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Journal From Calcutta: Part One: Can You Save A Man On The Street?

Journal entry from India. This one about trying to save a life. PART ONE

This entry, and the ones that will directly follow it may not be appropriate for kids.

I’ve been walking by this guy now for everyday over a week. I don’t know how to explain it, but I feel drawn to him. I find myself looking for him everyday, going out of my way to walk down the street that he’s always lying on, searching for him on whatever piece of sidewalk he’s decided to be on that day.

In Calcutta, things  aren’t normal. My normal. Meaning, if there’s a person on the sidewalk, you don’t ask them how they are. You don’t buy them a bottle of water or hand them a wad of wrinkled dollar bills from the bottom of your purse. You don’t hand them gift certificates to Mac Donald’s. That’s the kind of stuff we do at home.

Sometimes at home we even stop and offer to share a cup of coffee. I do, anyway.

Maybe though most of the time at home–we just drive by. We just turn our car radio on louder, we just avert our eyes, we just think about how hard our life is so we avoid seeing some else as a human being.

I think here, in Calcutta, it’s a lot like that last scenario. People are keeping busy, just surviving themselves–and sometimes even when they’re doing  really well, they don’t help either.

There are so many people on the street here–sick, dying, coughing, drunk, high, half naked, lying on a piece of cardboard, a torn blanket or bit of sari pulled over their face–that you almost have to tune it out. You’d never  get down the sidewalk, you’d never leave the street you were walking on, you’d never eat. Maybe thats the point, that all of us should stop all ths moving and scurrying and so on . But we don’t.

It feels impossible.

The sisters have advised us to not help anyone that is on the street, because it’s very complicated to do that. I’m about to find out just how complicated it is.

So I’ve been walking down this street everyday, twice a day, for a week, and I find myself searching for this one man everytime. Looking at him makes me so sad that I don’t think I can put the image of him out of my mind.

He’s small. He looks like a tiny boy, but he’s a man, with greying hair at his temples and a grizzled beard. His face is completely sunken and his eyes are wide, open, windows to something I don’t know anything about and I’m scared to death of. He’s got the expression of a child but the eyes of something else.

His clothes–what there are of them–are worn out. Just rags really, A very threadbare pair of trousers, like dress pants, tied with a bit of rope. A plaid shirt, at one time it had buttons. No shoes, and gnarled feet and hands.

He’s very dark, almost black, and this makes his eyes stand out even more.

He’s on the sidewalk everyday. Every time I walk by him and I see him curled up in the fetal position, dying.

People tell me that there is nothing I can do. I don’t know if that is true, but I do that he is one of thousands in this city. I do know that it’s getting cold at night soon here, and that the people like him are going to start dying like flies. I walk by at least a dozen people like him a day. Sometimes a hundred. Sometimes even children, little starving babies, skinny limbed and big headed, giving me blank glassy stares from their cardboard beds on the sidewalk.

Every person I see in need, oh my God. How it bothers me, overwhelms me, dismays me, challenges me, softens me….

But for some reason, this particular man, his situation, it just really bothers me.

I can’t stop thinking about him, and I have trouble eating meals of late because my mind is on him.

I keep thinking to myself, “How come I was born where I was, with the advantages I have had, and he got this life?” It just seems so strange, impossible really. I can’t think of any particular aspect of myself or my character that allows me to have deserved more than someone else. I think in alot of ways, I’m pretty average. Why is it I’ve got the life I’ve got and he’s got the life he’s got? I can’t make sense of it.

I wonder  what his life would have been like, if he’d had a chance.

Two days later….

The man I’ve been looking a everyday was suddenly on the other side of the street this morning. His shirt is gone, and someone’s put a ratty blanket on him.

My friend Serena and I walk by the guy on the sidewalk tonight. He’s still there, but he looks worse. Alot worse. I wonder if he’s dead or if he’s breathing. I’m afraid to get too close, so we’re sort of leaning in towards him and he is breathing, but  one can’t hear it–you have to look really close at his body to see it gently rise up and down with his breaths.

We wonder if he’s alright, and we talk about it aloud, when an Indian man walks by and says, “He’s fine. Don’t concern yourself with him.” So we keep walking.

I come back down the street on my own. It’s hours later, it’s very late and its quite dark. it’s about 10 pm, and see a crowd of people near the man on the sidewalk.

I venture closer.

The man has lost all of his clothes at this point, and he’s feverish, he’s stiff, like in a ball.

His eyes are wide, frightened, and the white part stares out at us but he doesn’t seem to see anything at all. He seems glazed over.

Everyone seems to be of the opinion that he is about to die. No one knows what to do about it.

Everyone is wondering how long he’s been there. I offer up that I’ve been walking by him for over a week. This upsets some of the crowd, who ask me why I have not done anything to help him.

“What could I do? “, I ask. They’ve all been walking by him everyday, too. Why didn’t they do anything?

They are all Indian. I am the only tourist, the only white person.

“You have money. You can travel. You should have taken him to the hospital.”, says one man, standing next to his wife who is dripping in gold and diamonds and an expensive sari. (It turns out the sick man on the sidewalk is laying in their driveway so they cannot open the gate to back out their car.)

