At a reading a few weeks ago in London, John Berger mentioned two events he’d been witness to recently, presumably in the village in France where he lives. The first was a procession of wild boars — old as well as young ones — suddenly crossing the road. The second had to do with birds (possibly water hens) taking off from a pond, and Berger noticing the water dripping from their feathers. Both incidents, he said, had to do with what had inadvertently become a theme that evening: the intermittent visibility of what is ordinarily invisible.

Why does this tension between the seen and the unseen move us, almost independently of the value of what’s being revealed? I suppose it was a promise of a window opening up, rather than the idea of usefulness, that drew me at first to the Gates Foundation’s proposal when they wrote to me about two years ago to contribute to an anthology, with fifteen other writers, about the problem of AIDS in India. The suggestion was that I, like the others, travel to some specific place, with a specific history and constituency in the story of HIV in India. The piece, in effect, would be partly the result of rudimentary field work — interviews and notes — and partly of the traveller’s alienated eye. The latter, perhaps even more than the former, would be attentive to the invisible in the visible.

My own sense of the immediacy of the problem of HIV in India came to me without warning five years ago, when I’d gone to Bombay, the city in which I grew up, to take part in a festival of literature and music. Three friends had come to my event; one of them was a friend from school, a former smack addict who now claimed to be ‘clean’. At around midnight, we dispersed; my schoolfriend headed to the station to catch a ‘local’ homeward. The following evening, after several telephone calls, I realized he’d never got back, and pieced together a story: my friend had overdosed on drugs and collapsed in front of the Prince of Wales Museum, an area that was a hub of junkie activity; he’d been found unconscious by a constable at 2 am, and admitted to G.T. Hospital.

Where was G.T. Hospital? The morning after, when I visited my friend in the ICU, I discovered it was in the heart of the city, not far from the route I took to school, or the posh club, the Bombay Gymkhana, where my parents spent mornings in the weekend. The reason I’d never known it is because it is a public hospital: the sort of place that the upper-middle class, ordinarily, has so little to do with. In some ways, as my friend’s case proved, it served as a dumping ground; and, as a result (or so claims Dr Saple, who was once in charge of the skin and venereal diseases department there), it was one of the first places in Bombay where patients with this new and disquieting disease were ‘dumped’ by other hospitals. That morning, indeed, the young doctor attending to my friend — who had miraculously survived — told me that a woman was dying of AIDS in an adjoining wing of the ICU; that she’d contracted the disease from her husband, who was a ‘migrant labourer’; that ‘migrant labourers’ themselves pick up the disease from sex workers. The husband, in this instance, was dead. As we know — without the thought ever coming clearly to the surface — the term ‘migrant labour’ usually describes, in India, itinerant wage-earners within the nation, rather than people travelling outside it, generally men without an address who are contributing to building the infrastructure of globalized India. We pass them by repeatedly on roads and construction sites; with homosexuals and intravenous drug users, they, in their lonely nexus and vigil with sex workers, represent one of the main high-risk groups in the story of HIV in India. That morning, standing inside a hospital whose existence I’d only just become conscious of, talking about this woman whom I’d never see, I became aware of, in a new way, the invisible in the visible.

A few years later, I found myself in Bombay again, to write my piece. It was the doctors in public healthcare I chose to speak to (as if I was continuing the conversation I’d had that morning); in spaces and institutions I’d had no interaction with — for reasons I’ve already hinted at — when I actually lived in that city. There was a new optimism among them; antiretroviral therapy was being offered at subsidized costs, or even free; mortality rates had dropped; importantly, the figures of HIV-infected people in the country had turned out to be exaggerated; more than five million at the first reckoning, the estimate was now more than two million. The expected epidemic hadn’t occurred. On my last afternoon, I met, at my own request, two HIV patients in Dr Alka Deshpande’s clinic at J.J. Hospital; in the end, I couldn’t fit them in into the story I went on to write; I already had too much material; oddly — to the unpredictable mind of the author as reviser — they, in a sense the real subject of the piece, seemed irrelevant to its gathering shape and theme. I have, here, an opportunity to revisit them, as well as the words I’d scribbled in my notebook while listening to their answers, with their mixture of transparency and prevarication. The first patient came to me where I’d been seated by a nurse, presuming I was a doctor. He was disabused of this notion, but made to sit and take my questions. He was a generic ‘migrant worker’, employed at a power-loom factory, originally from Uttar Pradesh; but also a generic homo sapiens (literally, ‘wise human’) of our extraordinary globalized age, patient, anonymous, scratching the scabs on his arm (the only sign, now, of the infection). He’d been cured of the opportunistic tuberculosis infection he’d had; he’d gained weight; his wife and two children were, providentially, HIV-free. He claimed to be ignorant about how he’d got it.

The other person was a Muslim housewife who was also a part-time maidservant, who says she got it four years ago during a blood transfusion during her daughter’s birth. She’d been through pneumonia-like symptoms, but was now on the mend. What did her husband do? He drove a tourist taxi. I was struck by the humdrum ordinariness of both people; they might have come here for some free medication for influenza. This ordinariness was immensely moving, somehow an unacknowledged and indispensable part of the planet we live on now and understand relatively little of. They were, of course, living beneficiaries and symbols of the cheap availability today of antiretroviral therapy in public healthcare; but they also reminded me that HIV is not only about dying of, or now living with, the disease, but reimagining the place of the ordinary in our various accounts of contemporariness. The larger story, as the boars and the water-hen in Berger’s anecdote randomly demonstrate, is the one of survival; intermittently visible, taking us by surprise whenever we become privy to it.

amitchaudhuri@hotmail.com