they ask me to remember
but they want me to
remember their memories
and I keep remembering
mine
—Lucille Clifton, “why some people be mad at me sometimes,” from Blessing the Boats
I spent the rest of that summer in the villages of Bihar, battling Shitala Ma, far away from the politics of New Delhi—the continuing protests against Mrs. Gandhi, the transportation strikes that left our supplies baking on the tarmacs of Indian airports. I was unaware, unconcerned with the news coming out of America. A grand jury had indicted Gordon Liddy and his fellow Watergate criminals, implicating the president of the United States in a criminal scheme to destroy democracy. At the same time, the Times of India covered the U.S.-backed coups toppling democratically elected leaders in Latin America, while the war in Vietnam, which had galvanized my generation into political action, came to an ignominious end. Our Russian and Indian friends, tired of the holier-than-thou manner in which our diplomats deified American democracy, had a field day with U.S. expats. Lots of new arrivals to Kainchi and some old friends came to WHO for lunch while we were in limbo waiting for Prime Minister Gandhi and J. R. D. Tata to agree on a way forward. The café had good clean food and it was air-conditioned, a treat if you had been living on an ashram like an ascetic sadhu. Two years before, I had done the same; Girija and I met an American USAID worker and would come down from the hills for a good meal and a blast of cold, breathable, air.
One day, Mrs. Edna Boyer, the cheerful face at the WHO front desk, gave me a message about a visitor. “He just arrived in Delhi from your ashram. You don’t know him,” Mrs. Boyer said. “He’s a young man who came to India looking for your guru, but your guru had already passed. He’s intense, a little anti-social I think, and well, may I say he does not smell like a Parisian perfumery. He shaved his head and he didn’t want to wear shoes. I sent him out to get clean clothes and shoes or I can’t let him into the WHO dining room.”
The nineteen-year-old in front of me for lunch that day was Steve Jobs, although I did not know his name then. He had come to India to meet Neem Karoli Baba. Like many young Westerners arriving in India, Steve was scrawny, hungry, and poor. The only remarkable thing about him, in retrospect, was how he managed to get to India. He scraped together the money for his trip by assembling and selling illegal electronic devices known as blue boxes, which, at a time when long distance was outrageously expensive, allowed you to hack into payphones and place all the calls you wanted to anywhere in the world for free.
I don’t remember much about the encounter, but Steve reminded me twenty years later that our first conversation was a disagreement about my diet. Steve inhaled his first fresh salad since coming to India, while I ate buffalo liver. I had been a vegetarian for nearly a decade but had begun to feel I was not able to work as hard fighting smallpox because of my vegetarian diet. My French, American, and Russian colleagues who ate meat had more protein in their diet and, I thought, had more energy because of it. Nicole, being French, recommended liver: “Think of it as medicine,” she said, “not food.”
I lied to myself that I was still a vegetarian because I hated what I was eating. Steve flat out busted my chops. “You’re still contributing to killing,” he practically shouted while consuming an orgy of fresh vegetables in a room packed with serious diplomats from a dozen countries eating lunch.
He was right; I was a hypocrite. “And how do you justify ending the existence of this form of life, smallpox?” he asked, piling on. “Who are you and your colleagues to take life into your own hands? The Jains wear special sandals so they won’t step on insects. So aren’t you, in effect, stepping on a really tiny life-form by killing off the smallpox virus?” I was too tired to get angry. Part of me wanted to drag him off to an infected village in Bihar to watch children suffer and die from smallpox and see if he still felt that way about buffalo liver and the smallpox virus. He might have been right about the liver, but he was wrong about the virus.
Five years later we would meet again and begin a friendship that lasted four decades.
The standoff between J. R. D. Tata and the Government of India ended when Prime Minister Gandhi acquiesced, writing a letter. She insisted that she would only write a personal, not an official, letter thanking J. R. D. Tata and accepting his help. J.R.D. must have agreed because everyone else said they had struck a deal. With the partnership finally begun, Girija and I left for Bihar to finish the setup of the Chotanagpur program at its new headquarters in Ranchi, a few hours’ drive northwest of Tatanagar.
