Word: govind
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...From Gandhi to Dandies. Less than three weeks before the Andhra election, the 25 top leaders of Nehru's Congress Party gathered in nearby Madras, prop ping themselves up against cushions on a great white mattress. The Congressmen's names were big names of the Gandhi days: Govind Ballabh Pant, Abul Kalam Azad, Chakravarti Rajagopalachariar; the setting was Gandhian, in a tenement, and many of the leaders traveled to Madras Gandhi-style, in jampacked third-class carriages. But they were painfully aware that India's Congress officials had since drifted away from the people...
Life was good for Govind, the little Hindu tailor. His shop, "The Handsome Gent's Tailoring Mart," buzzed with the profitable whir of a double row of sewing machines. His workmen were fond of him. He had a lovely, loving wife, two healthy babies and a third on the way. Good Hindu that he was, he tried to be a good man, gave alms to fakirs and lepers, never ate meat, and hoped for his soul's betterment in a new reincarnation...
Then one day, working on a customer's coat, Govind was horrified to discover that he had sewed his fingertip to the cloth and didn't even feel it. Another day he smelled burning flesh, saw his own toes pressed against a flatiron, yet felt no pain. When the doctors cleared up the mystery, Govind had to swap his tradesman's heaven-on-earth for what he was sure would be leper's hell...
...Mask of a Lion, Author A. T. W. Simeons shows that the life of a leper is not always as hellish as Govind had supposed. Simeons is a London-born, Heidelberg-trained doctor who spent about 20 years in India. Now a consultant at Rome's International Hospital, he has written a novel that makes amateurish fiction but has the fascination of its grisly material. If the book is read simply as a knowing, colorful report on the lepers' way of life, its inadequacies as a novel can be comfortably ignored...
...Govind, of course, became a social outcast. Like most lepers in India he joined a traveling gang of his fellows, moved about the country begging and stealing. After the first shock wore off, he began to like the life. At times his band all but starved, but there were other times when the begging was good and the lepers had tremendous feasts. Author Simeon is at his best describing this weird life in which sudden death, plague and all sorts of violence are regarded as quite normal. He knows his leprosariums, too, and can make it clear why even intelligent...