Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 04:03:44 EST
From: BDeshinoor@aol.comSubject: A non-fictional short story: Vitamin A
"What's the matter?" I asked, "Why has that woman been weeping all morning long?" "It's her son," my eye-surgeon father said. "He's blind. The Mom could not feed him well."
There I was, at home in my parents' flat, in the middle of summer away from college. I was away from the excruciating heat of Dhaka into the deliciously cool climate of Sylhet. My parents are both doctors. At that time they both worked for the government. My father's hospital was about a mile away from the doctor and staff colony in which we lived. There was a big field that stretched in the front of the rows of yellowish three-storied building housing six flats each. Five other professors lived in the same building.
Beyond the compound wall was the local stadium that would rarely flare up with any activity. The government had built that as a routine public works project hoping to encourage and facilitate sports and athleticism. The building had arrived but the expected and much hoped for behavior had not. Homes, even offices, in Bangladesh have curtains at doorways. Privacy is the reason for it. And so I peered out from my bed in the room that I was sharing with my grandfather, through the slit in the fluttering curtains. It was probably past midday for my father had come back from his daily round, lecture, and surgery or outdoor clinic. I say "or" because the day he had surgery he did not attend to outpatients.
We usually had lunch between 1:30 and 2:30 p.m. Consequently, dinner is served late around 8:00 or 9:00 p.m. That seems to be the case with every family in the country. The couple had been there since early morning when my father had visited with them in the small room he maintained as a private clinic. May be they were waiting for a second opinion. They could not afford to visit another doctor for a second opinion. May be they thought that the doctor was mistaken or that he could do something to reverse the calamity. Even if they had accepted the news, they had lost their legs to walk with or the ground to walk on appeared not to be there.
They were a forlorn couple, maybe in their teens or early twenties, wearing whites made of the cheapest fabric, small in build and frail physically. Based on the bindiya on the woman's forehead I realized that the couple was of the Hindu religious persuasion. As they huddled together in the corner of the verandah holding their gift, whom they were told had just lost his promise; they seemed to occupy so little space. The man's head hardly cleared the bamboo-made privacy screen that straddled the verandah wall about one to two feet further up.
Just then my old and bent grandfather walked into the room after having completed ablution. He was ready for the midday prayer. He must have once been a very handsome man, tall, very fair and with a face full of beard. Now he was gnarled with age and diabetes. Although his speech shook with the tremors of Parkinson's, every time he recited the Qur-an, it was clear and beautifully modulated. People would stop to listen to him.
As I reached for the rice my father opened up. "They are poor. With last year's flood the price of a square meal has gone beyond their budget. The mother is malnourished. There is no breast milk for the child. So, he did not get Vitamin A."
I felt a little awkward. I had never heard my parents so anatomically correct about women when speaking with me. I suppose I was college going, mature and he felt nothing wrong with addressing the situation as a regular doctor, in a matter of fact way. Maybe he had something on his mind. He was always so busy. So he had forgotten to make his statement in a more round about way since I was at the table. May be he felt that I would be going to medical school soon and it was time to start talking to me objectively about people's anatomy and physiology.
"There is nothing you can do?" I asked.
"Nothing. Just too late."
"How could this happen? The blindness did not happen overnight. What were they doing?" I anguished.
"They are poor, minimally literate. They have just too many things to wrestle with to realize what maybe slipping by them."
"Did you charge them a fee?" I queried.
"No. May be this will be some kind of a relief."
"Talking about relief, what happened to all the cans of dry powdered milk, Dano, donated by Denmark?"
"Black marketed by one or the other of the politicians. Possibly by one of the four national student leaders. Well, because of that, in the open market, a five-pound can of the same dry milk sells for 150 takas. The guy does not earn that much in one month.""Mom, could I have more curry", I asked just as my father pushed his chair back to go to the bathroom to wash his hand."