The Tatanagar train station had by now been turned into a museum, a shrine to the smallpox eradication program. Artists covered the walls with murals depicting the history of smallpox. The names of the victims who died at the station were memorialized. Mourners brought flowers and small religious statues. The sign that signaled to oncoming trains that they had reached Tatanagar was replaced by one that said, “You have reached the Temple of Anti–Shitala Ma land.” Tata Companies continued to export a lot of steel and coal, but Tatanagar never again exported smallpox anywhere.
An ebullient Sujit Gupta greeted us at the station and took us to the TISCO guest house. The executives of the Tata Companies and the hospital doctors used the occasion of our return to throw a celebratory dinner with traditional Indian cuisine. There were many toasts. They drank to everything they’d accomplished. They toasted J. R. D. Tata and WHO. They drank to the efforts of Tata employees—assembly-line workers, clerks, drivers, executives, managers—who left their posts to volunteer in the containment effort. And most of all they drank to the fact that the Tata name had been, if not cleared, given a chance for redemption.
During the several weeks of quarantine, commerce in Tatanagar had ground to a halt. The lines to get out of the city—at train stations and on the roads—were huge, and Tata exports had slowed to a trickle. It was clearly bad for business, but not once did these executives talk about how much money they were losing because nearly one thousand of their employees had been diverted to smallpox work. They were most excited about shutting down the exportation of smallpox, about doing the right thing. I was moved by how the three men I had worked with most, J. R. D. Tata, Russi Mody, and Sujit Gupta, had prioritized getting rid of smallpox over making money. Nothing is ever all good or all bad, but sometimes the better nature of the individuals even in the most financially driven company can still trump the bottom line.
Our first Chotanagpur strategy meeting was convened by Sujit Gupta. Dr. Rikushin, the Soviet epidemiologist from the Pasteur Institute in Leningrad, returned from the villages to brief us. A wizened professor who had worked on cholera in Africa, Rikushin was recruited by WHO to be a consultant in tribal Bihar. Besides his clipboards, pens, and folders, he had with him his ubiquitous basket of mangos. He’d never had a mango before coming to India and became so obsessed with the fruit that his mouth was always red and swollen from eating the last of the meat too near the skin. “I love mangos,” he joked, “and I will never go back to Russia unless I can have shipments airmailed to me.”
Many of the villages inhabited by the Adivasi peoples were located deep in Bihar state, far off the grid, embedded in the jungles of Chotanagpur. Professor Vishwakarma, whom I’d found when I put out a call to anthropologists around the world for help, brought the maps he’d made for his Ph.D. dissertation on the tribes of Chotanagpur. No one, not even the government, had known these maps existed. Vishwakarma had coded them by language and tribe, so as soon as we learned the surname of an Adivasi smallpox victim, we could trace outbreaks back to at least the region from which a person came. Lots of villagers worked in Tatanagar, bringing home extra money and food for their families; if a villager was infected with smallpox, the virus could bounce back and forth between Tatanagar and the tribal villages for as long as people went unvaccinated.
The Ho tribe suffered the worst outbreak. Eradication in their community was up against a major challenge. While they were ethnically Adivasi, several splinter Ho tribes had adopted an orthodox and strict Hinduism, unlike their Santhal and Gond counterparts, so members of this tribe were vehemently against killing cows, and therefore vehemently anti-vaccination.
Rikushin was telling me about his investigation into a source of infection near the Tatanagar steel mills. He traced it back to a remote jungle village, only to discover those villagers, the Munda, were relatives of the Ho tribe. They lived almost as hunter-gatherers in the remote jungles. Rikushin and his team drove several dusty, bumpy hours into the Munda territory where they discovered village after village decimated by smallpox. Rikushin tried to communicate why he was there and tried to vaccinate people, but no one would cooperate. He asked to be taken to the mukhia, the village leader.
“No,” the mukhia replied through a translator. “I will not be vaccinated. Smallpox is sent by Singbonga, Big Friend in the Sky. We will resist your vaccination so that we don’t offend Singbonga. Now get out.” Rikushin and his team were escorted to their jeeps by Munda members holding drawn bows, arrows pointed at the smallpox team. The tribe was chanting, “We have changed the name of our tribe. We are not Ho. We are not Munda. Now we are takka nai, our tribe’s name is ‘no vaccination.’”