Eventually the crowd disappears, leaving 4 men and myself. It’s about midnight now.

It’s two hours for them all to decide what to do. The whole time they are arguing and trying to decide, the man lays dying. I’m standing there, wondering if I should leave, but they keep insisting I should stay. So I do. I don’t know how I can help. I don’t know if I should go anywhere with four men I don’t know in the middle of the night. But all of these fears seems ridiculous and insane and I set them aside.

When they finally decide to take the man to a hospital, they then have the problem of finding a taxi that will agree to take the man there. The sick man is very ill, covered in feces and crawling with vermin.

We finally find a taxi, put him inside the back seat with 3 of the men who want to help–while I get in the front with the driver and another 4th man, who speaks some English.

3 hours later, we haven’t been able to find a place for him. No one will take him.

This is the opposite of what I had been told–that all healthcare is public and free and available to those who are in need. (West Bengal is Communist, after all–isn’t that supposed to mean everybody gets a share of the pot? Guess what..It doesn’t. Far from it.). Yet every place we go to has some excuse why they can’t take him.

I’d like to stop for a moment and explain that there are fine private hospitals in the city. It is only the public ones that are horrific balls of red tape and inefficiency.

We end up taking him to the police station. They tell us that they will take him, but that as soon as we leave, they’ll just put him back out on the street. They literally will just take him and dump him somewhere.

We get back into the taxi. We’ve got the taxi guy on own side now. He doesn’t even want to charge us for the fare at this point, he just wants to help us find a place for this guy so he can go home to his wife and kids and go to sleep.

The sick man stinks-of feces, of vomit, of dirtiness, of general ill health. That smell death has before it actually happens. The man has a fever, he’s delirious, he’s mumbling but none of it can be understood. He has no idea where he is or what’s going on. He’s pooped all over  the dirty blanket, his pants..it’s run down his legs into the cab floor onto the other guy’s shoes.

I feel like all of me is crying out that no one should be treated this way. He is a human being.

And then I remember where I am. There are so many people living here that some people don’t get treated like human beings. Actually, alot of people don’t get treated like human beings.

Or maybe, this is how human beings treat each other..just here, it’s more apparent, because it’s life and death every moment, while back in the States we kill each other off little by little by only thinking about ourselves.

We don’t know what to do. The guy that speaks some English is talking to me, he’s sitting in the front seat and he’s almost crying. He’s saying that he doesn’t know what to do. He’s never tried to help anyone off the street before. Everyone says not to do it. It’s just not done, he says.

I’m trying to understand that. I guess it’s all relative. If there are that many people dying on your front door, and you go out and feed them all, clothe them all, clean them all, house them all..you won’t have anything for your own family.

I see the logic, but it’s different when you’re sitting next to a dying person, who you ust want to give a little dignity to.

We all end up praying. There’s nothing else we can do on our own. Everyone’s a different faith, so everyone takes a turn..the Muslim taxi driver, the Jainist lawyer, the Hindu shopkeeper, the Christian clothes designer..and me.

What a weird moment. But it was good, just different.

We decide to try one more hospital. It’s not the worst public hospital in the city, but it’s second worst.

We go in and explain the situation. After much bakeesh-paying, they agree to take him.

We go out and find the taxi. We’ve brought a rotting rusty metal gurney that looks like it came out a trash heap (it probably did) and we load our patient on to it. In India, if you go to a public hospital, you have to put your patient on a gurney. There’s no staff standing around waiting to help you  do anything.

The gurney is missing a wheel, so one of the guys carries that side, while the rest of us wheel it into the admitting room.

There’s no paperwork on the guy, we don’t know his name or his history or what’s wrong with him. For everything we don’t know, we pay money to them. Getting him to be seen costs money, getting him a space to lie costs money, getting anything costs money.

They don’t have  bed. They are all full.

They tell us to take him to another building. He can lie on the floor in the hallway, they say.

On our way out, we walk by a young man on a makeshift pallet, his arm dangling and blood all over him and he’s screaming and then he just goes limp, like a dishrag, suddenly. He’s dead.

Am I breathing?

I’m reeling from that when a woman is carried in by her family. She’s not alive but maybe her baby is–she’s died during childbirth. It’s a gory, messy scene and the child she was carrying is not alive. They figure all this out right in the hallway, it’s done right there, right in front of us, there is no time, the family has gotten her here after a long time through Calcutta traffic, the staff… they have only the most basic of equipment…there’s no one to save.

Her family is all there and they look dark, ashen, confused. No one makes a sound, no one cries, it’s just nothing. Nothing.

This is not real, I tell myself. Not real.

A man is brought in with a huge wound a gash on his side, and he stares at us glassy eyed and bleak.

All of this happens in ten  or fifteen minutes, while we are making our way down the hallway. But it’s in slow motion, like a movie.

I’m white as a sheet says one of the men I’m with. I feel like I’m floating, like I’m going to faint. But then I remember why I am here and what needs to get done, and tell myself, pull it together. This moment is not about me, it’s about everyone else.

