And his being homosexual didn’t bother you? “Not at all! He was one of my closest friends. Constantly flirted with me. I guess he was in love with me, though we never talked about it. One of his favorite pranks was to arrive in my room at night, wet from the shower and wearing just his towel, holding his toothbrush, grinning away, saying ‘Basant, I want you to use my toothbrush to clean my bum, it’s still not clean.’ Oh, he was hilarious.”
And nobody persecuted him? “Nobody would have dared. I would have beaten up anyone who hassled him. Anyhow, he was a great sportsman and everyone liked him.”
I was puzzled. How could my father combine his unqualified comfort with that friend and his lasting affection for him with the patently homophobic views he had expressed when I was younger? I didn’t ask, mainly because we had both moved far beyond those harrowing years, and that was all that mattered to me.
But that opening up led us to a new level of comfort. One of my father’s favorite bantering habits whenever women friends of mine were around was to say to them and me both, in a tone that was at once jesting and yet hopeful, “Come on, son, why don’t you and she fall in love. Isn’t it time you tried a woman?”
In the past, I’d ignore his comments or snap at him in irritation. But now, in one instance, I retorted, “Dad, if you try a man, I’ll try a woman. Which of your friends will it be?”
My father guffawed at that retort, as did my friends. “You never know, son, stranger things have happened!” he quipped. My friends erupted in cheers and catcalls. The banter melted away the last of our tensions.
The years hurtled past, such strange years, so utterly different from anything else I had lived. By mid-1997, two and a half years from the time I had begun the research, I had a close-to-final draft of my manuscript. The end of what had once seemed an impossible task was in sight.
In the meanwhile, I had lived some of the most meaningful years of my life, despite the hardships and despite all that I had forgone in terms of having a normal, settled life.
Years of exhaustive research had added immeasurably to my knowledge about poverty and the challenges of social justice. It had, ironically, left me more ambivalent than ever about India’s track record.
There was so much evidence to show that on matters of social justice India had advanced at breathtaking speed in the fifty years since the end of colonial rule and its ruinous depredations. Famines and epidemics no longer killed millions. Feudalism had been ended so effectively that old elites no longer dominated politics. The most extreme forms of oppression and exploitation had been vastly reduced. Poor people voted increasingly freely in record numbers—their choices could make or break electoral prospects. The impact of affirmative action programs, the world’s largest, was stunning. India’s president in its fiftieth year was a Dalit man, the widely admired K. R. Narayanan, and a forty-one-year-old Dalit woman, Kumari Mayawati, had twice become the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. In numerous other states, women like her had achieved commanding political power through their own prowess rather than dynastic inheritance. I sometimes felt that independent India was more strongly committed to correcting old wrongs and achieving social justice than almost any other country.
But more often I felt frustration and anger. The striking gains made in addressing the gargantuan accumulated wrongs of colonialism were the result of socialistic commitments made at Independence. Both the strength of those commitments and their impact seemed to be fading precipitously by the late 1990s. Nearly one in two Indians still lived in dire poverty, a number that outstripped the country’s entire population at Independence. None of the basic building blocks needed for the poor to advance—whether schools and health care, safe drinking water and sanitation, housing, or guaranteed-employment programs—existed or functioned in most parts of the country. As a result, India’s performance on social indicators was worse than that of most other developing countries, including several of its neighbors. (Only the handful of Communist-ruled states and southern states performed significantly better.) Nobody was ever held to account for this chronic misgovernance. When the poor sought help or simply fair treatment, they were treated with a dehumanizing disdain—by even the lowest-ranking functionaries—that I had never seen elsewhere in the world. Seeing all that left me to draw the bleak conclusion that as a nation India was callously indifferent to its citizens’ well-being and would forever remain the land of poverty that the British had reduced it to.
All that knowledge was important to me, but more precious still was the relationship I had developed with Ram Dass, Prayaga Devi, and others in Baba ka Gaon. It had evolved gradually, like all deep-rooted relationships, marked with moments of epiphany that bridged the vast divides between our lives.
There was the afternoon, just a month into my research, when Ram Dass had cut off my apology for burdening him with questions after his arduous day at work. “You never need to apologize for asking me questions,” he said firmly, the first time he had spoken to me without deference. “Until you came to the village, no rich person had ever asked me how my life was or what I felt. And if I don’t tell you my history, how will people learn from what I’ve suffered?”
There was the day, months later, that I realized that Ram Dass and the other Dalits in Baba ka Gaon had come to trust me wholly, thought of me as one of them because I had stood by them unflinchingly through a violent attack by the Thakur landowners.
There was the time that I asked Prayaga Devi what she thought of trapeze artists wearing skirts instead of saris—I had taken her and her grandchildren to their first circus—and she replied in her characteristic measured manner, “Everyone must dress according to their needs. They cannot wear saris while swinging upside down! Just like we Dalit women cannot pull our pallus over our faces like upper-caste women, because we’d cut off our hands while harvesting.”
