Chhattisgarh

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Dilip D’Souza trained in engineering at BITS Pilani and computer science at Brown University. He began writing because that was where his passion lay. He has published four books, most recently The Curious Case of Binayak Sen and Roadrunner: An Indian Quest in America, and has won several writing awards and fellowships. He lives in Mumbai with his wife Vibha and children Surabhi and Sahir. During his trips to chhattisgarh, to meet his brother who was a doctor there, Dilip grew to appreciate the health care situation in the state. That’s where this travelogue came from.

To cross a river in spate

About Halfway across the river, I stopped to ask myself: “what the hell am I doing here?” Then I thought:“Did Bhanu ask the same question?” Then I thought:“whatever he did, he was up to his neck in water. Me, it’s just my thighs. There’s a difference, pal!”

Such are the thoughts that course through your mind, I suppose, when you are scrabbling for a foothold on sharp pebbles in a current that forever seems about to sweep you off your lacerated feet, with what seems like far too much of the river still left to ford. and to think Bhanu’s ordeal must have been worse.

like every Tuesday morning, the team—doctor, nurses, a couple of assistants—left the Jan Swasthya Sahyog clinic in Ganiyari(Chhattisgarh). They were headed for the village of Bamhni, 60km northwest through the achanakmar wildlife Sanctuary, for the weekly outreach clinic. with a half-seat free in their Bolero, I couldn’t resist the chance to leap aboard, wedged though I would be somewhere in the middle of all their equipment. The ride, the setting, their work—I had to go.

we rattled along, the driver determinedly unmindful of some serious potholes. once into achanakmar, the forest canopy closed above us and we began climbing gently, zooming around hairpin bends. once, we took a mudtrack that led to a little temple under a tree, overlooking a vast unbroken vista of more trees. Nice spot for a chai, admiring the view. Then onward, through a small market, past a deserted government “resort” with a few desolate “huts”—how we city slickers love our holiday “huts”!—a village with tall crops beyond… suddenly, we stopped.

we stopped at the river Maniyari, which, after the heaviest monsoon in local memory, was in spate. I had accompanied the Bamhni team six months ago too, when we drove without pause across this same riverbed. Bone-dry then. Things mightily different today. “The level’s down since last week,” someone in the Bolero noted, not much comfort because it was still a 50-60m tract of visibly swift water. But last Tuesday, the water had been so high, so wide, that the team had to turn back for the first time in eight years running this clinic in Bamhni.

But today, patients were waiting there who could not afford another cancelled clinic. So everyone grabbed a piece or two of equipment, rolled up our jeans, hitched up our saris, took off our sandals. Slugged through the slush on the bank, then into the water.

Bhanu on my mind, but I’ll return to that.

first impression: water colder and swifter, stones underfoot sharper, than I had expected. “Don’t look at the water!” shouted yogesh, the doctor, from somewhere behind me. “It can make you dizzy!” Two heavy bags on my back, trying hard to stay un-dizzy, I trudged sort-of-downstream to a large clump of reeds, turned and went sort-of-upstream to a small sandbar, sinking briefly on this stretch to nearly waist-level, stopped to give my sore soles a break, then sort-of-downstream again. finally on the other side, I was directly across from the Bolero—but it had taken a huge raggedy“S” to get me here.

Bamhni and the patients, still a muddy couple of kilometres’walk ahead.

five days earlier, Bhanu—a man I met at the Ganiyari clinic—had done this trip in reverse. In driving rain. In midnight blackness. The river up to his neck. He and a dozen of his fellow villagers, passing a string cot hand-to-hand, overhead, to get it across the river. on the cot, Bhanu’s wife Sarita and two kids. Twins. one born, one still inside her, Sarita exhausted from labour pangs.

This, the only way to get her to the clinic at Ganiyari. No, Bhanu didn’t take the mudtrack to look out at the trees.

Perspective regained, I rolled down my jeans, put on my sandals and set off. Somewhere far overhead, a monkey howled. Bamhni, here I come.