The office of the Pope is, like Kings of old, patriarchal and dictatorial, upholding belief, ensuring that the flock conforms spiritually, morally and physically. On his way to Yaounde, Cameroons, two weeks ago Pope Benedict XVI pronounced against the use of condoms against AIDS. Perhaps he should have walked around St Peter’s Square and note the discarded condoms in various stages of desiccation and check the vending machines selling them nearby. (That was several years ago; I doubt that anything’s changed). The Pope’s position would be defensible if he would accept the ABC of prevention of Sexually Transmitted Diseases:

Abstain, Be faithful, use Condoms. He is right to assert that “AIDS cannot be overcome by the distribution of condoms”; distribution will do nothing but use will, since abstinence and patience elude many. I hope that he reconsiders and make the distinction; I think he’s wrong to say that condoms may cause AIDS. AIDS in Africa is not simply a matter of prostitution and immorality; the evidence suggests that the disease afflicts more moral married women and newly deflowered young women than prostitutes, the culprits being carrier men who abuse women – poor, hungry and uneducated – in many regions of Africa that still treat women as chattel. Prevention will fail whenever sex is not controlled by the woman or a thoughtful male. It is known that a single exposure to HIV is more likely to infect a woman than a man and a healthy acidic vagina might prevent infection. But which woman knows her vaginal pH (acidity) level? Though not ideal, condoms are part of preventive strategy. Above all we should do no harm: ahimsa.
AIDS affects some 33 million people worldwide, including 2.5 million children. Two thirds are in sub-Saharan Africa. Médecins Sans Frontières treat 100,000 cases in 32 countries; efforts are stymied by shortage of health workers — most seeking political or economic asylum — shortage of diagnostic facilities, health education, high cost of antivirals, local beliefs and practices, including sexual initiation, and ill-health. Since so many are left untreated, it makes good sense to promote education and prevention. A vaccine remains elusive.
Societies do change when harm convinces them: we no longer spit in public nor defaecate on sidewalks; we cleanse, pasteurize, sterilize, sanitise; we make sure food handlers are not disease carriers; we immunize children; and we take all for granted. If the Vatican dislikes condoms it should support development of efficacious antimicrobials for vaginal use, thus increasing women’s control, several in trial. One promising approach was developed recently by a team led by Dr Bharat Ramratnam, Brown University, USA, who treated Lactobacilli - the same genus as keeps the female vagina acidic and disease resistant - with DNA from an anti-HIV protein; this converted the Lactobacilli into factories making the protein. They hope to find a safe and effective way of using them.
The disconnect at the Vatican from Science is not new. One example suffices. In 1510 Copernicus postulated the heliocentric universe as we know it and 100 years later Galileo invented a telescope, saw the moons of Jupiter and confirmed Copernicus’ hypothesis, thus displacing the ancient Biblical, Ptolemaic and Aristotelian claims of an earth-centered cosmos. The Vatican spent 17 years “persuading” Galileo to recant and finally tried and found him suspect of heresy, confining him to house arrest; he died eight years later, blind for the last four.
The CBC recently noted the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s telescope and credited the pair with discovery of the heliocentric system. But it was Aryabhatta I, (476-ca 550 CE), a 23-year old Indian mathematician and astronomer who first showed that Earth rotated on a north-south axis, each revolution taking 24 hours, that it orbited the sun in 365.3586805 days, and was one of several spherical planets in parallel orbits. He explained gravity and the apparent dance of celestial bodies that had long fascinated his Vaidic predecessors and would further engage Indian and foreign scholars from the Mediterranean to the Orient. In 499 CE the last of the Gupta emperors sent him on a tour of the West where he taught from his book the Aryabhattiya, the world’s first treatise on mathematics, which included complex calculations including fractions; decimals; square and cube roots; geometry; volumes of spheres; relationships; trigonometric functions; sine; pi (calculated as 3.14159 the short value most commonly used today) and properties of zero. Why does India not broadcast these things?
Condolences to the Jagan family on the passing of Mrs. Jagan, a Guyanese icon.