I’m fine, I say. Let’s do this.

We take him there, on the unwieldy gurney, dodging huge groups of people in all of the walkways outside. It seems like people are permanently camped out here. Whole families are sleeping, eating, and even cooking. (It turns out that they basically are living there. The entire family comes with the patient, lives there on the grounds or in the same area as the patients hospital bed.)

We go into the building they tell us to. Every one is staring at me as I am white and a giantess. And I am in a totally Indian hospital. There are no tourists here. Tourists do not bring patients here. It isn’t done.

The only space for him is in a hallway. Every single scrap of space has a person in it. there is not a single bed empty, some even have two patients in them.

We find a space for him in the hall. He’s next to a man who suddenly dies, with a final rasping sound, a death rattle from hs throat, and who lies there, dead, until one of the guys I’m with takes off his scarf and places it over the man’s face. The man who died is the skinniest man I have ever seen.

A woman comes in to the hall, wailing over the man. She’s equally skinny. It seems impossible to me that such a skinny woman could make so much noise…I don’t know how she has the energy for all of her sadness. She looks like she will just slip away any moment. She’s taken away by an equally skinny daughter, who consoles her as they take away the dead man’s body.

As soon as his body is gone, another patient is brought in to fill that spot. They don’t clean it or mop it or anything, just place the man on his bedsheet and place his meager bundle next to him and his family settles in, setting up housekeeping.

It’s filthy. Cockroaches are everywhere, already crawling on us, up my legs , under my pants. I try not to think about it. I don’t really think of anything actually. The whole scene is so shocking that I’ve never seen anything like it before. It’s kind of what I imagine hell to be like.

I am on automatic.

There are four people in each part of the hallway, each one alloted about 5.5 feet by less than 2 feet. There’s no room to stretch out, as they use the  hallway to bring patients in and out of the actual rooms with the beds, and sometimes even dead people are brought down the hall, on a gurney if there is one, or dragged on a blanket, wrapped in a sheet if there isn’t one.

There are rats, brownish big ones, with long tails, not even trying to hide or scurry but, instead, slowing eating their way thru the piles of garbage that are on the floors, around the patients, the beds. The bedpans serve as both urninals and places for food leftovers, and a few cats are eating from them.

I go into the room with the beds and it’s pretty horrible, too. It’s the dirtiest place I’ve ever seen. All of the patients stare at me. Some think I am a doctor, and motion me to their beds, others turn away from me if they can. I am followed by a large crowd.

The smell is overwhelming, horrifying.

Men and women are all mixed together in the room, there are no dividing curtains. It’s just a big room, packed with beds not more than a few feet apart, IV drip stands everywhere, litter on the floor, cockraches runing across the sheets. People with every ailment are thrown together..TB …broken legs … old age ..head injuries.. those who need kidney transplants.. new amputees … HIV ..typhoid…malaria…with you name it. All in one room. Room after room, hallway after hallway, all filled over with needy people and dirtiness and such squalidness that I can’t believe this is happening on the same planet that I inhabit.

It is a reality check of the most extreme.

I think of all the people at home, wondering if I will tell them about this place. I decide not to–at least for awhile, I’ll wait until it’s not so fresh, so real, so startling.

But back to the problem of our sick man and getting his immendiate needs met..

The only helpers are ones the sick and dying have brought with them–you bring  a family member to take care of you in the hospital! (Even the private hospitals do this!)

We don’t have  a helper, we don’t know what to do. There’s only one choice: we hire one of the “unofficial” helper guys that loiter around the hospital to help us, make sure our guy is taken care of. These guys are corrupt beyond belief, and I don’t know we are going to bother as he’ll just disappear the moment we are gone. But we have no choice.

It’s 4:30 am now. I sit on the floor next to out patient. There’s no where else to sit. I touch our patient, stroking his forehead. Whatever part of me that was repulsed by his dirtiness and the smell has melted away, and I almost feel like I am out of my body, really.

I ask for a clean bed pan and give him a sponge bath.  I’ve tied my scarf over my face, but I haven’t any gloves. It’s probably the first bath he’s had in a long time. He’s still glassy looking and feverish and we fight to get him a few pills to bring his fever down. It takes one hour to have those pills brought over to us. One hour.

I spend the hour hand picking lice out of his hair, with a crowd watching me in amazement and smiling at me. I’m smiling, too, but I have no idea why.

Somewhere in the middle of all this I stop thinking about my reaction to everything and just start being who I need to be for this moment. It’s moment by moment.

Someone finds a clean shirt and we put it on him. He gets an IV drip and already seems to have improved slightly. But maybe I just want him to improve.

We make arrangements to all meet back there in the afternoon and check on him and see if we can help him further.

I’m so tired, I can’t think. But I need to go home and take a cold water bucket shower, change out of these clothes…before heading to the orphanage in a few hours…

What a long night. I’ve had a whole glimpse of a reality that I’ve heard about, seen at a distance, but never was really inside. I feel turned inside out and upside down and my whole world just changed, in one night, forever.

I don’t know what will happen next.

gigi

end of PART ONE



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