I Stared at the Prophets of Shiva
By M.K. Batra MD
I stared in disbelief at the Aghori Sadhus, prophets of Shiva, eating the bloated human flesh and removing the eyes to access Madya – “wine ” from the brains of the corpses. As they fished the bodies floating in the Ganges I recalled the Hindu story of how the world would end. Shiva would open his third eye and begin Rudra Tandava – the dance of destruction. Perched on his white horse, Vishnu would strike down millions of people as Kali Yuga would come to an end. Only the Aghori Sadhus would survive, cannibalizing the endless number of corpses and internalizing the sickness from their dead bodies to purify the world again. I realized I had to make a hasty exit from the cremation grounds and back to the US.
Back in San Diego, I hugged my six year old daughter so tight that she felt part of me. She had just turned six while I was away in India doing the clinical trial. Excitedly she ran to her bedroom to retrieve the Apple watch Gabriella had given her on our behalf – I reflected momentarily on the Disney watch she had received last Christmas and how she seemed to have outgrown that quickly. She modeled the watch for me. Instantaneously the image of the adolescent girl who showed off the mauli on her wrist darted into my mind. Her name was Aarushi - “The morning light”. She was as enamored with the orange and red silk threads woven together and put on her at the temple as my daughter was with her amazon watch.
I pulled my daughter close to me again and held her against my chest hoping to erase the Indian girl’s image from my mind. Despite my best efforts, my daughter’s name – Roshini, which meant light, would evoke images of Aarushi. Thinking about the meaning of her name took me back to the funeral pyre which glowed as the sun settled. Two days earlier I was at her bedside in her parents Jhopri – a small thatched house - as she bled from her nose and suffocated in her bloody vomit unable to breathe. Her body was surrounded by her mother and father and her two older siblings, preventing the Aghori Sadhus from taking her away.
Her entire family now had the symptoms of the virus. I was certain that Aarushi had transmitted the virus to her classmates. Soon her entire village would have the illness. Only the Aghori Sadhus seemed to be resistant to the virus and its side effects.
As a scientist my hypothesis was that their immunocompetence was extremely durable due to years of eating rotten human flesh, decaying animal remains and drinking blood. They were likely to survive and flourish on the dead villagers. I was mesmerized by the glow of the funeral pyre where a Sadhu with his Kapala, a human skull, waited patiently. Like a land based vulture he circled the funeral pyre in his tantric trance, calmly smoking the marijuana pipe.
Aarushi’s family had grown up in Varanasi for generations. The ritual of the Aghoris was familiar to them, yet this was their daughter and they surrounded the pyre until her body was ashes. Aarushi’s mother recognized that once her daughter was cremated nothing further could be done to protect her ashes. The family turned away knowing the Sadhus would be smearing the ashen remains of Aarushi over their body and transferring her sickness into their bodies and eating the remains of her brain and bone marrow.
I too had grown up in India; at the age of fourteen my father accepted a position at the prestigious pharmaceutical firm Genesis. Our life in Vasant Vihar was more than comfortable. Having grown up in South Delhi I lived a life closer to the western lifestyle than that of an Indian teenager. We had several servants, two drivers, and an armed guard at our gate. We traveled throughout Europe and America – but always were happy to be back in Vasant Vihar where life was posh. At the age of fourteen we moved to sunny California. I attended and excelled at Bishop High School in La Jolla. I didn’t have the aptitude to be a scholar like my father and instead went to business school. I learned corporate finance, modern capitalism and risk analysis. I came back to San Diego to work at Genesis, alongside my father, who had been my mentor. He retired shortly after I started – and spent half his year in San Diego and half in Vasant Vihar. I had no desire to go back to India and made my life here with my college sweetheart Gabriella and our beautiful daughter Roshini. I know my parents were secretly disappointed I didn’t marry an Indian girl, but having lived in the US for more than half my life I felt more American than Indian. Nonetheless, Genesis felt I was “Indian Enough” to conduct their clinical trials in India; I still spoke the language and understood how to navigate India. A part of me felt guilty conducting nonregulated clinical trials in India, but over the past thirteen years we had compensated the participants more than they would have made annually and complications were minimal.
This year was different. The new influenza clinical trial involved using a nasal inhaler to transfect the participant. Genesis realized that a whole new market would open up worldwide if the vaccine did not require an injection. Children and their parents would prefer the intra-nasal vaccination, while we expected the older patients would still prefer the IM route.
They didn’t do the ferret trials for this cycle. Ferrets get the same signs and symptoms as humans to influenza. But they said it had to be skipped this time. The shortage of ferrets and their overall expense along with the limited time to bring the vaccine to the US led the researchers to “fast track” human trials.
As with all trials in the last thirteen years I was the lead to find an appropriate location and number of participants in India. The recent HPV trial in Indore that left several adolescent Indian girls dead had brought on more regulatory oversight. The Indian government failed to protect its most vulnerable citizens. Many who were told it was a vaccination against Malaria. Companies like Merck made record profits on the backs of these clinical trials. Indore and larger cities would be under greater scrutiny, so we chose Karma, a village in Varanasi, as the site for the clinical trials…
I had grown up sheltered in India so I had never been to Varanasi – the spiritual hub of India – These are some two thousand temples dedicated to Shiva, the destructive nature of God. It is believed to be the oldest living city in the world and it is said that whoever takes their last breath in Varanasi will achieve eternal salvation. Little did I realize that our clinical trials would lead to thousands of people taking their last breath in Varanasi.
The researchers at Genesis decided that the influenza trials would be done with the nasal inhaler. The virus, would have a more virulent strain in order to confer immunity through the nasal route.
