Aids Sutra: Untold Stories from India; Random House India; Price: Rs.395; 334 pp This anthology of impactful essays with an introduction by Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, is supported by Avahan, the India AIDS Initiative of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It strings together 16 high profile writers, who attempt to provide insights into the grim twilight zone inhabited by HIV and AIDS afflicted Indians. Curiously, the title of the book has inter-textual links with Vatsayana’s ancient Sanskrit treatise on ‘kama’ or human sexuality — the Kamasutra. The word ‘sutra’ inscribed in Devnagari script to form a continuity with the preceding word AIDS written in Roman script, literally drags the story of this stigmatised, life-threatening disease into the Indian scenario. In India’s orthodox, superstitious and largely illiterate or semi-literate society, the hard facts about the spread of AIDS are either ignored or vehemently denied. Statistics, however, reveal that the number of those afflicted by the virus, which usually destroys the body’s immuno-deficiency system, exceeds 3 million. Aids Sutra recounts real-life stories from India that give a human face to what is essentially a global tragedy. As Amartya Sen writes in his foreword, “the understanding of a complex reality not only demands facts, figures and empirical details, but also the use of our responsive imagination to interpret what is going on….” Thus facts are transformed into comprehension through literature that “plays a mediating role over the millennia everywhere in the world”. In her contribution to this collection titled ‘Night Claims the Godavari’, Booker Prize novelist Kiran Desai describes a tour of the coastal East Godavari district of Andhra Pradesh, and her experience of Peddapuram, a hamlet traditionally notorious for prostitution. She comes across women descended from prostitute castes, whose lives raise larger issues of poverty and gender. While these women have commonplace aspirations, they live their professional lives “with the intensity of art; rife with metaphor, raw, distilled”. Sunil Gangopadhyay’s story ‘Return to Sonagachhi’, the infamous redlight district in the heart of Kolkata, traces the beginnings of the flesh trade to the eclipse of the landowning zamindars and the growth of the merchant class, flaunting flamboyant lifestyles, which popularised the idea of the ‘kept woman’ or barnari. By the 1960s, the brothels where the author and his bohemian friends escaped to drink Scotch and discuss literature, had lost much of the old-world genteelness. It was “a dark world… hundreds of cell-like rooms — dim and airless…” A further transformation has occurred over the past few decades when the “crushed and defeated” sex workers of Sonagachhi have acquired self-confidence, formed unions, professionalised their work and take greater care of their health by cooperating with NGOs. These “untold stories from india” are all first-person encounters, either reported directly or distanced through fictional names and locations. William Dalrymple meets the “daughters of Yellamma” who live in Belgaum (Karnataka) and contiguous villages, with the stark and omnipresent truth that neglect, ugliness and death are in store for them. These are devadasis who believe it is not the goddess enshrined…
