A Different Ward

This weekend I decided to take a quick break from War and Peace, so someone lent me the NY Times Bestseller, Everything is Illuminated. Before I started reading, I had visited the "Special Ward" at the government hospital in Namakkal. This is the corner where the sick HIV patients are shooed off too. Well, adjacent to the man who appears caged by his own bones, there was one girl in bed with a crowd of doctors around her. The tiny girl (8 yrs) is HIV positive, and her mother is negative. This is the peculiarity. She has never had a blood transfusion nor has been exposed to blood in a way that would transmit the infection. How has she become positive? The adopted naivete concerning the only other option disappeared when her father, who also happens to be her care giver, was tested and found positive.

Right, so I was reading this book. One passage seemed pertinent:

"And we must all be familiar with that most portentous of Biblical parables, the perfection of Heaven and Hell. And as we all do or should know, it was on the second day that the Lord our God created the opposing regions of Heaven and Hell, to which we and the slouchers, may they pack only their sweaters, will be sent, respectively. And but we must not forget that third and next day, when God saw that Heaven was not as much like Heaven as he would have prayed, and Hell not as much like Hell. And so, the lesser and harder-to-find texts tell us, he, father of father of fathers, raised the shade between the opposing regions, allowing the blessed and the condemned to see one another. And as was his hope, the blessed rejoiced in the pain of the condemned, and their joy became that much greater in the face of sorrow. And the condemned saw the blessed, saw their lobster tails and prosciutto . . . and felt that much worse for themselves. And God saw that it was gooder. And but the appeal of the window became too strong. And rather than enjoy the kingdom of Heaven, the blessed were fascinated by the cruelties of Hell. And rather than suffer those cruelties, the condemned enjoyed the vicarious pleasures of Heaven. And over time, the two reached an equilibrium, staring at the other, staring at themselves. And the window became a mirror from which neither the blessed nor the condemned could, or would, leave. And so God dropped the shade, forever closing off the portal between kingdoms ..."

As I enter the glass door of the special ward, I know that the shade has been lifted.