Conversation with a vegetable vendor

We live in a hidden geography of AIDS.

Sheba talked to the vegetable vendor at corner between our housing complex and the JSK centre.

He brought up a distant relative of his.

How distant - how close a relative we have never found out. Close enough for the vegetable seller to talk to us about him. Distant enough for him not to care.

The man in question is dead.

We looked after him - and his wife and two daughters while they were here. All 4 had HIV.

His wife is dead.

His one daughter is dead.

Another one seems to be still alive. In the village.

They are the disappeared. While they lived in a small shanty here - they were anonymous - unknowns.

He was a TB patient. As was she. We knew them for a season. Make that two.

After some time of misery here - they decided to go back to the village.

We doubted they would come back alive.

They didn't.

-------------------------

Should we have forced them to give up their children for adoption before they left? Should we have tried to put them in a hospice? Why did the family not see the kind of change of heart and mind that we had hoped for?

There are many questions - many more than we will have answers for in the here-and-now at least.

I think back to a time when we first met her - it was at a festival time - similar to the crackers and rockets going off today. The families who are bursting crackers tonight are bursting more than this now almost erased family would have used for food in a month.

------------------------

All the vegetable vendor has to say about his relatives is that they are dead. And the one little girl with HIV is still alive - but sick. No more. More customers are there - he goes on selling his vegetables from the little hand-cart, at the corner of the junction.