Basket Case

Today I got holed up all day in a hotel room. I arrived in Dhaka yesterday on a business meeting representing my institution. Meeting was scheduled to start today but, apparently, the opposition party called a strike. Earlier they were planning to take us to the university, where we are meeting, in an ambulance but that plan was cancelled today. The guy told us the political situtation was too unsafe to travel.

The street looks deserted. They have told us not to go outside the hotel so whatever I have peeked out from the window at the end of the hallway (the windows of the hotel rooms are blocked, by walls, not sure if it is a protection measure) probably does not represent the whole Dhaka on the day of this strike. Just a few moments ago there were loud sounds ringing out, sounded like gun shots. Not sure if they were aimed on somebody or were just warning shots or maybe burst out tires. I dared not to check it out. 

Bangladesh was called the "basket case" of Asia, a hopeless country. But it has pulled out of that reputation lately. It has done much better than other countries in the region in terms of several social indicators. The Economist says "Bangladesh combines economic disappointment with social progress.".. "The country has achieved some of the largest reductions in early deaths of infants, children and women in childbirth ever seen anywhere."

Dhaka airport's relative magnanimity just after coming from the chaos of Kathmandu's airport had been a welcome feeling. But today's deserted Dhaka offers no such solace. On the way to the hotel from the airport, a Nepali compatriot and a colleague at a different institution told me he feels better each time he comes to Dhaka: at least we are not the only country which is in a dismal shape, there are some worse than ours. But I am afraid he might be wrong. In it's shabby exterior, this country seems to be doing the right things. That can not be said with confidence in ours. But it indeed offers a consolation that things can be done even in most dismal of states. It is a consolation we terribly need working in the current conditions of Nepal. 

Kanchii

Kanchii is making a gradual recovery. She is our dog. Every morning we take her out to take a dump. One morning, as we brought her back, a nasty black dog, which had sneaked into our compound through the open gate, lunged at her and sunk its sharp terrifying teeth. We did not realize the magnitude of the trauma until Kanchii's belly ballooned up on one side few days later. She gave up eating and camped in her box of carton where she normally sleeps. When she gave us no hope of spontaneous recovery, we called a vet. An enterprising stocky man, he came with his assistant. They grabbed Kanchii, shaved her side, made an incision in the skin which let out a gush of blood-mixed pus. She screamed through her strapped mouth all along. As I stroked her trying to comfort her, I found myself wondering if she knows we were hurting her to make her better. Does she know that? Or, maybe she is just profoundly aggrieved that their masters are inflicting pain on her. There is no way to know. But she has gotten back to wagging her tail and jumping at me as I come home now.

Why did that black dog enter our compound to bite Kanchii? Did he/she have grievances. Who knows what kind of rivalries run among these dogs? But how did she develop these grievances, if any? Kanchii lives in a closed compound. Her only exposure to the outside world is from the morning excursions where she empties her bowel and bladder. Was this black dog offended by Kanchii's morning rituals that she wanted to disembowel her? We know Kanchii as a meek animal. She functions as a door bell, barking primarily when there are people knocking at the gate. She keeps quiet as that person enters inside. How did she offend this black dog? It is hard to find answers. It just makes no sense. 

The world is witness to such black dog behavior in human society time and again. James Orbinski, a physician, who worked through Médecins Sans Frontières in Rwanda during the human carnage from Tutsi, Hutu conflict, writes in his book An Imperfect Offering: 

At one point, as I was driving through the city, a wild dog lunged at my open window. I hadn't seen it approaching as we slowed at a roundabout, and now I saw a pack of wild dogs tearing at a corpse (a dead human) in the grass by the roadside. They looked up at us as we drove by. The dogs were fat, bold and vicious. They were not moving from their mound of flesh. The dog that had lunged at our four-by-four returned to its pack, growling, baring its white teeth, and held me in its stare. 

