Death of a Financier

by John Francis Kinsella

  The bad news from the USA was piling up as George Bush announced his plan to save the economy, which looked to many like trying to inflate a bus tire with a bicycle pump.

  The City of London had spread the subprime virus into debt markets around the world, inventing and promoting products designed, according to them, to make the banking system surer with unfortunately exactly the opposite effect, following the well established path established over the centuries of financial folly.

  The outlook was becoming grim as the three main drivers of economic growth: credit-fuelled consumer spending, house prices and the financial services industry, seemed to be coming to a grinding halt.

  Any hope that the manufacturing sector would take over with the falling pound boosting exports was no more than a pipe dream. British industry had been laminated over the previous twenty years, names such as Bentley, Land Rover and Jaguar sold off, Corus Steel sold to an Indian group with the risk of its production being relocated in bad times. Shipbuilding was practically non-existent as the Royal Navy turned to its ancient enemy, France, for the design of Britain's new aircraft carrier. Airbus, which had been scorned by the jingoistic press, was now one of the two leading plane builders in the world with just its wings built in the UK. France monopolised high speed rail transport, not forgetting nuclear power, whilst textiles, electronics and a multitude of other goods were manufactured in China and India, and even call centres had been relocated to distant Bombay.

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  Chapter 34

  It's a great pity the Kovalam's Zero Waste programme, launched back in 2003, produced more reports and talk than anything else, that is aside from their usual fantasy and self-elevating babble,' Francis told him.

  Ryan laughed, it was an undeniable fact many Indians were unrealistic and could not help themselves from taking their fantasies for reality. Their pride in their country was justified by its size and by its numbers, but beyond that the rush to get out spoke for itself.

  'I've read a couple of their reports in the papers at the hotel, filled with out of date catch phrases, you know Shifting to a New Paradigm, the New Mantra, and a lot of technical gobbledygook.'

  'Yes, the kind of report that disguises the fact that nothing is done. Those kinds of superlative descriptions are common, which if they weren't so self-disillusioning would be amusing.'

  'I suppose there's not much they can do about it.'

  'Sadly you're right. On the one hand the state wants to encourage hotels to install sewage treatment equipment and garbage sorting and on the other hand waste has always been and is still dumped or burned on the beaches or tipped into local streams.'

  The tourists sunning themselves on the beaches did not see the dozens of waste dumps hidden out of sight just a stone throw away. The area behind Lighthouse Beach, the main tourist zone, was the most seriously affected by kitchen waste and rubbish from the seafront restaurants, which was simply piled in their backyards or dumped in the nearby rice paddies, leaking toxic juices down into the groundwater.

  During the day garbage, stored under plastic covers or in sacks, putrefied until it was collected for dumping late in the evening, when ragged porters from the other India appeared, invading the paths and alleys of Kovalam as its bars and restaurants were closing, balancing the sacks on their heads, scurrying off to the hidden dumps.

  These were the Untouchables; it was their task to clean away human and animal waste. They were subcastes, considered so polluted that they kept out of sight, working at night: they were the Unseeables.

  Untouchables represented a quarter of all Hindus and were literally outcastes, that is to say without a caste, and were considered polluting for all Hindus of caste.

  Nowadays, the term Untouchable has become insulting or politically incorrect and they are referred to as Harijans - the children of God, or Dalits - the downtrodden. The Untouchables had their own their own subcastes and traditional professions, considered polluting by caste Hindus: these included handling dead bodies, both human and animal, tanning leather and manufacturing leather goods,

  The Indian caste system was composed of Brahmins, the highest rank, priests and teachers, followed by Ksatriya, warriors and rulers; Vaisyas, farmers, merchants and artisans; Sudras, labourers and finally the Untouchables, polluted labourers.

  There were literally thousands of subcastes with their own institutions. An example could be seen in Gandhi's life, when as a youngman he had wanted to go to England to study law, he was obliged to ask permission to leave India from his subcaste, the Modh Bania, who refused. Bania meant merchant and gandhi greengrocer, from the Sanskrit word gandha meaning smell or fragrance. When he disobeyed, he was banished.

  It was common practice to dump waste into the streams and paddy fields, whilst plastic bottles, which were been collected from the waste bins at the beach, could be seen scattered all around the fields and land adjoining the town.

  Burning waste was a common practice, but since there was neither sorting nor separation, plastics and other potentially toxic materials were burnt together. Thus the stinking garbage in and around of Kovalam was not only unsightly, but posed a serious health risk.

  Few hotels had waste treatment systems, those that did were in the form of septic tanks, as a consequence most of the town's waste water was emptied into its streams and drainage canals before being discharged into the sea. Certain restaurants and guesthouses on or nearby the beachfront discharged their waste water directly onto the beach during the night.

  Any person who cared to look could see the broad layers of brown scum floating on the waves beyond the surf. Waste was even buried on the beach during the night, only to be uncovered during the monsoon with the waste being carried out to sea together with every form of microbe imaginable.

