On a positive note

In this anthology, some of India’s best known writers attempt to break the silences around HIV/AIDS as they tell human stories about the epidemic, writes Taran N Khan

AIDS Sutra: Untold Stories From India
Random House
334 pages
Rs395

In his essay titled ‘The Last Of The Ustaads’, journalist Aman Sethi describes thundering down the highways of northern India wedged in the front seat of a truck, having hitched a ride with a driver who leans over and bellows into his ear, “So you want to know about sex, eh?”

In a way, the exchange sums up the idea behind AIDS Sutra — to shake away the silences and the stigma around the disease and reveal the human stories behind “high-risk categories” such as sex workers, homosexuals and truck drivers. Despite the undeniable virtue of this aim, however, the book is a mixed bag, with essays that range from the moving to the sadly inept.

The table of contents features a number of heavyweights, beginning with a foreword by Amartya Sen, who sets out to demolish the argument that since HIV is contracted through voluntary behaviour, individuals should be left to bear the consequences of their past actions. Personal responsibility, while important, is shaped by social circumstances, he writes. To tackle the epidemic, “we have to stop blaming the victims and stop looking for reasons for leaving them to look after themselves. We are in it together.”
This thought recurs throughout the collection, which tries to replace the vagueness and half-truths of stigma and stereotypes with real, flesh and blood people we can relate to.
So Salman Rushdie is despatched to create a lively portrait of the eunuchs of Mumbai, travelling to Thane to meet a feisty hijra, Laxmi, who combines a taste for purple lipstick with living with her “UP Brahmin military type” father.

Kiran Desai’s essay from the Godavari delta explores the rituals of temporary weddings with men and deities amongst a community of hereditary temple dancers. Her casual question to a young woman with a gold Virgin Mary chain around her neck elicits a storm of giggles. “How can we go to church?... We are prostitutes.” And Vikram Seth revisits a poem he wrote many years ago, about a man dying of AIDS. Back then, contracting the virus meant near-certain death, and his piece underlines the difference medical advances have made in the lives of HIV positive patients. Yet, as he points out, our increased knowledge and better drugs have not been accompanied by a reduction in the numbers of those with AIDS; quite the opposite has been the case.

The stories that stay with you longest, however, are quieter accounts like Jaspreet Singh’s Ghost Stories, of afternoons spent with HIV positive children in Delhi. Singh captures their tiny, everyday tragedies with gut-wrenching clarity. There is also Sunil Gangopadhyay’s ‘Return To Sonagachhi’, Kolkata’s red light area, which he discovered in his youth as a cheap adda where his friends could get drunk and recite poetry. The young writers befriended several prostitutes, including Lakshmi, a shy poet who filled notebooks with her secret verses, and Teri, a pretty girl who joined in the drinking with a happy “Cheers!” Gangopadhyay’s ease with the space and the women who occupy it is palpable, and makes the essay an absorbing read.

Unfortunately, most of the other pieces lack this quality of empathy, perhaps because of the way they were produced. Many of them seem to be the result of a brief interaction between the author and an NGO working with a community. While in some cases, this interaction is negotiated skillfully (as in Sonia Faleiro’s examination of the relationship between the police and sex workers), in others, it results in a parroting of NGO ‘success stories’ and the kind of woolly sentiment that comes with unfamiliarity. The sense of the writer just passing through, for instance, is clear in Amit Chaudhuri’s whistlestop tour of Mumbai’s public health facilities for HIV patients, while Shobha De’s account of her “favourite driver’s” demise from AIDS is so depressingly predictable you are left wondering as to why it was included at all. Far more nuanced and interesting is Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi’s ‘Hello Darling’. This piece is as much a portrait of upper-crust Mumbai society’s brush with the virus as it is the story of a flamboyant, gay filmmaker who responds to the news of his positive status by going into an extreme, paralysing denial.

What AIDS Sutra lacks in depth, however, it attempts to make up in width. The collection addresses the major landmarks of the HIV problem in India, from drug addiction in Manipur and devadasis in Karnataka, to gay couples cruising in Bangalore’s green spaces. Taken together, the stories create a comprehensive picture of the range and weight of the issue of AIDS in the country. This makes AIDS Sutra a valuable resource, if an uneven read.
k_taran@dnaindia.net