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bride burning
February 2008 
Touching the Untouchables ~ Part One
Posted on Dec 26th, 2007
by 
Barbara Raisbeck
Barbara Raisbeck
After that, whenever I saw him on the street, standing next to his cycle, he would come running towards me, face lit up like the sun, excited to see me, to shake my hands with his. He had a way of making me feel extraordinarily special; seeing him would warm me for hours afterwards.
It had been a few days since I’d last seen Mintu, or Pappu, as his friends affectionately refer to him, when a young friend of his rushed towards me on the street. He led me to a large slab bench where a few people were sitting. He pointed to a man with a red patterned scarf wrapped around his head. It took me a few seconds to comprehend that the face peering out from beneath the slight opening in the scarf was my friend, Mintu.
His face swollen and wounded, I asked his friend what had happened. He had fallen, he told me, into an open fire while cooking. My body went numb as I looked at Mintu, his infectious broken tooth smile hidden behind distended blistered lips. Half of his face was an inflamed red mass, the other half was where I could recognize him, his one open eye peering out at me.
I tried to convey my compassion, realizing that even if we spoke the same language, no words could express how badly I felt about his accident. I gently rubbed his arm, while listening to a group of people excitedly trying to fill me in on what happened, most of them speaking in Hindi.
“Did he go to the hospital?” I asked. Mintu produced a blister pack of medication along with a doctor’s prescription for what he advised him to take. “Has he gotten any of the medications?” I wanted to know.
People from the street, wanting to see what was happening, started gathered around us. Young boys stood and looked at Mintu, looks of horror spreading across their perfectly smooth faces.
None of us recognized him, his silly, sweet smile had been swallowed up, his normally hyperactive stance lay in an indolent, near comatose state. I longed for his smile, for his hands reaching for mine. But he was expressionless; his hands lay limp, lifeless.
I sat for a few moments, trying to figure out what to do. I hadn’t seen my friend Til since breakfast, but when I last saw her she was at the cyber-café. She was a nurse; she would know what to do. I just hoped that she was still there, since nearly two hours had passed since I last saw here.
I assured the group of people surrounding Mintu that I would return at once, explaining that I was going to try and find my friend, with the extra reassurance that she was a nurse.
I was relieved to see that she was still at the cyber café. When I saw her, I tapped her on the shoulder, but my words stuck in my throat. I was barely audible, but I managed to express the urgency of the situation to her.
We ran back to where Mintu lay. At once Til, in the manner of an unemotional nurse, climbed onto the slab bench where Mintu was now sitting up, and pulled the scarf away from his burned face. She asked the same questions that I had asked, and then at once sent a man who spoke English to go with me to get the prescribed medicines. She handed the man, who had orangish-red hennaed hair that matched the color of his shirt, a 500-rupee note and told him to take me to the closest pharmacy.
We returned in 15-20 minutes time, but I was not comfortable simply dropping the medication off and wishing Mintu well. The extent of his injuries seemed more serious than that. One of his friends suggested that we try and find a good hospital to take him too. It seems that, as more of the story emerged, Mintu had only went to a clinic, not a hospital. He clearly needed more medical attention than he had received, so I suggested that we call Dutch Priest Father Frances, director of the clinic for the “dalits” or low-castes, as they’re called, to get his advice. I wondered if he would answer his phone since he was taking leave for three days during the Holi festival, to work on writing his fundraising newsletter.
Relieved to hear his voice in the receiver, I handed the phone to Til, so that she, especially as a nurse, could (better) explain the situation to him. And I knew that the words were still stuck in my throat. This was no time for crying.
Upon being apprised of the situation, Father Frances told Til that Mintu’s face is his future, that we must seek emergency care for the burns and do whatever is needed. He advised us to go the University Hospital, a facility that Til was familiar with, having visited it once while working at the clinic. She forewarned me that it would defy my experience of a western hospital, to prepare myself.
