.The same for HIV.
I know. Hoping for ignorance to be wiped out is naive.
Ram
The sense of guilt had visited me every time I passed that colony on my way to office. I should have been there doing something. but I didn't do anything and instead found satisfaction in blackening the whites in paper...
anand