The man with the broken gun

I had gone to the ward to  attend a call. The ward was busy and I noticed the  crowd of police men in front of a room. Out of curiosity, I asked the sister  on duty what was happening. A young Indonesian girl had been admitted to the ward. She looked so young and innocent. She was lying on the bed with  her feet  chained to the bed. I wondered if she had committed a murder. I got the story from the nurse on duty. The girl was working as a house maid and was almost new to the place. She was young and cute looking. Her employer ,who was a man in his sixties has been constantly harassing her from the day she landed. He used to wait for the lights to go off, his elderly wife to go to bed and his own  grown up sons to retire, to sneak in to this girls room. She was new and afraid. And he used to use her every single day.

The girl had a difficult time. New place. A strange world. No one to talk to. And one day, she made a decision. She waited with a brand new razor blade in her hand. He took out his weapon for action, and she simply slashed at  what  all she could get at. My later assessment  revealed that she had managed to chop off at least part of the  organ which was troubling her all along. The man stated shouting and yelling for help. I could imagine the scenario when he was holding on to his bleeding organ and crying for help. This  story is unusual. The moment his family realized what has happened ,there was a curious turn of events. When the Police arrived at the scene, the family fabricated a story that the girl was stealing money from them , and when caught, she had tried to cut off  his organ!!. What a story !    The police filed a case against the girl , for theft and chained her.

I admire the girl. With the help of some compatriots, she  managed to inform her embassy of what had happened. They arranged legal assistance for her, and after all the funny procedures, she managed to leave the country. At least ,she managed to escape the long term prison life, which otherwise would have fallen on her, like many others. There are many of these maids who spend terms in jail  ,for crimes they haven’t committed.

And from what I have gathered, the man still continues his activities, with what  is left of his organ. He recruits new maids, and his family lives happily ever after!

I have many stories like this. Few months back, a girl was brought to my clinic. She had no medical file and so, had been brought with the recommendation of a local man working in our hospital. The girl was good looking, in her thirtees  and looked a typical middle class house wife. She was a Malayali  girl who had come to the place to make money for  the family back at home. She was brought to me with a history of having cough and spitting out blood. I examined her. She was in good health and had no stigmata of any serious diseases. I ordered the routine blood tests and an Xray of her chest. I saw  her on few occasions  on the following weeks and couldn’t make any thing out of her. At the end, she realized I was going to declare her clean. During  her last visit, she came up with the story. She was married, with two young children, and an ailing husband back at home. She had come with the hopes of raising some money to take care of the family. Her employer was a a very influential man . His wife was working in a bank. He would take his wife to work, and then come back  home, to rape this girl, and then go back to his work. And then, he would come back every now and then, and repeat the same procedure, till his wife would return from work. She was afraid, and no one to talk to, and suffered the torture to the levels of her tolerance. And then she told me. “ Doctor, how will I go back to my family? How will I face my husband? “ Please tell them I have Tuberculosis, so that they will deport me “

There are  only few instances in my career where I have willfully lied in professional matters. And this was one of them. I told the man who brought her to me. “ This woman has tuberculosis and  is infectious”. The rest was easy. The man pissed in his pants and made all the arrangements to send her back home. And he used to come to me to check if he had  tuberculosis himself, for many months.  He must be cursing me, for depriving him of such an exquisite property.

Life is unkind. It gives all the pleasures to some people. And some people are destined to suffer all their lives.

People often have no choices in life.

But ,we can choose to fight.