Til and I sat on either side of Mintu, holding onto and trying to comfort him while the auto rickshaw that took us to the hospital, bumped along on potholed and rocky roads. The journey was brutal; I heard it in Mintu’s moans that followed each jolt of the narrow seat that the three of us sat on. I wanted to shout out to the driver to be more cautious, less reckless, but it’s the nature of rickshaw drivers. Drive fast, follow close, and pass and squeeze by others at every given opportunity. Or make an opportunity where none exists. Often, there is only a scrape of space between vehicles on india’s roadways. Everyone is rushing towards their finish line with no consideration of others on the road. It’s like being on a speedway with no rules. Horns honk incessantly, some of them so loud it feels as if my eardrums will burst.
Moments after we arrived the hospital we were cocooned in a gathering of curious Indians who wondered what two white women were doing with an injured Indian man.
Once inside the hospital, Mintu was instructed to lie down on a table in an administrative room where he was given a quick look over. We were then asked to take him to a common room where there were eight beds, most of them occupied. He lay there for a long while, motionless, not one sound from him, suffering with his injuries in silence. Flashes of his smile kept coming to me when I looked at him; it was the only former impression that I had of him.
As Til had warned, the hospital bore little resemblance to the hospitals of the western world. The dirtied walls held years of previous patient’s injuries and illnesses. A thick coating of dust covered the electrical receptacles behind the bed that Mintu lay in. There were no blankets provided the patients, and when it came time to administer medicines to Mintu, they had to be purchased by us next door.
After being examined by a number of different doctors, some of them interns, we were informed that there were no beds available on the sixth floor, in the burn ward. We would have to take him elsewhere. They allowed him to occupy the bed through two bottles of IV drips however, before we had to take him to another hospital. This was likely only because a friend of Father Frances’s had come to the clinic; giving a bit of clout to the situation. Or maybe it was a compassionate stance since Mintu was in serious shape, and in need of fluids.
One of the doctors, after learning where Mintu lived (in the slums of Varanasi), asked me if he was my servant. “No”, I casually replied. “He is my friend”. His right eyebrow lilted in surprise as he tried to grasp why I had befriended a “dalit”, an “untouchable”.
From the looks that we received from most everyone in the hospital - the patients, their families, and the staff - it appeared that everyone was wondering the same thing. Their wild-eyed curiosity grew when they witnessed Til and I comforting our friend by gently touching his arm or rubbing his back, and more so when I cradled Mintu’s head in my hand. At one point, when three male orderlies brought a patient into the ward, Til said that they had more eyes for me than for the patients.
The patient that they brought in, an elderly man accompanied by his adult son, moaned loudly as a tube was forcibly being pushed into his nose, a procedure that took several minutes longer than it should have. He kept fighting it, his body writhing in pain, as the orderlies forcefully kept pushing on his legs.
His moaning spread to the patient in the bed to the left of his, a woman in a lime-green sari, whose face was completely charred. She sat in a squatting position on the bed, and when she moved, I could see that her neck and chest were also burnt. I imagined that she was a victim of bride burning, and by the gurgling sound emanating from her lungs in between her labored breathing, it was likely that she would succumb to her injuries.
Two women, their head scarves pulled close to shield their faces, sat next to her bed, but there was no feeling of concern from either of them. If the woman was indeed set on fire, they may well have been the ones who lit the match, since mother or sister in laws are often the perpetrators of such crimes. And their presence in the hospital would be one for show, and especially to make sure that the victim told no one what *really* happened. It would be deemed a “kitchen accident”, where seldom does anyone get prosecuted.
The wailing coming from the two of them, the burnt woman and the man with the tube in his nose, became nightmarish. I felt sure that I was watching a film; that I was an observer. But when I looked over at my friend Mintu, and saw him looking back at me with a sort of childlike panic, I knew that this was no film, and that our friend’s injuries were serious and in need of more attention than we were getting.
To be continued…
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Very sad story. I hope he is better now. I will be waiting for the continuation of your story. Thanks,
Love Billy
thank you for your comment and concern Billy. I will be seeing Mintu when i go back to Varanasi; i've not seen him since February, and will post a story about his progress then. I'll post Part II of the story soon.
love,
barbara