Lin’s first visit to the leper camp near Khar transforms his improvised work as a neighborhood healer into a relationship with a community whose medical knowledge and underground trade are bound to its exclusion. Led by Ranjitbhai, the camp’s residents offer Lin medicines for his patients and a place in their network. The encounter also reveals the stark logic behind that network: denied reliable access to treatment, the residents have become suppliers to people who need medicines but cannot safely obtain them through ordinary channels.

Setting and encounter

Abdullah takes Lin to meet the residents after Lin has begun treating people in the Colaba hutments. The journey leads to the outskirts of Bombay, where a few dozen people with leprosy live beyond the city’s treatment colonies. Those state- and privately funded colonies provide medical care, support, and clean surroundings, but their strict rules are difficult for some residents to accept. Some leave; others are made to leave. Outside the colonies, they face further rejection: neighborhood councils and street committees rarely tolerate their presence for long. The group therefore lives in temporary camps, moving to open ground where it can and leaving when necessary.

On the day of Lin’s visit, the residents have made their camp on rusty railway land beside Khar. Their shelters occupy a clear space between the tracks and are assembled from cardboard, plastic, branches, and string. Around thirty men, women, and children live there. The precariousness of their homes contrasts with the more established huts of the settlement where Lin lives, making visible how little security this group has even among people already accustomed to life on the margins.

The residents have seen Abdullah and Lin approaching. Ranjitbhai, the camp’s senior figure, comes out to greet them, supported by two children. Abdullah addresses him with respect and introduces Lin to the assembled group. Ranjitbhai is treated as the camp’s leader, and the meeting proceeds with the residents gathered around the visitors. Their welcome is not merely personal hospitality: it opens a conversation about the camp’s needs, its means of survival, and the medicines Lin requires for his patients.

A leader and a supply arrangement

Ranjitbhai tells Lin that Abdel Khader Khan has informed him of the need for medicines. A boy named Sunil brings forward a canvas bundle containing labeled, apparently new ampoules and plastic bottles. The supplies include morphine hydrochloride, penicillin, and antibiotics used against staphylococcal and streptococcal infections. The display makes the residents’ practical capacity clear: they can obtain and organize medical stock, rather than merely receive whatever help outsiders choose to provide.

The camp agrees to help Abdel Khader Khan and offers medicines regularly. Ranjitbhai arranges for Sunil to deliver supplies to Lin’s hut as required. The arrangement links the camp’s underground resources to the daily work of Lin’s informal clinic. In time, the connection also matters during the cholera emergency: Khaderbhai’s lepers provide oral rehydration salts, which Lin and Doctor Hamid use in treating the sick. The visit thus establishes a concrete supply route whose importance becomes clear in a later crisis.

Ranjitbhai also directs the men, women, and children of the group to approach Lin and touch his feet. Lin finds the gesture mortifying and asks him not to require it, but Ranjitbhai insists. The residents approach one by one. The scene gives the meeting a ceremonial dimension, while also placing Lin in an unfamiliar position: he has come as a visitor who doubts his own qualifications, but the community receives him as someone whose work deserves recognition.

The medicine trade and its history

Abdullah explains why the camp’s residents steal medicines and sell them on the black market. During the British Raj, lepers were placed last in the allocation of medicines, bandages, and treatment. Shortages caused by famine and floods could leave them without conventional supplies or traditional remedies. Stealing became a way to obtain what they could not otherwise get; as their skill and stock grew, the residents began selling medicines as well as using them to survive.

The trade also fills a particular gap in a country repeatedly marked by conflict. Medicines and medical supplies are monitored through chemists, hospital pharmacies, and wholesalers. Purchases substantially above the norm can attract attention, and records of antibiotics have helped authorities trace dacoits and revolutionaries. The residents’ market operates differently: they do not ask customers why they need the drugs, and they sell to anyone able to pay. Abdullah describes similar networks in India’s major cities, serving terrorists, infiltrators, separatists, and outlaws, as well as other customers seeking to avoid scrutiny.

This account complicates the camp’s position in the story. Its residents are not simply recipients of charity, nor are they presented only as criminals. The trade arises from deprivation and exclusion, yet it makes them indispensable to people whose needs range from survival to armed resistance. Their marginality places them outside systems of care and regulation, but also gives them a role those systems cannot easily replace.

Consequences for Lin’s work

Lin initially resists being called a doctor. He has first-aid training from a course taken as a teenager, and he has used CPR to revive people suffering overdoses, earning the nickname Doc. But he regards himself as unqualified for the wider demands of the slum clinic. He sends patients whose illnesses he cannot identify to the diagnostic service at St. George Hospital, only to find that many return without having seen medical staff. His modesty is therefore grounded in a real limit: basic training cannot substitute for diagnosis, equipment, or reliable institutional care.

The camp’s supplies do not resolve that problem, but they give Lin practical resources and a continuing connection to people who can obtain them. His clinic grows through a mixture of limited skill, improvised care, and help from others. During the cholera outbreak, he acknowledges that he can do little beyond arranging for trained volunteers, while relying on the oral rehydration salts supplied through the same network established by Abdel Khader Khan’s lepers. Later, he also uses his first-aid knowledge to treat Ameer’s arm and to perform CPR during an overdose. These episodes extend the role first formed in the slum without making Lin a formally trained physician.

The encounter’s decisive change is relational as well as practical. Lin arrives with Abdullah as an outsider to the camp; he leaves with an agreement that the residents will help provide medicines to his patients. The visit binds a fugitive healer, a marginalized community, and Abdel Khader Khan’s network through a shared, if uneasy, reliance on care. It gives Lin’s work a source of support while exposing the conditions that make such support necessary: formal services fail many patients, and people excluded from them have developed their own means of obtaining and circulating medicine.