Sickbed ruminations

Lying in bed all day, I ruminate over whether Jaswant Singh feels stupid for writing anti-party statements, or if he has a grand plan in mind to over throw the BJP and the RSS for their closed-natured ideology and start a new kind of Hindutva which is more openminded than its older counterpart. I have been in bed for the past four weeks, of which one was spent in a hospital. The other three, of course, has been spent in the comfort of my own airconditioned bedroom with attached bathroom; under the care of loving parents who could provide me with literally anything I want. In spite of all these comforts, the fevers in the morning, and the acidity (due to the never-ending pills I take) all day drain me out, making sure I cannot step out of the house. But I don't need to. 'Cause like I said, I have everything I need right here.

This brings me to think about friends I have, who are equally, (or perhaps even more) susceptible to the disease I bear. These are friends stay away from home and work in order to send money back to the village. Something as dastardly as a severe TB attack would rent this person living alone absolutely helpless. For self-preservation, he'll have to cook for himself, wash his own clothes, clean his own house and come to work everyday in spite of high fevers, dizziness, acidity and horrible coughing.

Why limit myself to bachelors! When one could ignorantly think that a person could always find comfort in a family in times of sickness, he doesn't realize that the Indian family is basically like a broken toy fixed by a child using superglue; Permanently, but not perfectly joined. And who is the one to suffer the most? The lady of the house of course! Just in case she falls to some severe illness, she is first of all diagonized late, because the fevers, chills and dizziness she might be having would be taken extremely lightly by the rest of the family; meaning that she'll have to do all the cooking cleaning washing, water collecting, bazar buying, etc. all by herself. The moment things get worse, and the husband finds out she has a serious disease that could be harmful, she is carted off to her parents place, where she might find some respite.

I've quoted one of the most mildest, most treatable diseases of this time; (may be not as mild as swine-flu. What a loud noise that made!) but imagine the woman shivering from pneumonia, suffering from breathlessness at night, while the drunk husband walks in, finds is wife too cold to touch, and is sexually turned off. making him angrily sleep on the other side of the bed, leaving her to shiver through the night. And we wonder why the world's largest number of deaths (2.94mill a year) have a cause in pneumonia.

The lack of love in our community might sound overexaggerated (and believe me, it's not) in this piece, but one definitely cannot exaggerate the lack of basic facilities to treat a simple illness. What does one do when his beloved is suffering from extreme diarrhoea due to food-poisoning? and since there is no water in the well, only muddy water from the river the factory spoiled, what does he do? He will have to feed her the water that gave her the diarrhoea in the first place. The local quack would charge a hundred rupees for an IV line, (which costs under Rs 30)when all she would need is a 12 rupee ORS packet and some clean water to get better. Obviously the family cannot afford such luxuries, and the husband will have to watch his bride die of a disease that people with attached bathrooms wouldn't give two hoots about.

It is amazing to watch how living in different classes bring out different perspectives of the same disease. I post on facebook that I've been sick for a month and everybody's there for me asking me to take care of myself. I wonder if the poor housewife would ever think of one month's fever as something abnormal!