There was the day in Bombay that I asked Ram Dass what had been his favorite haunt in the city when he had lived there many decades back. His voice ringing with excitement, he said that he loved the Kala Ghoda museum, the colloquial name for the Prince of Wales Museum of Western India, more than anything else to gaze at the ancient sculptures of the Buddha. “The first time I came to the museum, I was so astounded by it that I spent half the day here,” Ram Dass said. He had taken every member of his family to the museum, visiting it more than a dozen times.
And then there were the days, most moving of all, whenever I left Baba ka Gaon, that I saw Prayaga Devi weeping at my leaving, saw Ram Dass and so many others in the crowd fighting back tears, too, and saw me struggling not to sob openly like Prayaga Devi. I had become part of another family that I loved deeply.
FIFTEEN
DEATHS—AND WOMEN’S REVOLUTIONS
In the summer of 1997, with the manuscript of the book delivered to the publishers, I left Delhi to join UNICEF’s health policy division in New York City. Just eighteen months later, in late 1999, I turned around and went back again, this time to write a book about India’s escalating AIDS epidemic, my research underwritten by a Ford Foundation grant. For the next many years, my writing and advocacy focused overwhelmingly on AIDS and its devastating impact on sexual outlaws.
By that point, the AIDS pandemic had become one of the world’s defining threats. More than 50 million adults and children had contracted HIV, of whom nearly 20 million had died. An estimated 13 million children had lost one or both parents to the disease. Almost all that toll was concentrated in low- and middle-income countries—all from a disease practically unknown just seventeen years before.
Even worse devastation lay ahead, the United Nations’ newly formed AIDS program, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, known as UNAIDS, warned. In 1999 alone, 5.8 million adults and children contracted HIV, a daily average of nearly 16,000 people. In that year, 2.5 million people died of AIDS—equivalent to more than a hundred Boeing 747s crashing every day with no survivors. Only a handful of developing countries had managed to lower their infection rates, no
tably including Thailand, Uganda, and several West African and Latin American nations. And even though the newly launched antiretroviral drug combinations were, Lazarus-like, literally bringing dying people in rich countries back to healthy life, there was no hope that developing countries could ever afford them, as a year’s treatment for an individual cost $20,000, many times the average income in even the best-off of those nations.
To many experts, India was the greatest source of worry outside sub-Saharan Africa. Though just a dozen years had passed since the first indigenous cases of HIV had been detected among Selvi and other sex workers, more people were infected with HIV there than in any other country, according to estimates by the UN and other international groups. UNAIDS estimated that it had affected somewhere between 4 million and 5 million adults, approximately 1 percent of the adult population. As many as half a million more were contracting HIV every year, and more than 150,000 were dying annually of AIDS, its estimates suggested. The US government’s National Intelligence Council, an expert research arm of the CIA, warned that an astronomical 25 million Indians could be infected within years—with India’s billion-strong population, even a small increase in rates made a difference of millions of people in absolute numbers.
The consensus among close observers was that the Indian government’s prevention efforts were too patchy to check the epidemic, given how widely it had spread. Every aspect of the response was imperiled by the abysmal condition of public health programs, chronically underfunded by the government, which left all but the well-off practically without access to even basic health-care services. Only a handful of well-run state governments had rolled out comprehensive HIV prevention efforts.
Within days into my research, I could sense the shocking change in scale. From previous AIDS research trips, I could remember virtually every encounter with people hit by the epidemic—an artifact of the long lead time from infection with HIV to actual sickness. Now there were countless HIV-positive individuals. In every city, they waited in unending lines in the outpatient departments that specialized in sexually transmitted diseases or tuberculosis (the most common AIDS-related opportunistic infection in poorer countries). They gathered at “positive people” associations and HIV-focused nongovernmental groups, their worries and sickness overriding fears of persecution, desperately seeking confidential HIV tests as well as advice on where to find doctors who didn’t discriminate and how to hide their illness so that they would not be evicted by landlords or fired by employers.
I met impoverished manual laborers, low-income truck drivers, and upper-income professionals. There were sex workers and housewives. There were injecting drug users as well as policemen. They had had nothing in common to draw them together earlier—but now they had been forced together by AIDS.
Their suffering was exacerbated by the real threat of persecution facing anyone whose HIV status became known to others. Though the federal government had formally ended coercive AIDS policies in 1992, a myriad of abuses continued, so widespread as to defy cataloguing.
Both public and private hospitals continued to eject patients found to have HIV and leaked positive HIV test results to the press, employers and health-care insurers. In 1998, the Supreme Court ruled that any man with HIV would be prohibited from marrying, “as the marriage would have the effect of spreading the infection of his own disease, which is obviously dangerous to life, to the woman he marries.” Newspapers all over the country carried reports about individuals or even entire families who had killed themselves because of the AIDS-related persecution they feared or had suffered.
