Sickness and Health

There are vehicles outside with early sci-fi sound effects for sirens. The other-worldly whizzes, slowly fading wails and staccatos of beeps suggest that on a plane above Lahore is an inter-galactic highway on which float flying saucers, space shuttles and time-machines.

Sadly, these sirens are actually just those of ambulances, bringing the sick and injured of the city to the medical bazaar outside this college campus. A dozen hospitals, plus pharmacies, labs and diagnostic centres line the road. Staying here we have a heightened awareness of ‘the pestilence that stalks in the night.’

A few days before Christmas, in a relatively minor way, sickness visited our family and we lived through a night of a million billion germs. Calpol flowed, and so, in turns, did bodily fluids and Dettol. There was late night laundering and midnight mopping, then an almost military regime of handwashing. In the morning, I sent the cook to the bazaar for restorative things: yoghurt, rehydration solution, garlic and something called ispaghol.

Meanwhile the mountain of washing had grown from an office shirt and pair of socks the night before to something overwhelming. I staggered downstairs with it. (Now this building was built for the long hot Lahori summers. Its ceilings are high, lost somewhere in the distance overhead; fans hang from immensely long poles and yet still loom far above. High ceilings mean a lot of stairs.)

I descended far below our room to the laundry at the back, a grim little brown and yellow place, and began to fill the tub. Cries from a child above meant I had to make the ascent to take him back to the bathroom.  And so the morning passed, up and down, taps on, taps off, clothes in, clothes out, a rinse, a cry, a spin, a shout.

It was early afternoon when I was finally wringing out the clothes when I noticed there was a door out of the laundry. It was stiff, rarely used, but once opened, led out into a grove of trees through whose leaves filtered lovely winter sunshine. Lemons hung from otherwise bare branches on one tree, while behind fluttered the yellow leaves of another. Bamboo and tall grasses bordered the place. To my right, bougainvillea, though faded in winter, was still pink. To my left was a great thick trunked tree of broad and glossy dark leaves; a pillar of health and strength. Two eagles swooped down, heralds from a wild place full of vigour, fighting over a writhing thing in one of their beaks.  

That evening the cook made a nourishing lentil and rice dish of kitchri and told us it was a gift from him. We all ate bowlfuls. We prayed, read stories of Jesus healing the sick and I am pleased to say, were a lot better the next day.