All things Bright and Beautiful… All things Wise and Wonderful…
It was around 9pm in the night. As we walked into the gaunt and dingy male medical ward of a government hospital in Adilabad stinking of urine and sweat, we braced ourselves to encounter another episode of the usual depressing cases of farmers suffering from health issues, poisoning due to inhalation of pesticides while spraying in the fields and also some cases of farmers who survived after a suicide attempt. This has been our regular activity for a while now, foraging for cases in the hospital, counselling them, following up with them and helping some of them in whatever way we can.
So, as was the usual practice we went from one bed to another, talking to the patients, noting down details till we came to the bed of this lanky Marathi speaking tribal farmer who was admitted because of inhalation poisoning. While I was struggling to speak to him and his mother in my broken Marathi, this bright young lady, Nanda, Rajender’s sister-in-law sprang out of nowhere and volunteered to play the translator. With a naughty smile she spoke to us, all along cracking jokes at her mother-in-law and making fun of her brother-in-law, not for a moment expecting us to feel pity for the situation they are in.
As we got around to speaking with her, she narrated the story of her husband, who was also admitted to the same hospital 8 days ago due to alcohol induced psychosis. She mentioned that she has a 10 month old son whom she left at home with some relatives because she had to take care of her husband who was acting crazy (pagal in her words), running away from the hospital if left unnoticed. She had to tie him to the bed and keep an eye on him. She also showed us her son’s pictures in her small Nokia phone. All through the conversation she continued to giggle, smile and crack jokes about her plight. Not just that, she was also helping around every patient in that ward and kept a track of their progress and updated us regarding the same.
This was not something I was prepared for. How could she manage to smile so genuinely despite life constantly being so unfair to her? Where did she get all her positive energy from? What was she made of? How could she be so accepting of this desolate life? Her sprightly demeanour so full of life brought tears to my eyes. I was angry with every entity who was responsible for this condition of hers. An intelligent, smart woman with an excellent sense of humour and a heart of gold deserves a much better life. She definitely didn’t deserve to be stuck to an alcoholic husband, tending to him all her life.
Such encounters with all these lovely people I meet during the course of my work with Kisan Mitra fill me with guilt, questions, anger, frustration, a sense of helplessness and a deep sense of responsibility.
Hope we can together make this world a better place for all these wonderful people. Let’s try to make “equality” a reality.