Sex workers continued to bear the brunt of the persecution. On the orders of the courts or government, sex workers were routinely rounded up in raids and forcibly tested for HIV, with those testing positive incarcerated indefinitely. In 1994, the Maharashtra government attempted to pass legislation that would have allowed it to brand HIV-positive sex workers with indelible ink. In 1996, the Mumbai High Court ordered the arrest and mandatory HIV testing of more than four hundred sex workers; many of the women were incarcerated for over a year, and seven died in that time. The Supreme Court made several rulings that further legitimized the persecution and abuse of sex workers.
My notebooks were soon overflowing. Every one of the interviews with those who were HIV-positive was heartbreaking because of the desperation they exuded, so different from the philosophical resignation with which I had seen Indians accept more conventional catastrophes, however awful or unremitting. Their terror leached through as relentless anxiety. Every conversation returned to the looming prospect of death. For those with children, there was the added feverish dread about which relative or friend could be trusted to house them, how to set aside some money to provide for them, how to ensure their well-being.
The one constant I found in my research was that AIDS had devastated the lives of India’s sex workers like no force ever before. In the dozen years since Selvi and the five other sex workers in the Madras reformatory had been found to have HIV, countless more sex workers had contracted HIV, had fallen mortally sick, or had died. No one knew exactly how many—or even exactly where.
Given the rudimentary state of India’s vital registration systems, many deaths among the poor were never recorded, particularly those of unknown women dying on the roadside. The governmental National AIDS Control Organization had established serosurveillance sites in major urban red-light areas, which blind-tested for HIV blood samples drawn from the women, but even by 1997 there was just a tiny handful of sites and even fewer that provided consistent trend data. Those sites reported infection rates ranging from under 5 percent to nearly 50 percent, with the highest rates in the cities of western and southern India. The estimates from Bombay were harrowing, suggesting that every second woman sex worker in the central red-light areas had contracted HIV—as high as the peak rates recorded among gay men in New York City. And though those results were unlikely to be representative of the many areas where sex work did not take place from brothels, the nongovernmental organizations that had sprung up to undertake HIV prevention with those women reported, anecdotally, that considerable numbers of sex workers were falling sick and dying. Adding to the imprecision, there was still very little empirical knowledge about sex work in India; much of what was known was still more guesswork than fact.
But it soon became evident, to my great surprise, that alongside the havoc AIDS was wreaking in the lives of sex workers, the epidemic had also catalyzed positive changes for them, perhaps even transformative changes for those who might survive the epidemic. That dynamic reminded me of the impact that AIDS had rapidly had on gay activism in the United States and elsewhere in the West, evident in the revitalized push for equal rights as well as the landmark success in forcing the pharmaceutical industry and US government to develop lifesaving drugs at record speed.
In India, those changes were driven by a handful of unusual HIV prevention efforts focused on sex workers. They rapidly evolved from being standard, top-down public health projects into collectives run by the sex workers themselves that began to catalyze once unimaginable changes—from forcing the government and the women’s movement in India to pay heed to sex workers and their right to self-determination to profoundly influencing global thinking about sex work.
Over the years, I got to know well three of the most remarkable of those sex workers’ collectives. They were coincidentally founded in the very same year, 1992, but in far-flung reaches of the country—Calcutta, Madras, and the small agricultural town of Sangli in Maharashtra, hundreds of miles apart. And though they developed independently, the common thread linking the groups was that their founders acted on the evidence that when sex workers saw that their overall welfare was genuinely at the heart of their efforts—that their most hated burdens were being tackled—they themselves rose up to fight determinedly for their well-being, of which protection from HIV was an urgent part.
Their commitment to the women’s well-being and their right to self-determina
tion set the collectives far apart from mainstream HIV prevention projects focused on sex workers. Those had begun to multiply because of the millions in funds available from the National AIDS Control Organization. The mainstream projects—largely established by Indian and foreign not-for-profits that had so far worked on other health issues—struggled to make headway on even their narrow goal of trying to control the spread of HIV, once faced with the difficult realities of sex work. Indeed, the worst of them did the sex workers outright harm by aiding authorities with forcible testing, raids, and imprisonment or by duplicitously helping pharmaceutical companies use them as guinea pigs for testing drugs and purported cures.
The Madras organization, the South India AIDS Action Programme, or SIAAP, owed part of its astonishing success to the very woman who, years before, had been among the first to be subjected to the state’s brutality: Selvi, the sex worker who had been imprisoned in the reformatory for four years. It had been set up by Shyamala Nataraj, the journalist who, in 1989, had filed the legal challenge that had won hundreds of HIV-positive sex workers imprisoned in Tamil Nadu, including Selvi, their freedom.
By the time I first visited SIAAP, two thousand sex workers had joined local collectives launched by the group in villages, towns, and cities across Tamil Nadu. This was a world away from its start just six years earlier, when the fledgling organization had begun with no budget at all, operating out of a tiny rented room, with its staff comprising just Nataraj and a part-time assistant. I quizzed Nataraj—a woman of my age with a boyish figure, cropped hair, and an unsettlingly direct gaze—about its evolution.
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