It is a scene of evil hidden in human run amok. Orbinski who has witnessed it first hand tells us, he has seen humans even worse than the black dog. He writes in the same book: 

....She said that she had escaped being killed by the interahamwe. "My mother hid me in the latrine. I saw through the hole. I watched them hit her with machetes. The men were angry and strong. I watched my mother's arm fall into my father's blood on the floor and I cried without noise in the toilet." I listened to her and watched her lips quiver as her words came at a slow, staccato tempo. I watched her brown eyes look away as tears dropped to her cheeks and I could not stop my own. 

At that moment, I felt both despair and rage. Despair that she knew intimately our capacity for the most extreme rational cruelty; that she was alone. Animals could never do this. Animals can be brutal, but only humans can be rationally cruel. We can choose anything, we can be anything, we can get used to anything, I thought. Only humans can be evil. Only humans can make this choice. I felt my heart pounding and I wanted a gun. I wanted to kill the men who had done this to her. I wanted to pull the trigger again and again and again. My heart was racing; I was fighting my tears, gasping for air, for freshness, for something other than this. Then Eli clasped my arm with his strong hands. I felt an overpowering despair for the little girl, for myself, for all of us-- that we can be alone, trapped in our passions, in our reasons, in our minds, in our politics, that I and those men could be so angry and strong. 

Be it in an African nation, far away from where we live, it incites an indescribable torment. But we have our own share of such images and such despair. I am haunted by an image of charred body, supine in the ground with burnt arms flexed and skull bare. A result of inferno borne of rage from ethnic hatred in Tarai. This was an image I saw on TV, during the Madhesh unrest. An anguish looped incessantly in my heart, "How can a human do this to another?" Recently, I searched for that image on the Internet; maybe I could come to terms with it, seeing it again, I wanted to find a closing. But I could not find that image. Did I imagine it? Or have we forgotten? I do not know. 

But the violence we have gone through in Nepal has left its legacy. In our daily interactions, I find the remnants of that cruelty and violence it a little subtle ways: in our recklessness, greed, indifference and lies. It is disquieting.  

How do we save our honor?

Hospital that I work at runs private clinics. These are clinics where patients pay substantially larger sum of money than the general clinics to see a doctor. They are given a private room, attention from a fully qualified doctor and a personalized setup. All the revenues generated from this goes to the hospital’s charity which funds the cost for patients who cannot afford  care. I was asked to join this clinic. I will be spending 2 hours a week in these clinics. It started last week.

As I was waiting for my patient to come in, a man peeked in. He asked me if I would be able to see his neonate because the pediatrician had not arrived yet. The child was not eating well, he said. I am also a doctor, he declared. He said, he could have taken his child to the emergency room but he was worried about getting infection from that chaos. I agreed. But I told him I am an endocrinologist, I have no skills to evaluate or treat an ill child more than what he probably knows. In a typical pushy manner that I encounter in general clinics from people with some authority and recognition but perhaps also a desperate father bothered by child’s illness, he perseverated if I could still see his child. I said no.

The character in J M Coetzee’s book Diary of a Bad Year deliberates about the US administration’s involvement in torture of captured terror suspects:

Their shamelessness is quite extraordinary. Their denials are less than half-hearted. The distinction their hired lawyers draw between torture and coercion is patently insincere, pro forma. In the new dispensation we have created, they implicitly say, the old powers of shame have been abolished. Whatever abhorrence you may feel counts for nothing. You cannot touch us, we are too powerful. 

Demosthenes: Whereas the slave fears only pain, what the free man fears most is shame. If we grant the truth of what the New Yorker claims, then the issue for individual Americans becomes a moral one: how, in the face of this shame to which I am subjected, do I behave? How do I save my honour?

We doctors also work in a shame. We are scared to take our own child to where we treat other’s children. I cannot imagine of asking my parents to wait in line at our hospital to get a ticket to see a doctor at the general clinic, I would have failed as a son if that situation comes.

The question then becomes glaring to us: How, in the face of this shame to which we are subjected, do we behave? How do we save our honor?