Leper Camp near Khar is a makeshift settlement on railway land where people with leprosy, often unwelcome elsewhere, form a mobile community and maintain their own networks of care. Lin’s visit with Abdullah brings him into contact with the camp’s residents and its leader, Ranjitbhai; the encounter also reveals that the community supplies medicines to Lin’s clinic. The camp is not simply a refuge at the city’s edge: it is a place shaped by exclusion, where residents respond to precarious conditions with organization and mutual support.

Setting and Displacement

Several treatment colonies for people with leprosy operate around Bombay, funded by state and private contributions. They provide medical attention, support, and clean surroundings, but impose strict rules. Some residents cannot conform to those rules, while others leave or are forced out. At any given time, a few dozen men, women, and children live beyond the colonies, within the wider city. Their exclusion is therefore not only a matter of disease or diagnosis; it also reflects the limits of institutions whose care is conditional on rules that some people cannot accept or meet.

The wider slum communities of Bombay can accommodate people across caste, race, and circumstance, but that tolerance rarely extends to people with leprosy. Local councils and street committees often do not allow them to remain. The displaced residents consequently form mobile settlements, able to establish a camp in an open space within an hour and leave without a trace in less time. They may stay beside a rubbish dump, contend with rag-pickers over access to the site, or settle on swampy or industrially contaminated land. Their mobility is both a means of survival and a sign of how little secure space the city affords them.

When Lin and Abdullah visit, the camp occupies a rusty railway siding near Khar. They leave Abdullah’s bike and enter railway land through gaps in fences and across ditches. The site lies within a working transport landscape: trains and goods wagons move through staging and shunting areas, while offices, warehouses, and maintenance sheds occupy other parts of the grounds. In a clear space between the tracks, the residents have assembled low shelters from cardboard and plastic, supported by branches and thin string. Thirty people live in the camp. Its location makes the settlement vulnerable and marginal, but the space between the tracks has become a place where its residents can live together.

Residents and Community

The camp’s inhabitants are not presented as an undifferentiated crowd. Men, women, and children share the settlement, and the children perform essential work for the group. Their families’ circumstances and the difficulty of establishing a stable home are visible in the camp’s improvised construction and exposed location. The residents have little protection from the surrounding systems, yet they sustain a community there rather than living as isolated individuals.

Ranjitbhai is a recognized leader. When Lin and Abdullah approach his shelter, two children support him as he comes out to greet them. He welcomes Abdullah and asks whether he has eaten, establishing a familiar relationship between them. Ranjitbhai’s manner also shows that the camp’s residents make decisions and maintain relationships with people beyond their immediate settlement. The scene gives the community social structure: its members receive visitors, communicate collectively, and arrange assistance rather than appearing only as recipients of outside intervention.

Communication with Ranjitbhai requires accommodation. His speech is difficult for Lin to understand, and a boy standing beside him repeats his words steadily. This arrangement allows Ranjitbhai to speak for himself while making the exchange possible for a visitor unfamiliar with his speech. The detail matters because the camp’s residents are often described through the circumstances of their exclusion; here, the visit also records the practical adjustments through which they conduct ordinary conversation and business.

The Visit and Medical Supplies

Abdullah brings Lin to meet Ranjitbhai because Abdel Khader Khan has told the camp leader that Lin needs medicines for the clinic in the Cuffe Parade Slum. Lin initially resists being called a doctor: he has some first-aid training, but no professional qualification, and describes himself as someone who has been drawn into helping. His clinic faces problems that exceed his knowledge, and he sends people to St. George Hospital when he cannot identify or treat their conditions. Many return without having seen a doctor or nurse. The hospital is overwhelmed, but the residents of the slum are too poor to pay a licensed practitioner for the referral that would help them get seen sooner.

Ranjitbhai offers a regular supply of medicine. At his direction, a teenage boy named Sunil brings forward a canvas bundle containing new, labelled ampoules and plastic bottles. The supplies include morphine hydrochloride, penicillin, and antibiotics for staph and strep infections. When Lin asks where the medicines come from, Abdullah explains that they are stolen. The exchange exposes an uneasy fact about care in the city: the clinic’s access to essential supplies depends on an informal network operating outside legal channels, even as formal hospitals struggle to meet demand.

Ranjitbhai arranges for Sunil to deliver medicines to Lin’s hut when needed. Before Lin and Abdullah leave, he asks Lin to remain seated and directs each member of the group to come forward and touch Lin’s feet. Lin is uncomfortable and asks him not to insist, but Ranjitbhai does. The gesture expresses the camp’s welcome and regard for Lin’s work, while also placing him in a position of honor he does not feel he has earned. For the residents, the encounter is not merely a transaction over supplies: it establishes an ongoing relationship between the camp and the clinic.

Place in the Care Network

The camp’s contribution becomes particularly significant when cholera spreads through the slum. Cases rise rapidly, and hospitals are already under pressure from outbreaks elsewhere in the region. Doctor Hamid and Lin treat residents in circumstances where outside assistance is limited. The oral rehydration salts used during the emergency have been supplied illegally by Abdel Khader Khan’s lepers. This links the camp’s medicine network to a wider community response: its residents provide resources that help the clinic act while public-health capacity is stretched.

The novel places this improvised care against the unequal material conditions of the city. The Cuffe Parade Slum houses thousands of people without reliable electricity, running water, toilets, or security of tenure, while formal medical services are overcrowded and difficult for its poorest residents to access. The camp near Khar occupies a different, still more precarious margin: its residents have been excluded from treatment colonies and repeatedly displaced by neighboring communities. Their support for Lin’s clinic does not erase those conditions, nor does it make the theft of medicines a secure substitute for accessible health care. It does show that people denied stable institutional support can become essential providers within another community’s fragile system of care.

The camp’s narrative significance rests on that reversal. Lin arrives thinking of himself as an unqualified helper, yet the people he visits supply medicines, organize delivery, and recognize his work. Their settlement is presented as vulnerable, but its residents are not merely passive objects of pity: they negotiate with visitors, maintain internal relationships, and contribute materially to care beyond their own camp. The encounter makes the city’s health system legible through its gaps, while showing how practical aid and human connection cross the boundaries those gaps create.