Sick Leave

Let me tell you a story. It is a simple story really, and so let me make it snappy. There was a bloke who woke up one morning...

Let me tell you a story. It is a simple story really, and so let me make it snappy. There was a bloke who woke up one morning and found that he had a bad case of the flu. So he took a day off work, popped a pill and took some rest. That’s that, really — not much of a story, is it? But wait, I am missing a few details and so it is best that I go over it again. There lives, this bloke called Govind in a place very, very far from us. He is a regular chap, really, pretty much like you or me...

Govind Rao awoke at 5AM like he did everyday in the 10X10 room that was his home. He slept on the dried cow dung floor and the walls of the house were made of mud - the roof was thatched. The room had no furniture or lights. The two sets of spare clothes he owned hung on a line drawn across his room. At one corner lay the remains of a fire he had lit with fire wood the previous night to cook his dinner. There was still another two hour before the sun rose over the fields and the December chill was biting even through the walls of his house. It was time to set out for another long day of work on the fields. Today, however, as soon as he woke up, he realized he felt unwell probably owing to the cold night that had penetrated the walls of his house. He had a headache and his nose felt all blocked up — only a minor inconvenience and Govind didn’t give it a second thought as he set about the business of getting ready for work.

In about twenty minutes, Govind was off, making his way to his field, a kilometer away from the village. It was still dark, but as he walked through the village, his path was illuminated by light from kerosene lamps from the other houses. People were already up all through the village and were busy preparing to leave for work in the fields; some of them in fact had already left. The womenfolk were up even before the men, as they had to prepare food for the men before they left. Govind stayed alone, his father having died when he was a child of a minor wound on his leg that had turned bad and his mother having succumbed to tuberculosis the previous year. Govind was not married — he couldn’t afford that as yet. So he stayed alone, and never bothering to have any breakfast, always got to the fields before anyone else.

There were less than 2000 people in Winwal, the village that Govind had stayed in all his life. Most of the villagers were poor and Govind considered himself lucky to own his own patch of land. He made nearly 900Rs a month, while those who didn’t own land made only around 600Rs working on fields owned by others. Almost all the houses in the village were made of mud, with the exception of three to four stone houses, which were owned by shop owners or those who owned bigger plots of land.

It was still dark when Govind got to his patch of land. It was small enough for him to work alone (in any case he could not afford to hire anyone), so he was usually alone for most of the day. His friend Mohan owned a field shouting distance away and they went back to the village for lunch together everyday. During the day, however, they rarely met, each being busy at their work. That day, as Govind started work, he immediately felt weak and began to worry if he could last through the day. He took his mind off his illness and tried to focus on the task at hand. For Govind, missing work often meant a reduction in income in one way or the other and there was no way he could afford to miss a day’s work for what seemed to be a common cold. So he braved the cold and carried on with his work. By mid morning, however, the heat of the sun had aggravated his symptoms; he had a splitting headache and his nose was running like a tap. He also felt feverish. So, when he went home for lunch, instead of hurrying to cook lunch and then getting back to the field as he usually did, he decided to skip work in the afternoon and stay and home to rest. After a quick lunch of rice gruel, he lay down and tried to sleep, but found it difficult. He hadn’t forgotten the final unfortunate lesson both his parents had taught him — never wait for an illness to go away. It never may.

The government doctor would not visit the village for another five days and there were no medical shops in the village. There were three to four shops, but none of they stocked medicines. They only stocked a handful of products, mostly food and basic toiletries. The nearest pharmacy was at Jawahar, 14 kilometers away and going there meant losing a day’s work, since the bus left at 8AM, but the returning bus was only at 3PM. More importantly, the ticket cost 7Rs. either way and he would spend an additional 5Rs or so on medicines. Another alternative was to buy the medicine from one of those people in the village who always had a stock of medicines. They purchased medicines and other odds and ends every time they went to Jawahar to resell to whoever needed it in the village — at a higher price, of course. This worked out cheaper overall, but there was no way of ensuring that he got the right medicine, which was an issue anyways, since he had no idea as to which the right medicine was.

Govind finally fell into a fitful sleep and it was evening when he awoke, and he still felt ill. However, he decided to venture out and seek out the “Police Patel” to ask what medicine he should buy from the medical shop at Jawahar the next day — for he had already decided to make the trip. There was a small crowd outside the Police Patel’s house and Govind had difficulty locating him.

There were only four houses that had television sets in the village and the Police Patel’s was one of them. In the evenings, many people gathered around these television sets to watch their favorite programs. The television had not yet been switched on, but people had gathered there, knowing that the television would be stitched on any minute now that darkness was falling and they could all watch through the window. Every night, as darkness fell, tens of villagers gathered outside the Police Patel’s house to gawk at strange and wonderful stories of beautiful people and far away places that most of them had never heard about and none of them would ever see. Watching television had recently overtaken the radio as the most popular evening entertainment in the village. There were no newspapers or magazines in the village since no one would deliver newspapers so far out and like Govind, most of the villagers couldn’t read anyway.

He finally found that the Police Patel was out visiting some relatives at a nearby village and would be back only the next evening. This posed a serious problem, since Govind had always relied on the Police Patel to tell him what medicine to buy. He could just go to the shop and ask the chemist, but then he didn’t trust the chemist to give him something he could afford. There were no names that Govind recognized and he would have got the name written on a piece of paper by the Police Patel which he would have shown at the shop the next day, but now with no Police Patel, he was in a quandary.

