Prisoners with AIDS feel better inside

AHMEDABAD, Dec 1: The World AIDS Day is here again. Time for some to mouth platitudes and others to do some good work. But for those who ...

AHMEDABAD, Dec 1: The World AIDS Day is here again. Time for some to mouth platitudes and others to do some good work. But for those who live behind barbed wire fences and high prison walls, it’s a day that evokes mixed feelings.

Prison doesn’t seem to bad to Raman Bahadur, an inmate of the Ahmedabad Central Jail. Raman is an AIDS patient, with less than a year left to live according to a jail doctor.

Jailed for carrying liquor, Raman said he had tested positive for AIDS two years ago in Mumbai. Jail authorities confirmed the test. Raman suffers from tuberculosis and came to know about the effects of AIDS only in gaol. “I would have died in a week if I was left outside,” says Raman. Battered and weak with malnutrition, he admits he is better off in jail with eggs and milk and better food.

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Raman, who migrated to Mumbai from Nepal many years ago, is married with two children aged four and six. He left his wife two years ago due to tuberculosis. While he may have contracted the virus before marriage, his wife and two children have not been tested for HIV.

“I went to prostitutes all over in Mumbai six to seven years ago,” admits the 35-year-old inmate. He says his two brothers and wife are unaware about his present condition and he is unaware about theirs.

Raman is not the only one. There are three other HIV positive inmates in jail. A lifer, Amaji Kavaji, was convicted for murder four years ago. In 1995, he was diagnosed HIV positive while in jail. His 32-year-old wife in Deesa and five-year-old son do not know whether they are HIV positive. “There is a possibility that they may have been infected,” said the doctor on duty at the jail, Dr Atul Dhuvad.

Dhuvad said that while the family members do not know about the danger, they should. “It is stated in the document of the National AIDS Control Programme that once a patient is tested HIV positive, all contacts have to be tested too,” he said. (Names have been changed to protect their identity).