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them after parental deaths. Parents also fear the risk of HIV will render their daughters unmarriageable, a finding corroborated by Human Rights Watch.

This disturbing trend has the added effect of creating a lot of very young widows. "I see many girls widowed by the age of eighteen," said Dr. Pillarisetty, relating the story of one girl who was married at the age of thirteen, widowed at fourteen, and is now fifteen years old and living with HIV. Often these widows are blamed for the husband's infection and death, and outcast by his family.

India's crisis is acute in part because the government has done little to protect children affected by HIV/AIDS, and has no provisions for the orphaned. "The national and global response to the HIV/AIDS crisis in India has virtually ignored children," Dr. Pillarisetty said. "The strategy has focused primarily on high-risk target groups: the sex trade, truckers who spread the infection from town to town, and drug users." Eighty percent of AIDS funding goes toward prevention in the high-risk populations, and only twenty percent to caring for those living with HIV.

But the epidemic has been spreading so rapidly and for so many years that it has long since moved from these high-risk groups into the general population. Married women contract the disease from their husbands, who often bring it home from sex workers or other men. The strong cultural taboo against homosexuality means that gay men typically marry and have families but continue sexual activity with other men outside of marriage. One out of every three people infected with HIV is a woman, and eighty percent of these women are housewives. Mother to child transmission is the most common source of infection in children, at a rate of thirty thousand per year.

* * *

As I talked with Durgamma and other families in Vambay also destroyed by AIDS, I struggled to make sense of it, because it made no sense. How could this disease be a treatable, manageable illness for some and a death sentence for others? What needed to be done for Yesu and his HIV-positive brother was so simple. In other places of the world treatments were readily available and children did not lay in beds inside concrete lockers, wracked with AIDS. In a world where two different treatment regimens were available depending on wealth and geography, in which AIDS deaths had drastically fallen in western nations at the same time they were exploding in African and Asian countries, these dead parents seemed expendable.

They had not been expendable to Yesu and Venugopal. A simple regimen of medicine and proper nutrition, an incredibly small amount of money, and lives in Vambay could be vastly different. It wouldn't take much, it was not an impossible or hopeless situationbut for those families, it might as well be, for these things were as out of reach as diamonds. And so they died, one at a time, while their children and elderly were left to take care of one another including the sons and daughters who had inherited HIV from their parents in a wholly unnecessary legacy of destruction.

Durgamma and her grandson gazed at me listlessly as we spoke, both with the same vacant eyes. In those two pairs of eyes laid a world of despair, devoid of any hopes or dreams. They waited patiently for my next inquiry. Abraham looked at me expectantly. I knew I was supposed to ask more questions, but I could think of no other words. Silence seemed to demand all the space between us. The wrecked lives left in the wake of AIDS' destructive path had faces and stories, and their suffering knew my name. Everything I wanted to know was there in those eyes that stared back at me.

Learn more about this author, Shelley Seale.
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