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The Rediff Special/D Jose

One Woman's Story

Chitra is 26. Lively, vibrant, happily married to the boy next door and mother of a baby son.

She is also an AIDS victim -- and a fully satisfied user of Majeed's medicine, which she has been taking for just under five years now.

Her life is of the kind sagas are made of.

Way back in March 1992, a pregnant Chitra sat at the bedside of her first husband, Soman, in the Thiruvananthapuram Medical College Hospital and watched him die of AIDS.

Shortly thereafter, shock was added to grief when she herself was proclaimed HIV positive. Admitted to the Avittam Thirunal Hospital for delivery, she was all but thrown out by the authorities when they learnt of her HIV-positive status.

Her daughter Priyanka was diagnosed HIV positive at birth, and doctors predicted that the baby had six months to live.

Chitra and her infant daughter returned to her sister's house at Kilimanoor, to endure humiliation and mental torture at the hands of her relatives. When life within the four walls proved insupportable and she stepped outside the gates for a stroll, she was pelted with stones by the neighbours.

AIDS is a killer, AIDS is a mystery, and mystery killers bring out the worst in people.

Her sister and family in fact abandoned the house, leaving Chitra and Priyanka to their fate.

Sometimes, though, when one door slams shut, others open. Local autorickshaw drivers took Chitra under their wing and began bringing her food. Keralites working in the Gulf, on learning of her state, began sending her money. A local philanthropist gave her a house to live in.

Enter, at this juncture, Majeed. An engineer with a yen for Ayurveda, who in course of his researches stumbled on what he thought would be a cure for AIDS. He volunteered to provide his medicine, still at an experimental stage of development, free of cost. And a desperate Chitra agreed to try it -- what, after all, had she got to lose?

Two years down the line, tests proved that she was no longer HIV positive. And neither was Priyanka who, defying the predictions of the doctors attending at her birth, had grown into a bouncing baby girl.

A local electrician, Anil Kumar, learnt of her plight. Sympathy became affection, affection became love, love escalated into marriage.

And society boycotted Anil, as they had earlier boycotted Chitra.

Anil Kumar found it difficult to get jobs -- the taint of AIDS, even by association, was too strong to ignore.

Priyanka could not get admission in local schools. Which parent would want his or her kid associating with a child diagnosed as HIV positive -- no matter that the diagnosis was no longer valid?

The couple finally resorted to subterfuge, and admitted their child into a school in Kochi under an assumed name. Priyanka, under her alias, is now in Upper Kindergarten, and by all reports, doing well.

"Attitudes towards us are slowly changing, society is beginning, gradually, to accept us," says Anil Kumar.

"But modern doctors are not prepared to accept us," laments Chitra. "We are harassed, tortured in one form or the other. When we went to Delhi recently, we were attacked by goons," she adds.

"My wife is the first patient to be cured by Majeed's medicine. We are grateful to him," says Anil Kumar. "Unfortunately, it looks like doctors are more interested in their own interests than in actually curing diseases!"

Ayurveda versus Allopathy: The controversy rages on

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