In Gujarat village,a family is killed by HIV and humiliation
Three daughters consumed pesticide last week,father died on Wednesday.
It is not clear what ultimately killed Vinu Gohil and his entire family: HIV,or ostracisation,humiliation,loneliness and hunger. No one in this village in Bhavnagars Ghogha taluka is keen to know anyway.
Forty-five-year-old Vinu died on Wednesday,three days after his three young daughters Krishna 16,Rinku 12 and Daxa 10 killed themselves,unable to bear the taunts,curses and the pariah life of the last six years.
Vinus wife Vilas and their two-year-old son Ajay died in 2005,the first victims of the virus which Vilas is suspected to have contracted through the transfusion of infected blood during the delivery of her first child at the local hospital. The village ostracised and shunned the family,and Vinu was forced to leave his pucca home with his daughters and move to a small thatched hut at the edge of the village. The three girls never went to school again.
On Friday,the hut stood empty and desolate,a row of fading gods looking down from pictures on the wall at a torn blanket on the only charpoy,a rotting wooden cupboard and a soot-blackened chulha.
There was evidence young girls lived here next to the utensils strewn on the floor were,along with a few toys,an empty packet of fairness cream,some bindis and a purse on which was scrawled Aa Daxa ba nu purse chhe This purse belongs to Daxa ba.
No one,not even Vinus brothers,ever visited the family,so it isnt clear what Vinu and his daughters ate to survive. Vinu had two bighas of land that he once farmed groundnut and cotton on,but the infection had confined him to bed for years. No one visited him even after his daughters killed themselves.
A local man,Udaysinh Jadeja,pointed the hut out to The Indian Express from some 50 metres away. Two young girls who were among the familys closest neighbours,said,They Vinus daughters were never our friends. We do not know anything.
Vinus elder brother Ghanubhai who,along with another brother Babubhai,lives nearby said he had not visited his brothers home since the time it became known they had AIDS.
They were not allowed into the village temple. At all social functions,they were made to sit and eat separately, Ghanubhai said. Asked when he last spoke to Krishna,Rinku or Daxa,he said,I cant remember.
A neighbour said simply,We were afraid of the family.
According to Ghanubhai,Vilas was likely infected in a hospital at Dhuvaran village in Khambhat. No one knew until 2005,when their youngest child Ajay fell very ill and doctors said he was HIV positive. Tests then showed the entire family was carrying the virus. Ajay died soon,and his mother went two months later.
Dr D B Vyas,District AIDS Officer attached to the Gujarat State Aids Control Society,claimed that they could not help because the family refused anti-retroviral treatment.
They had registered with us,but in 2007,Vinu gave a written declaration that he and his family no longer wished to receive treatment. Since 2007,they had been approached to restart the treatment no less than five times,but they remained adamant.
Neeta Kavaviya,who works with an NGO supporting HIV positive people,said Vinus relatives shunned the family completely. It was ultimately the isolation that perhaps forced the three girls to open the tin of pesticide that Vinu had once bought to use on his small farm.
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