Rikushin had an idea for cooperating with Munda cosmology. Since the Munda saw Singbonga as being in the sky, Rikushin asked the Tatas if they would underwrite hiring a small plane from which to drop leaflets telling villagers it was permitted to get vaccinated. Vishwakarma helped get the leaflet written by hand in the Khmer-like script of the Munda language. Along with the captain of the Tatanagar flight club, Rikushin coordinated an ad hoc mission from the gods.
On Rikushin’s next trip to the village, the mukhia greeted Rikushin’s battalion of WHO jeeps with a warning, “Singbonga would not approve vaccination. You are endangering yourself by returning. Get out now!”
“Wait,” Rikushin said through one of the Ho translators. “I am sure Singbonga would approve of vaccination. Just wait a moment.” Rikushin listened for the sound of the plane. When he heard it coming near, he repeated, “Singbonga will approve vaccination. You will see.” At that moment, the leaflets fell from the sky. A literate tribal member picked one up and read it to everyone. The mukhia reversed himself, and the villagers lined up for vaccinations.
To repeat this process all over Chotanagpur would take two hundred sorties, and we didn’t have enough personnel. Someone needed to be on the ground communicating with the villagers, and someone other than the pilot needed to drop the leaflets. “I bet our wives would enjoy flying over the villages and dropping leaflets,” Sujit said. And they did. Girija went first. She did dozens of leaflet-dropping sorties over Chotanagpur. At the end of the meeting I picked up one of the leaflets that Tata had printed to read it myself. I was most impressed by what was not in them: not a single mention of Tata Companies or their sponsorship.
Dr. Vishwakarma enhanced our search teams to double check on the effectiveness of the leaflets by adding transitional leaders from the various villages as supervisors—people who had been to modern schools but lived in the villages and could translate to the rest of the team the language of their ancestors. We created more than four hundred search teams to work in the villages. They all reported into the new Chotanagpur smallpox headquarters in Ranchi, each team had a driver, an Indian medical officer from the government, a WHO medical officer, a transitional leader from the tribe the team would be visiting, vaccinators, a representative from Tata, and a paramedical assistant assigned to each foreign WHO medical officer.
Waves of foreign doctors came to the Ranchi headquarters. The program attracted volunteers from Oxfam. A young couple drove almost straight from Oxford University to Ranchi and volunteered to help in the program. Canadians Alan Morinis and his wife, Bev Spring, arrived in their VW camper. She was studying yoga; he had completed a Rhodes Scholarship. They were the first to be hired officially as a couple for WHO. Bev ran one of the most difficult programs of all, stopping smallpox among homeless pavement dwellers in Calcutta. Around that time, Justin Bhakla showed up in Ranchi. Unusually tall and handsome, he shared the confident posture of the many young tribal men who had gone to Christian schools, where he probably had gotten his Christian name. He was joyful and enthusiastic, and even though he was far less educated than the doctors, he spoke better English because he was educated in “English-medium,” while the doctors were educated in “Hindi-medium” and learned English as a second or third language. Though Justin was from the Santhal tribe, he seemed comfortable in every setting, from tribal village to stately Kaiser Colony home.
Justin’s family and friends had greeted us with suspicion at first. They didn’t trust the Indian government or Europeans—all of whom had lied to them over the redistribution of land, pushing them ever deeper into remote terrain as the Raj and the Indian government grabbed as much land as they could take. But as we demonstrated the vaccine—I vaccinated myself again and again to show it was safe—we began to gain their trust. Justin had his whole family vaccinated, and none of them got sick or got smallpox. We hired Justin to be a watch guard, paying him to make sure those who were infected stayed at home and, as we had learned from Steve Jones, to buy food to keep the quarantined from going out to beg.
Just as Tatanagar had become an exporter of smallpox to the rest of India, there was one more foci that was exporting back to Tatanagar and elsewhere in Bihar, located deep in the forest. I was eager to head out with Zafar, Sujit, and Justin to this village deep in Ho territory, where a resistant chief, let’s call him Mohan Singh,† was keeping his village from being vaccinated. Our teams had been to see him many times, begging, cajoling, and even bribing him to accept vaccination. If we didn’t vaccinate their leader, no one in the village would allow us to vaccinate them. In charge of the trip was Dr. Lakshmi Kant, one of the many retired epidemiologists whom M.I.D. had brought back into the field. He was a cholera expert and a well-known public health guru. Also in the jeeps were Tata managers dressed in crisp white shirts, black pants, and ties.
