By Shyam Pandharipande
Nagpur(IANS) : She works 10 hours a day, eats well and dresses immaculately. Watching Shah Rukh Khan-starrers and cricket, especially when Yuvraj Singh is at the crease, are among her spare time passions.
Too busy to talk as she was putting up posters and flower vases for World AIDS Day Saturday at the government medical college hospital, she requested the correspondent to wait for the function to end only to say sorry again as she hurried for a party with a busload of HIV positive children.
Incredible though it may seem from her visage today, 26-year-old Shashikala Gadge from this Maharashtra city was not spared any of the cruel ordeals that an HIV patient has to suffer once she tested positive for the affliction five years ago.
“It was a bolt from the blue when I was declared HIV infected during my pregnancy tests,” Shashikala told IANS.
“I hardly knew anything about the disease, the doctors refused to touch me and my husband came two days later, not with fruits and medicines but with divorce papers,” she recalled.
“I told my husband I would readily grant divorce if he tested negative… but when he tested positive and it was revealed that his infection was older, he agreed to live with me.” Her husband’s relatives, however, were not so kind. “I was forbidden to sit on the sofa and my sister-in-law would smash my tea cups,” she said.
She spent all the money she got by selling the house and an auto-rickshaw on her husband’s treatment.
“With relatives and society including doctors remaining unkind, I went to the brink of suicide in a weak moment but desisted from the desperate act thinking about my daughter.
“Moreover, I realised in a flash that this escape route was not for me. For, unlike most others in my situation, I had declared in front of all doctors and patients in the hospital that I had tested positive and that I won’t hide it from the world since I had committed no sin,” Shashikala told IANS.
Taking medicines regularly, scrupulously following medical advice on diet and doing yoga and pranayam without fail, Shashikala has managed to keep herself in good health.
What’s more, she has formed a group of HIV positive women, mostly widows of deceased AIDS patients, and ensures they keep themselves fit too.
Called Sanjeevan, the NGO is a group “of the positive (people), for the positive, by the positive” working indefatigably to turn into positive the attitude of society towards AIDS patients as well as educating and aiding the afflicted and their families.
“And a positive change is coming, slowly but steadily,” said Milind Bhrushundi, a doctor and founder of Sanjeevan and now its advisor.
“I examine, on an average, 40 to 50 HIV patients every day and perform all kinds of surgeries on more than 400 of them in a year,” he said, adding that many other doctors too were doing this.
“And mind you, if utmost precaution is not taken, this does involve a risk of contracting the infection while taking a prick or doing blood transfusion,” the doctor said.
“This (shunning HIV patients) could be the case 10 years ago and it might be happening to a certain extent even today in government hospitals, but painting the entire medical fraternity with the same brush is unfair. What we need today is sensitisation of HIV patients’ relatives who, by and large, still remain callous,” he said.
As for Shashikala, while her parents have accepted her, her husband’s family hasn’t. She is not bitter about them.
“I am just one of the 90 percent of two million women in India who have got the infection from their husbands but are still treated as sinners,” she says philosophically. She now lives separately from her husband.
In fact, she considers herself fortunate to be earning, working in an NGO dedicated to the cause of women like her. “I am taking care of myself and the ‘positive’ women in my group… and hope my daughter fulfils my dream of becoming a pilot whether I live to see that day or not,” she concludes.
Saturday was World AIDS Day. India has 2.5 million HIV/AIDS patients, second only to South Africa.