  Kovalam was not alone; all other tourist regions of Kerala were equally polluted. Over five hundred houseboats on the Vembanad and Ashtamudi Lakes in Kochi, Alappuzha and Kollam continued to empty sewage into the backwaters leading a local newspaper to call it 'God's own wasteland' in mockery of the state's slogan 'God's own country'.

  'We have sewage tanks in the boats that need to be emptied only once a year. We do that outside these days on the department's instruction. But a sewage treatment plant on land still remains a pipe dream,' announced a leading houseboat operator in Alappuzha.

  The garbage and rubble strewn beaches and polluted backwaters were sights that welcomed visitors to Kerala. To the local people it was part of the landscape, but more surprisingly tourists seemed either oblivious to the eyesores or accepted them as part of the local colour.

  'How else can the popularity of God's own country be explained,' asked Johnny, though admitting that things were not looking as good as in past years.

  Most tourists were totally unaware of health hazards in India; amongst these were malaria, typhoid and enteric diseases, just to name a few. The fear of an outbreak of disease had only recently caused serious concern to authorities in Kochi, the states largest city. Uncollected garbage that had piled up in the streets was the cause of their concern, which was not without reason, given the recent epidemic of chikungunya that had claimed more than two hundred lives in the region with tens of thousands of people infected.

  Not one city or village in the state possessed an effective waste-disposal system and the incapacity of the authorities was underlined by the fact that many hotels and resorts in places such as Kovalam openly violated the Coastal Regulation Zone rules and continued to get away with it.

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  Chapter 35

  With the fall in air fares, many Indian tourists were also attracted to Kovalam, which they found almost pristine - a vision confirmed to them by the presence of so many European tourists, including a good proportion of Scandinavians - in comparison to Bombay and other of the country's large cities, given their fatalistic attitude in regards to public hygiene.

  Johnny however was worried like many small hotel owners in Kovalam; he had observed a fal
l in the number of tourists compared to the previous peak season. The trend confirmed that many tourists, after spending a day or two on the beaches, headed for other destinations.

  The weather had not been so good and the rain together with the lack of space on the beaches was having a negative impact on the resort. Complaints of recurrent power cuts, lack of efficient garbage disposal and drinking water explained why the smaller hotels had seen a fall off in business, as their clientele, individual travellers, were not fixed, unlike those who came on packages tours and were booked into the larger hotels for one or more weeks, and had the choice of moving on.

  Kovalam was an example of how the damage of unplanned tourism could affect local people and their environment. The fishing village that Kovalam had once been no longer existed, in its place hotels and restaurants had sprung up, mostly without planning permission, and many, in contravention with town planning regulations, no more than a few metres from the sea.

  There were more than one hundred and fifty guest houses, shacks and restaurants in the central district of Kovalam Beach. The construction of buildings had drastically increased sea erosion whilst hotels and other establishments discharged their waste water directly into an open sewer that ran parallel to the beach before finally spewing the filth into the encroaching sea.

  Tourism slowly spread from the Kovalam beach area to neighbouring villages, displacing the very same communities it had displaced initially, as large hotel groups arrived with their plans in a never ending race for business and profits.

  The slogan of Kerala's tourist board described Kovalam in superlative tones, presenting it to the world as 'God's own country'. Guide books and travel magazines called it the Costa del Sol of southern India. However, it was a million light years away from the concrete jungle of Benidorm and far from the pollution, crowds, noise, poverty and dirt of the real India. Many visitors even took a liking to it after a period of adaptation, transforming it into their winter home and even buying property there, whether they were aware of the dangers and health risks or not was another story.

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  Chapter 36

  Ryan joined his mother by the pool where she was thumbing through a brochure.

  'What's that mum, more advertising for beauty treatment.'

  'No?' she said.

  Her reaction was much too calm, which meant she would soon be asking him something. He did not have to wait long.

  'Ryan?'

  'Yes mum.'

  'What do you think about this nip-tuck thing?'

  'What nip-tuck thing?'

  'You know,' she said, the tone rising, 'Getting rid of this fat!' pointing to her midriff.

  'You know what I think about that kind of thing, if it's a real problem, I mean if a person has a serious complex, then it could be considered.'

  'Well I have a bloody complex!'

  'Don't get excited mum.'

  'Look, here it says you can get a lot of things done here in India much cheaper than back home.'

  'Health care does not come cheap mum. In any case you don't have a problem with money.'

  'Have a look at it,' she said handing him the brochure.

  It described in flowing terms a large modern hospital in Kochi, specialised in cosmetic surgery amongst other things. Their services remedying everything from loose upper arm skin, amusingly described as 'bingo wings' or 'bat wings', lifts to remove excess skin from the thigh and buttock area, liposuction and abdominoplasty or tummy-tuck; mini or full. The latter, the brochure explained, generally produced a smoother and flatter stomach, noting that the best results were achieved in women who had the correct weight for their height. Not the case for my mum, Ryan thought.

  The smooth talk was designed to comfort na?ve women - and more and more frequently men - in search of elusive youth and beauty, playing up to their whims, reassuring them that 'appearance plays a vital role in our self-confidence, so naturally the happier we are with our face and body, the greater our level of self-esteem and in turn, our ability to successfully achieve our goals and ambitions in life'.

