The cosmos milled about the nondescript byculla street corner, where a run down clinic, set up by kamal damle, clamored for a survival sustaining eminence. The board was the same red paint on a rusted, wasting, white coated iron sheet. An experiment with fonts was probably the only betrayal of the capitulations to marketing, that the inheritance of a bigha of land in barren raigad afforded.
The MBBS emblazoned, could of course be contended for circumstantially, interpreted as one's
economic position dictated.go figure.
The arduous road chalked out by reality for prostitutes like padma, did not have a propensity for lavish and elaborate medical care. So the the throngs at random street corners in byculla, did have a smattering of kamathipura locals.
A complaint never permeated out the lips of the mentioned crowd at the dingy sustenance, they entrusted their health with but then obviously riches of life had never had a particular penchant for leaking into their sore pockets or sordid, sweaty blouses(bras were tedious contraptions, given their profession) for that matter.
Padma was, therefore a natural clientele for the dispensary. She hadn't been frequent at the place, i mean, not as much as some of the other clients most notably, those whores, whose HIV had assumed terminal dimensions.
But since the death of her son, she'd grown increasingly conscious regarding, every unusual characteristic, her health displayed, however frivolous, it might have been.
The leash afforded by damle's compromised education did not allow him to decipher the test result's for what they were.A look of abject ignorance was, by practice, masked by a veneer of sadness and shock. It was, in general, a trusted method to eke out, more than necessary dough from some of the most deprived pockets.
But in padma's case, it only acted as a catalyst to accelerate the misgivings, she already had been having about her health. And for this dangerously precocious conclusion of hers ,she, if not justified, wasn't at least completely complicit. The stat that nearly 40% of kamathipura prostitutes had HIV, did nothing to compell her to deliberate over her inference.
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A small column on the page that dealt with local news,one day, blared the headlines,
Fire incinerates three shacks.
A brief read would reveal the number of fatalities to be 2.
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An unusually animated humming, the same evening hung like a lazy and languorous cloud, over the small queue at damle's clinic. Ignoring the persistent colloquy for a while, the curiosity of damle, finally overpowered his cold professional facade.A few right questions to a few right people, and he could finally make out the truth though the translucent visage of colloquial exaggerations.
'The fire' was the pestilence that had afflicted the tongues. The proliferation, almost epidemic.
A fire had broken out at padma's place, charring her and her husband to a black sooty mess.
The fire engulfed the two neighbouring houses before the fire brigade, blared its authority over the inferno and managed to control the fire before any other casualties could occur.
Suicide was suspected, but the fire, it seemed vapourised every clue to padmas's heavenly abode itself, or so it seemed, as a lethargic police, was diffident to sieve through the mess, that remained.
Instead of facing the long drawn death that was in store for her, or so she thought, the immolation, from the left over kerosene from the stove(pondering over her act, she hadn't eaten anything, the previous day, nor did her husband, or so it seemed), was a dignified and swift way to end her troubles.
That night, when kamal damle went to bed, putting curtains on yet another day, he did not have a reason to ponder over an innocuous blood transfusion he'd carried out on inspector gaitonde, some years back.
Having the Blood sterilised from the retrovirus wasn't his worry.
He had also not foreseen what inspector gaitonde's perverted inclinations would reap.
The connection to padma, hence, was pretty serpentine.
Snoring indulgently, the paucity of knowledge of the above resulted in him being in-complicit......the conscience for now, had been cloaked by the mind's short sightedness.....
It had been just another day, in the life of kamal damle, and the last one for padma and her husband......
We, live on......