There are a few moments in Paul Theroux’s kiss-and-tell book about his at times turbulent relationship with Sir Vidia Naipaul, Sir Vidia’s Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents, that made me laugh with irony more than delight. One of these moments was Theroux’s complete miss over Sir Vidia’s fussiness about eating from the same dish as everyone else. This is something I grew up with in Trinidad, and which my grandmother drilled into my eating habits from early childhood – she would say, “Beta, don’t eat anybody ‘juthaa’”. What Ma meant was that I should not eat from the same plate used by another, or use the same cutlery – drinking from a cup, for example, meant tilting it and pouring the water into a cupped hand.

As complicated as this was with his brahminical upbringing, and in the wider Naipaulesque sense evidence of how he viewed the world and the ‘unclean’ people at the dinner table before him, in its simplicity, “juthaa” was placed before me as one of the fundamental lessons of life by my grandmother whose innocent intent was to teach proper eating hygiene.
Nowhere in Theroux’s betrayal of Sir Vidia - and the friendship they both shared - is there evidence that he knew about the strictures regarding “juthaa”. The young Sir Vidia would have had the same lessons in dining that I had as a boy, and which will no doubt continue to be inculcated in the generations to come in Trinidad.
And so, even as I broke into laughter as I read the book, I appreciated the additional veneer of dramatic irony that had unintentionally become woven into the narration of Sir Vidia, and given the scope of Theroux’s intent to betray and humiliate, was working against the narrator and even in favour of the subject.
The second moment in this book that made me sit up with a chuckle involved Theroux and Sir Vidia dealing with a pack of stray dogs. The details are as far away as the day I put the book down after I was finished reading it. However, what has stayed with me is they were in a village in Africa – walking together, they had encountered a hostile pack of dogs. No doubt about it – this was a frightening and menacing moment. The dogs would have been strays bound together into a pack by the similarity of abandonment and mistreatment. Sir Vidia and Theroux, without knowing it, had strayed into a territory marked with strategic bursts of dog urine, and had done so with the innocence and the dubious immunity of tourists – and without a cautionary sniff of the air.
And so, before them stood a pack of dogs with fangs barely bared beneath half-raised, quivering lips, tails stiffened with malevolence, ears tilted backwards, with bloodshot eyes focused on the intruders. Both men would have not been thinking of their feet – perhaps they would have been looking at the world before them at eye level, their collective perception appreciating the uneven boards of bent-nail architecture, the skeins of sun-peeled paint on the jalousies, with metaphorical absorption. And then, a tingling of the spider sense – time and space would have come into confluence, held together with tightening sinews of tension. Looking down, they would have seen a wall of sharp teeth, bared, territorial, and held back by the thinnest web of obedience, and ready to spring forward. For the American Theroux, he would have felt the fright even before the adrenalin arrived, the way we see lightning before the sound of thunder comes. But not so for the Trinidadian, Sir Vidia.
I recalled my boyhood in the back streets of market places, in short cuts through rubbish dumps, in the pathways through the mangroves where wind-blown debris caught in the roots that grew downwards like deformed fingers – it was here where packs of dogs roamed, their skins leprous with mange, faces scarred with welts and wounds from ferocious dogfights, eyes puffed with infections and hovering flies, their neglected lives equally filled with opportunism as with rage against the establishment, co-existing in a subculture where the credo was, ‘Every man for himself’.
I learned early, after the scars of a dog-bite or two - and the required tetanus shot - that to encounter a pack of these lost souls was to not show fear, neither in body language nor in the eloquence of the eyes. And worst, to fight against turning and running, despite the urgent whispering of the adrenalin in the ear and its empty promise of god-like athleticism. For to be caught in this tremendous cross-current of fangs meant being pulled under, there to be ripped apart the way predators tear sinew from bone.
Sir Vidia would have known this and how to deal with it; he would have encountered it, having grown up in central Trinidad, and then in the outskirts of Port-of-Spain – and he would have still been street-wise, despite his literary distance from Chaguanas and Woodbrook. And he showed no fear, leading an admiring Theroux away from danger and into safety. I smiled at the runaway irony.

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