  True, but nevertheless crap, thought Ryan as he scanned the list of services that the brochure proudly announced: cosmetic surgery, dentistry, hair transplants, orthopaedic surgery, infertility treatment, CT and MRI scans, obesity surgery, eye surgery and transplantation.

  When he recalled how Francis had spoken to him of India's public health expenditure, it seemed incongruous that such establishments could exist in a country where hundreds of millions lived beyond poverty.

  The country's public health budget was one of the lowest in the world, less than one per cent in terms of GDP. Private health expenditure accounted for four fifths of the total health care costs, but public health only one fifth, ranking India on the same level as countries like Afghanistan and Cambodia.

  Of the private health, only three percent was covered by insurance, which meant that when a family was hit by sickness, hospitalisation could cost more than half of a family's annual income to cover treatment and bribes.

  Francis had told that a national insurance scheme was out of the question for India, as it would be an unbearably heavy financial burden on the state budget, and even if it were possible it would probably end up subsidising private hospitals.

  'Interesting mum, but I suggest that if you really want something like this, then do it at home. There's enough dodgy plastic surgeons in the UK without looking for them in India.'

  'You never encourage me Ryan Kavanagh!' she almost shouted.

  'Think of the risks, there's anaesthetic, that's never anodyne! What if they take off too much fat? What about blood loss and surgical trauma? Recovery can be long and painful, you may even need to wear special bandages for weeks, you could even end up a cripple.'

  'Sod you!'

  He laughed.

  'Forget I asked,' she replied extremely annoyed.

  Ryan ignored her, better she be mad than sad he thought, laughing to himself at the brochure's spiel about aesthetic or cosmetic surgery, that promised to enhance or create a slimmer body, younger, smoother and more erotic.

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  Chapter 37

  Parkly was not the only one laid up, it was two days since Mike Ryman had also been confined to his room with diarrhoea at the Jasmine Palace. Kate had called in a doctor who had prescribed the usual strong antibiotic, the standard remedy for visitors to Kovalam Beach.

  It would have been of interest for tourists to learn that typhoid was the fifth most common communicable disease in India, especially those with children, since children constituted almost three quarters of hospitalized typhoid victims in India. In adults and older people, typhoid was however less frequent, but much more severe.

  The problem was that even sophisticated drugs were proving ineffective against new resistant strains of the typhoid bacteria, which was a major cause of death in developing countries such as India.

  Typhoid, a severe contagious and life threatening disease, was caused by contaminated food, drink and water by a bacteria called Salmonella typhi, which could result in fever with severe complications. If untreated, one in ten of those infected ran the risk of death, if treated early this was reduced, though to a still very high one percent.

  Typhoid fever could be transmitted in several different ways. Bacteria were spread by infected persons and carriers via their defecations and vomit. The bacteria were then transmitted to food and drink by flies and other insects, those who consumed the contaminated aliments were infected by the disease.

  The risk in Kovalam also came from raw vegetables grown on sewage-irrigated fields where bacteria could survive in soil and water for several months.

  Unhygienic conditions were the principal causes of infection, which manifested itself by various symptoms including fever, persistent headache, abdominal pain, diarrhoea, weakness and nausea, which progressively became worse until the infected person fell into a state of semiconciousness and eventually dying.

  The problem was
that typhoid often showed symptoms similar to the much more usual type of gastrointestinal complaint caused by Escherichia coli, thus the risk of undiagnosed typhoid leading to severe complications with intestinal bleeding and perforation.

  Since the development of resistant strains of Salmonella typhi increased the problems of typhoid treatment as well as morbidity and mortality, prevention was the best remedy.

  Tourists in Kovalam were reminded to respect the need for proper hygiene as well as drinking only purified water, avoiding raw vegetables and food left out in the open, such as the fish displayed outside beach restaurants and fruit sold on the beach, the former often stored under doubtful conditions given the daily power cuts.

  Power cuts in Kovalam, due it was said to Kerala's serious power crisis, did not help food hygiene as freezers - if they existed - and refrigerators were without current at least twice a day, few hotels were equipped with standby generators.

  Kerala's power crisis was worsening, first there was the price of oil and second the level of water in the state's hydroelectric reservoirs had fallen to a third of their normal recorded levels as the monsoons brought less rain than in the past. Some blamed climate change for the changing patterns of the south-west and the north-east monsoons that had ensured Kerala of more water than any other Indian state for countless centuries, others blamed the lack of planning or uncontrolled deforestation, the principal cause of rainwater runoff. Whatever the reason the power producers were forced to ration their precious current and it was too bad for tourists, who had no choice but to eat food stored in less than the best conditions.

  Typhoid was an endemic disease in India and a recent outbreak in Kochi had resulted in more than three hundred cases. The incubation period could vary from three days to three months, but in general was one to three weeks.

  It was essential that infected persons washed their hands carefully with soap and hot water after going to the toilet, which also applied to the people around them, including medical personnel and family, but in towns like Kovalam soap and running water were often rare commodities for the poor.