As he stood outside the Police Patel’s house, wondering what to do, he ran into Mohan, who promptly solved his problem. Mohan had saved the medicine wrapper from the last time he had a fever and he was willing to lend it to Govind so that he could display it at the shop when he got there the next day. The medicine had worked just fine, claimed Mohan and he had been back on the field just the next morning. Govind was relieved and once Mohan had finished his TV viewing for the night, he accompanied Mohan to his house to pick up the life saving wrapper.

When he got home, Mohan kept the wrapper under a stone in the farthest corner of his home before he went to sleep. This was the corner where he stored his most precious possessions — a pair of plastic colored glasses purchased at the fair at Jawahar, an empty soft drink bottle that he had found mysteriously near his field and his most prized possession, a five-year-old pink cardboard calendar that his uncle had brought for him from a rare visit to Nagpur.

The next morning, Mohan was up by 5, but as soon as he was up, he felt a throbbing in his head and immediately remembered his illness. He stood up to judge how he felt and immediately decided that the result of his little experiment was not good. He felt feverish and his whole body ached. He decided to carry on with his plan and catch the 8 O’clock to Jawahar. He went back to sleep. There was still plenty of time to catch the bus.

The bus was late. Mohan squatted on the roadside along with Madan, one of the shopkeepers in the village going to Jawahar to pickup his monthly supplies for the shop. He had been waiting for around half an hour and the sun was rising in the sky. The cold had long since evaporated and the heat was sapping whatever energy was left in Govind. He began to see dark spots and felt that in another few minutes he would faint. Then, when he felt he could take it no more and was planning to move away to sit under the tree some distance away, the bus appeared in the distance. The bus was already full and there were no seats available. He got on and moved to the back where he squatted on the floor holding on to the rusty pole for support. He paid up the 7Rs for the ticket and then settled down for the 30-minute ride to Jawahar. The bus held an assorted crowd among others, a bunch of women carrying baskets on their way to the market at Jawahar, two shop owners on their way to buy provisions from the wholesale market there, a priest from the temple further up the road to an unknown destination, three pansy overdressed vagabonds in bright colored shirts and stylishly combed hair on their way to see the sights at Jawahar, a generous sprinkling of unremarkable men and one very sick farmer burning with fever and racked with pain squatting at the back of the bus.

There was a bus stop at Jawahar that was just off the market road, which was a good thing because Ambika Chemists was just around the corner and Govind didn’t have to walk much to get there. The Chemist was having a busy day, like always, since it was only one of three chemist’s shops in Jawahar and it catered to a number of villages in the vicinity apart from the local population. Govind waited his turn and when he had the counter boy’s attention, he presented the wrapper that he had been holding in his hand ever since he left home. This was a common mode of purchase at the shop, especially by the villagers and the counter boy saw nothing remarkable about this.

“How many?” he enquired.

“How much?” Govind countered.

“1.5Rs for one” he was informed.

That wasn’t too bad. Govind could actually afford to buy two. He would take one then and there and keep the second one for later. He completed the transaction and left the shop, feeling better already. He walked back to the bus stand and having found a public tap there, swallowed one of the tablets helped down with some water. He then lay down on the ground in the bus stop and tried to sleep. He had a long wait before the bus that would take him back would arrive at three in the afternoon.By the time Govind got back home that evening, his fever had subsided a little, but he felt weak from not having eaten since that morning. He prepared some rice gruel and drank it down. Mohan came to visit him on his way back from his field. Partly to see how he was doing, but also to retrieve his wrapper. Mohan chatted for a while and then having retrieved his wrapper and having reassured Govind on the efficacy of the medicine left. In a few hours, the fever was back and Govind took the second tablet too. Govind found sleep hard to come by and he lay awake for very long before he finally fell asleep. While awake, he wondered what he would do if he did not feel better by the morning. Another trip to Jawahar was too expensive and he simply could not afford to miss another day’s work. The only option he could think of was to go to the village medicine man. He had once gone there when his mother had a serious stomach problem. The medicine man had given her some rice to eat and had chanted some mantras to quell the spirits and thus cure her problem. His mother hadn’t been sure that it had worked and had used tablets more often since then.All these thoughts passed through his head as Govind lay in bed trying to sleep. In a few hours another day would begin and the villagers would go on with their lives. The lanterns would be lit, womenfolk will bustle with household chores, the men would head for the fields, children would continue to sleep a little longer and then play or cry or be led unwillingly to the creek to be washed and Govind would know if he was ok to go back to his field and carry on with his life or whether he was not. But for now, the village was asleep. The mist had descending, making it even colder than it already was and even the dogs and the cattle were asleep or silent, unwilling to pierce the ghostly silence. The road to Jawahar was deserted too; no vehicles passed that way at night. There was just the almost dry creek, the broken water pump, the fields where the villagers eked out their living and the thatched huts partly obscured by the mist that contained two thousand sleeping people somehow forgotten in the distance traversed by the long winding road to Jawahar and the rest of the world. Meanwhile, in a corner of Govind’s hut, there was an additional item that had been added to his precious collection — the green colored plastic wrapper of two tablets of medicine torn at one end to remove the tablets, but otherwise in good condition with a stone over it to keep it from flying away.