Who is normal? This question, without answering which no society can fix its centre, its margins and its outer darkness, and the answer to which is determined by the secret dispensations of power that are articulated in the social edifice, is thrust upon a comfortable world at the most unexpected of moments. Women who wander about naked must be ill. That is what members of a voluntary organization visiting the Howrah district hospital felt when they accidentally came upon six unclothed female vagrants locked up in a ward. But the authorities, represented in this case by the superintendent of the hospital, are furious. These women, deposited in the hospital by relatives and do-gooders, are perfectly normal; they have been examined by doctors and have been found mentally and physically fit. According to the superintendent, their disruptive behaviour with other patients, visitors and hospital staff, and the refusal to wear clothes, are just nasty blackmailing strategies to ensure for themselves a permanent shelter in the hospital, since no one will take them. This is an outlandish argument, as the voluntary organization has politely pointed out. In spite of discussions, the hospital has yet found no law that would enable it to shunt these women out, somewhere, anywhere, and not be termed inhuman in the process. Out of the hospital, these women have nowhere to go.
Is such a situation “normal”? Even if the women do not meet the requirements of the “mentally ill”, their suffering may have made them desperate, unable to express themselves except through disruptive behaviour, and frantic to find a place in an institution which is deaf to communications that do not fall within accepted codes. The six women have been lumped together, without a hint as to their individual histories. Their presence is a comment on the terrible failure of the state’s palliative institutions. What are hospitals, shelters, asylums, for? Patients are cheated of their food and medicines, and mentally ill people chained, locked up, left naked. Can a society that punishes people for suffering be called normal?
