Fighting AIDS and laughing at destiny

BANGALORE: Sashwati and Amrita (names changed) are soulmates. They have their HIV-positive status to thank for that. They delve into the reservoirs of their inner strengths to fight the disease, the ‘positive’ tag and rejection. Today, these victims of circumstance have emerged from the shadows and are ready to speak their story with dignity as the world focuses on HIV and AIDS.
Destiny has its designs. How else does one explain two young women, who have little in common other than lives turned topsy-turvy with AIDS and their own ‘positive’ status, becoming neighbours in a Bangalore suburb?
It’s been a long and painful journey till there for them. While Sashwati’s tears have dried, Amrita still chokes on her emotions as she relives the trying days of learning of her husband’s sexual behaviour, the deathly disease, isolation and the final blow of knowing she was HIV-positive herself.
The only silverlining, and a huge one at that, is medical endorsement that all her three children have not contracted the virus.
There is still a twinkle in Amrita’s tear-filled eyes as she recalls her wedding in 1986 at 17 years, on the threshold of matrimony and big dreams. From the middle-class comforts of her Bangalore home, the transition to Arni, a tiny village in Tamil Nadu, where her husband stayed was not smooth. A small price to pay for a rosy wedded life, she rationalised then. Anyway, she had no say, she was married off by family, Amrita recalls solemnly.
The real picture was defeating. The bubble burst when some years into marriage and motherhood, she learnt indirectly of her husband’s promiscuous behaviour. Even as she grappled with the deception, events followed at hurtling speed leaving on her hands a very sick husband, with fever, paralysis, visual impairment and smelling ulcers in his mouth. The doctors pronounced him HIV-positive and the countdown had started.
Within five months it was all over. Worse was to follow: she and her children were humiliated, ostracised in the name of AIDS, even before they could fully comprehend its impact. And when she was diagnosed HIV-positive, Amrita decided suicide was the way out.
That was in 2001. With helping hands along the way, she lives for her children, content seeing them lead wholesome lives that was denied to her. She works as counsellor in an NGO in Bangalore.
Today, being HIV-positive is not even on her mind.