We drove through the remote jungle area for hours until we admitted we were lost. We needed to find a place to settle before the sun went down and predators came out looking for food. We found a huge, flat, round clearing and decided to make camp. We pitched tents to protect the vaccine from spoiling in the morning sun and curled up in the jeeps to catch some sleep.
At 2 A.M., the sound of deafening, terrifying wails snapped all twenty of us out of sleep. Lakshmi Kant approached me and said quietly, “Sir, you have parked the vehicles in a place that perhaps was not wise.”
“Why wasn’t it wise?” I asked him.
“It was not wise, sir, because the elephants are coming,” he told me.
“Elephants?”
“Sir, these are the elephant mating grounds. The sound they are making means they are coming to use them.”
“How do you know these are mating grounds?”
“Why do you think there is a flattened circle in the middle of the jungle?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never been in this jungle! Why didn’t you say something before?” I couldn’t believe he was telling me this now.
“Sir, you did not ask my opinion.”
There was nowhere to go in the dark. We were encased by dense jungle that was hard enough to navigate during the day. And we were directly in the path of twenty tons of a horny animal stampede. But Lakshmi Kant knew what to do. Following his directions, we moved the jeeps into a circle facing outward and left the headlights on all night to keep the elephants away. We kept one jeep in the middle of the circle with the lights off. Because the headlights drained the batteries, we would need the jeep in the middle to jumpstart the others in the morning. If we hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t be here to tell the story.
Daylight came. We packed up camp and started the jeeps one by one. Several of the old epidemiologists took out machetes to clear a path large enough for the jeeps. Everyone, especially the young Tata managers, took turns at cutting through the jungle. With each hour, they shed their office garb, their jackets, ties, and crisp white shirts, until they were as bare chested in the hot and humid jungle as the local guides.
We arrived on the outskirts of the village in the middle of the afternoon, where we met with the deputy superintendent of police, the assistant district magistrate, and the chief medical officer of the district to debate how to break Mohan Singh’s resistance so that we could do proper containment vaccination around this outbreak. I was exhausted and on edge. Rikushin had already dropped his leaflets on this part of Bihar. There were no parades to stage, no Hog Farm tricks to play. The reward hadn’t worked in this village. We were facing the real possibility that forcible vaccination of Mohan Singh might be our only option to keep smallpox from coming back to the tribal areas. As a card-carrying member of the ACLU, this was not something I wanted to be a part of. But if this remote foci of infection wasn’t stopped, the virus would continue going back and forth between the Adivasi region and Tatanagar. Our fear was that smallpox would reignite and explode through the subcontinent. No one was comfortable with forcible vaccination but we didn’t see another way. We knew from our experience at the Tatanagar railway that we had the legal authority, but this peaceful Adivasi community deserved better than a full-on clash with police. We had to plan how many rifles to show, how visible the foreigners would be, and figure out who spoke which languages so that our interpreters could be in the front lines.
We settled on a strategy and waited until most of the villagers had gone to bed. In the early hours after midnight, we took up our positions around Mohan Singh’s house—policemen and vaccinators to either side of the front door, vaccinators ready to push the door down. I stood outside the inner circle, watching from the sidelines.
Mohan Singh leaped out of bed when the government vaccinators burst through the bamboo door of his simple adobe hut. His wife, Laxmi,† awoke screaming and scrambled to cover herself with a thin sari. Singh grabbed an ax and chased the intruders into the courtyard. As he rushed through the door, a squad of doctors and policemen overpowered and pinned him while a second vaccinator jabbed smallpox vaccine into his arm, more frequently and more forcefully than needed. The wiry forty-year-old leader of the village squirmed away from the needle, causing the vaccination site to bleed. The government team held him until they had delivered enough fluid to vaccinate him a dozen times over.
