People who come to our hospital, come there because they are too poor to go anywhere else. They come from far-off villages, from hamlets you couldn’t locate on a map, and from slums in which you couldn’t believe people lived.

One day in the orthopedics wards, we were given a child to examine. She was 6 years old, and she had come with her mother. Wide-eyed and quiet, she let her mother answer all our questions.
Her mother said that she had fallen down and broken her arm at school one day. They lived in a village that didn’t have a qualified doctor, so they took her to a quack who dressed her arm with leaves to reduce the inflammation, and then put a plaster cast on it.
When they took the cast off, a month later, her hand was curled up, and it wouldn’t straighten.
It was a fairly straightforward case. She had Volkmann’s Ischemic Necrosis. Blood supply had been partially occluded to her forearm, by the cast, as well as possibly a tear in the artery.
They took her to the local health center. They were referred to the block hospital; I don’t remember the name of the place. From there they referred her to our hospital. They had come, the entire family, to Calcutta. The father waited nervously outside.

I don’t know what happened to her, we never saw her after that first day. As a matter of fact, she will never get back full use of her hand.
Poverty and ignorance- that is what this little girl lost her hand to. As will many other little girls, and boys.
But this post is not about that. That is neither good, nor bad; it is what it is.

What struck me was their hope. It didn’t matter that the doctors at all the other hospitals had told them that it could not be cured. They had come to Calcutta. All their problems would be solved here.
Hope glittered in their eyes, and quickened their speech.
Even the apathetic little girl, whose arm lay limply and uncomplainingly in the grasp of whomever cared to examine it, even she was touched with hope.

They had come to the city of miracles.

Hope is like that. I see it everywhere, in so many people.
They cure cancers in Vellore. They save people with heart surgery in Bombay. They will heal blindness in Chennai, and they will transplant livers in Boston, and forcing a live fish down your throat will cure asthma.

Blind, unrestrained hope.
A fresh start, a new existence, and my ulcers shall be healed, my limbs shall be made whole, and the scales shall fall from my eyes.



I wish I could find this place of wonder.
Somewhere I could be healed.