Lin Visits the Leprosy Camp

Lin’s visit to the Leper Camp near Khar, accompanied by Abdullah, reveals a community pushed to the margins of both official medicine and ordinary slum life, yet organized enough to provide medicines to the clinic where Lin has been informally treating patients. The meeting makes his uncertain identity as a medic consequential: the camp’s residents recognize a need he cannot meet alone, while their own history explains how they have learned to obtain and distribute what others cannot easily supply.

How Lin became a medic

Lin’s work in the slum grew from a combination of circumstances that he initially could not interpret. As a teenager, he had trained in first aid, learning to treat common injuries and perform basic emergency procedures. Later, he used CPR to revive people suffering drug overdoses, earning the nickname Doc among people who knew him through that work. Friends in New Zealand gave him a first-aid kit before he left, and after crime and a prison escape brought him to the slum, residents began looking to him for treatment.

Lin understood that his training did not make him a doctor. He had been drawn into helping because people needed care and because he knew more than many around him, not because he possessed the knowledge to handle every case. When he met Doctor Hamid, Lin stressed that he had only been co-opted into the work and was not qualified. He described sending patients with illnesses he could not identify to St. George Hospital, only to see many return without having received attention. The gap between his limited competence and the community’s urgent needs is part of the context for the visit: he needs supplies and support, but he also knows that his position is precarious.

The camp on the railway land

Abdullah took Lin to the outskirts of Bombay, where some people with leprosy lived beyond the treatment colonies. Those colonies offered medical attention and cleaner surroundings, but their strict rules did not suit everyone; some residents left, while others were forced out. At any one time, a few dozen people lived outside them in the wider city. They also faced rejection from slum councils and street committees. Their settlements were mobile: they could establish shelters in an open space and leave quickly when their presence became unwelcome.

The group Lin visited had made its camp on a railway siding near Khar. To reach it, Lin and Abdullah left the bike and passed through gaps in fences and across ditches. The camp occupied a clear space between the tracks, where roughly thirty men, women, and children had built low shelters from cardboard, plastic, crooked branches, and string. Its fragile construction stood in sharp contrast to the organized railway land around it, where goods wagons moved through a landscape of tracks, warehouses, and maintenance sheds. The residents had made a place to live inside infrastructure designed for movement, not shelter.

People watched the visitors approach without challenging them. A severely affected man emerged from one of the huts, supported by two children, and greeted Abdullah. Abdullah addressed him respectfully as Ranjitbhai and introduced Lin. Ranjitbhai was the senior figure in the camp, and children brought stools as a small crowd gathered around the visitors. The welcome was not simply a meeting between a helper and people in need: it introduced Lin to a community with its own leadership, routines, and capacity to negotiate what it required.

Medicine, exclusion, and exchange

Ranjitbhai had already heard from Abdel Khader Khan that Lin needed medicines. He offered to provide supplies each week, and a boy named Sunil brought a canvas bundle containing labelled ampoules and bottles, including morphine hydrochloride, penicillin, and antibiotics for staph and strep infections. Lin asked where the medicines came from. Abdullah explained that the residents stole them and sold them on the black market, a source of income that also made medicines available to Lin.

Abdullah traced this practice to the position of people with leprosy under the British Raj. They were given low priority when medicines, bandages, and treatment were scarce, and shortages grew worse during famine or flood. Stealing what they could not obtain by other means gradually left them with surpluses, which they began selling. The trade therefore emerged from exclusion and need, but it also became a specialized network with customers far beyond the camp.

Medicine carried risks for people engaged in armed or clandestine activity. Purchases from chemists, hospital pharmacies, and wholesalers were registered; unusually large or repeated orders could attract official attention. A trail of antibiotics had helped police and governments locate dacoits and revolutionaries. The camp’s market operated differently: its sellers asked no questions and sold to anyone able to pay. Abdullah described customers that included terrorists, infiltrators, separatists, and other ambitious outlaws, and said the networks existed in every great city in India. The same system that enabled residents to survive could also supply people trying to evade state surveillance.

The camp’s place in this economy was not reducible to either charity or criminality. Its members had been denied reliable access to care, yet had developed skills in acquiring medicines and a means of supporting themselves. They could supply Lin precisely because their network operated beyond the ordinary channels that had failed them. The encounter makes the exchange reciprocal: Lin needs the medicines to treat his patients, while the camp turns accumulated knowledge and access into livelihood and influence.

The relationship continues beyond the visit

Ranjitbhai arranged for Sunil to deliver medicines to Lin’s hut whenever they were needed. Before Lin and Abdullah left, he asked Lin to remain seated and directed the camp’s residents to come forward and touch Lin’s feet. Lin found the gesture mortifying and asked him to stop, but Ranjitbhai insisted. The residents approached one by one; the ritual expressed the camp’s regard for the work Lin was trying to do, even as Lin resisted being treated as a figure of authority.

The connection later mattered during a cholera outbreak in the slum. When Doctor Hamid was asked what help Lin could provide, he said he would arrange trained volunteers and urged the community to continue the work it had begun. Hamid had obtained oral rehydration salts illegally from Abdel Khader Khan’s lepers; Lin explained that Abdel Khader Khan had brought the salts and taught him how to use them. The supplies did not make care easy—some patients were too sick to keep them down—but the earlier arrangement had provided a resource for the emergency.

The first-aid kit also recurs later in a very different setting. During the Afghanistan campaign, Lin and Khaled use its antibiotics, antiseptic wash, bandages, and scissors to treat wounded men under fire. That scene extends the significance of Lin’s early training and the kit his friends had given him: neither makes him a professional doctor, but both repeatedly place him in situations where limited practical knowledge can help determine who receives immediate care.

Significance

The visit turns Lin’s improvised medical role from an isolated act of good will into a relationship with a community that has its own expertise and resources. He arrives as a fugitive and an unqualified helper, expecting to explain his limitations; instead, the residents supply medicines, establish a delivery arrangement, and recognize his work. His discomfort at their ritual honors the distance between the authority they attribute to him and the uncertainty he feels about his abilities.

The camp’s circumstances also complicate a simple contrast between legitimate medicine and illicit trade. Formal services exist, but access to them is shaped by restrictive rules, scarcity, and exclusion. The black market answers those failures while serving a varied and sometimes dangerous clientele. Lin’s visit brings these realities into one encounter: care depends on people whose own access to care has been denied, and the medicines that sustain his clinic come through an economy formed under pressure.