They then seized his wife. Pausing to suck out the hated medicine, Laxmi Singh pulled a bamboo pole from the roof and swung at the strangers restraining her. She bit deeply into a doctor’s hand. While two policemen held Mohan Singh back, the rest of the team subdued the entire family and vaccinated each in turn. When it was all over, our vaccination team gathered in the small courtyard outside the house. Mohan Singh and his exhausted family members stood by the broken door of their home. We faced each other silently across a cultural chasm, neither side knowing what to do next.
By now, the whole village was awake. People gathered in the courtyard as the dawn illuminated our unfolding drama. Mohan Singh surveyed his disordered household. After a moment’s hesitation, he strode to his small vegetable plot and stooped to pluck the single ripe cucumber left on the vine. He walked over to the puzzled young Indian doctor whom his wife had bitten and handed him the cucumber. Justin translated for Zafar and me.
“My religious duty, my dharma,” Mohan Singh said, “is to surrender to God’s will. Only God can decide who gets sickness and who does not. It is my duty to resist your interference with his will. We must resist your needles. We would die resisting if that is necessary. My family and I have not yielded. We have done our duty. We can be proud of being firm in our faith. It is not a sin to be overpowered by so many strangers in the middle of the night.
“Daily you have come and told me it is your dharma to prevent this disease with your needles. We have sent you away. Tonight you have broken my door and used force. You say you act in accordance with your duty. I have acted in accordance with mine. It is over. God will decide.
“Now I find that you are guests in my house. It is my duty to feed guests. I have little to offer at this time. Except this cucumber.”
The morality play lasted a moment, the mere “blink of an eye,” what the Germans call an Augenblick, but it felt to me like a postgraduate course in cultural relativity. I felt numb and torn and wondered whether I was on the wrong side. Mohan Singh was so firm in his faith, yet there was not a trace of anger in his words. I scanned my teammates’ faces, looking for someone to respond to Mohan Singh’s challenge. Everyone stared at the ground.
At length, Zafar stepped forward, bowed slightly, and crouched in deference to Mohan Singh. He addressed the tribal leader humbly. “You are a good man. You live by God’s will. I, too, have surrendered to God’s will—that is what the word ‘Islam’ means, one who has surrendered to God’s will. These vaccinators are of your tribe; they also share your faith. But what is God’s will? Is it God’s will that you go hungry, or is it his will that you plant rice and eat? Is it God’s will that you walk naked, or his will that you make cloth and cover yourself? Look around you at your children. How many are absent today, dead from smallpox? How many are scarred? That boy over there is blind forever. This girl with her scarred face will never marry now. Three hundred Ho have died suffering from this terrible disease.
“You are strong. You fight this needle, but its medicine will prevent smallpox. There are so many diseases we cannot prevent, but smallpox can be stopped with this vaccine. Could we bring the needle if it were not God’s will? Could we make the vaccine? Could this Angrezi doctor come ten thousand miles to your village if it were not God’s will?
“The Angrezi also shares faith in God’s will. He came to India to study Hindu dharma. His guru sent him out of the ashram of learning into the villages to give vaccinations. His guru was a great yogi, a great saint who said that it is God’s will that smallpox shall be eradicated. He said the end of this disease is God’s gift to humankind. No more children dead from smallpox. You think it is God’s will that this disease will always kill your children. I think it is God’s will that our people don’t have to suffer like this anymore. I think it is God’s will that we take this vaccination.”
Zafar arose from his respectful crouch to his full five feet three inches, though he seemed to be a six-foot-tall hero of Indian mythology. His whisper became a bellow: “It is God’s will, and my dharma is to protect your children from smallpox.”
Zafar walked over to Justin, who was still translating what Zafar had just said. Reaching into a jute bag marked “National Smallpox Eradication Campaign,” Zafar took out another ampule of vaccine and several needles. Sensing that the crowd was now wavering, he broke open the vaccine and vaccinated Justin, then took my arm and vaccinated me. “It is my dharma to fight smallpox!” he declared. An elderly man slowly came forward. Zafar brought his palms together respectfully, and then quickly and expertly vaccinated the old Ho tribesman. One by one the villagers came forward. Soon it was over. Five hundred were vaccinated. No one else resisted. The tension evaporated in the morning sun. My anguish did not.