I was concerned that the animal trials were skipped – but was reassured that I didn’t have to worry about the “scientific” stuff and to leave that to the research department. I spoke to the person who always offered me the best guidance. My father emphatically stated that I should not conduct human trials until we were sure the animal trials showed minimal complications. “These poor, uneducated Indian villagers should not be their guinea pigs” he stated. In retrospect, having my privileged upbringing made the poor and destitute Indians seem expendable. Indian lives were cheap. It was ethics versus economics – and profits rather than people became the prime consideration. I became the vehicle for Genesis to conduct these trials in time for release of the vaccine for this flu season.
When the news arrived two days later about one of our first participants, an elderly woman complaining of weakness in her legs and not being able to stand and dying of respiratory paralysis, I didn’t think much of it. She was an older lady and probably died of natural causes. But then as days went by, the same scenario seemed to occur with other trial participants and within the first three weeks of the clinical trial there were eleven deaths. I knew something was very wrong.
I called Dr. Fisher at Genesis, the lead researcher. He assured me that it couldn’t be the vaccine. By six weeks there were 37 deaths. The same circumstances: weakness, followed by hemorrhage complications and respiratory failure. The people literally asphyxiated as their diaphragm and rib cage didn’t have the strength to take in a breath. I had talked to Dr. Fisher almost daily – he now commented “It looks like they are developing a rare complication of vaccination called Guillain-Barré syndrome – I’m not sure how this happened but you should halt the trial and get back to the US.”
The villagers wanted my head. I watched daily as the bodies of the dead participants were floated in the Ganges River. Some of the bodies were accosted by the Aghori Sadhus and eaten.
I stared at Aareeshi’s funeral pyre on my last day in Varanasi – knowing if I didn’t leave immediately I may not be able to get out of India at all.
I boarded the British Airways plane on my way back to San Diego, thankful that I had been able to get out of India before the government could mobilize its efforts to the small village. Genesis would have to deal with this mess; I wasn’t the guy that was responsible. We sat on the runway delayed for several hours due to the poor visibility from all the smog in Delhi not allowing us to take off. The putrid air made me sneeze and cough – how could these people survive in this habitat I thought? I wasn’t alone either as I could hear some of the other passengers having the same reaction to the air that circulated on the aircraft.
I arrived in San Diego and held my daughter close and hugged her all the way home. I recovered from my trip for the next two days - the hectic pace left my body sore and Ibuprofen and soup were the mainstay of my treatment.
I watched CNN. The headlines were: “Thousands die in India with flu like symptoms” and “British government concerned this flu season starting early. “
At Genesis I confronted the researchers – how were they going to explain the clinical trial results? They looked baffled – they had not been notified of the outcomes by Dr. Fisher – The vaccine had already been shipped out to pharmacies across the country. I searched out Dr. Fisher, and cornered him in the conference room with Kenneth Frazier, CFO of Genesis. Like me, Nepotism played a role in Kenneth’s rise to CFO at Genesis; his father had been CFO of Merck. I was relieved they were together and likely discussing the retrieval of the shipped vaccines.
“Mr. Frazier, I’m sure Dr. Fisher has notified you of the failed clinical trial in India, are you going to announce a recall on the vaccine?”
“Mr. Kumar,” Dr. Fisher said, “I would not call that a failed clinical trial, I opted to halt it based on the fact that we had enough data to move forward with release of the vaccine.”
I must have appeared incredulous as Mr. Frazier remarked “We expect almost 60 million people to be vaccinated this year – the complications that occurred in a few hundred people vaccinated in India amounts to a very small percentage.”
“Except that in India we had vaccinated only about 3000 people and at last count over 400 deaths had occurred” I retorted and left the conference room.
I walked back to my office and started to pack up my belongings. I called my father from my office phone for the last time before I resigned my position. He must have noticed the remorse in my voice as I explained the details. He was silent on the phone for several seconds before saying “It’s too late for those people in Varanasi who were treated as guinea pigs – and for those people on the airplane and the ones they transmit the virus to, you need to go into isolation and whatever you do don’t come into contact with your daughter.”
I sat on the phone silent with a sickened feeling in my stomach.
A text came across my IPhone: “Roshini not feeling well, have to go to school to pick her up.”
Munish Batra MD
is a plastic and reconstructive surgeon based in San Diego, California. He writes articles, short stories and novels. Born in a small town in India that had neither running water nor a sewage system, his father brought the Batra family to the United States in 1972 when Munish was 7 years old. The Batras settled in Maple Heights, Ohio, which borders inner- city Cleveland. Batra’s father worked as a Foreman in a metal foundry in Cleveland and young Munish worked at the same factory on the blast furnace under his father while attending public schools there. Although he had always wanted to be a writer, due to his Indian roots he was given the options of either becoming a doctor or an engineer. He attended The Ohio State University, graduating with a Bachelor’s in Science, and a minor in English and then was accepted at Case Western University Medical School, where he was awarded an M.D. and completed his residency in general surgery and trauma at St Luke’s Medical center. During medical school and his residency he continued to keep a journal about his experiences as an inner-city trauma resident. Many of his short stories were inspired by those real life situations. While he has had much success in his medical career including being featured on the Oprah show, in the LA Times, and people magazine, he has returned to his first passion. After 25 years of being a surgeon he is now dedicating a significant amount of his time to writing short stories and books. His novel, Animal, was acquired by Wordfire press for publication in early 2021 and the film rights were recently optioned by a Hollywood production company. Dr. Batra’s interest is in exploring the ramifications of medical science in his writing. He’s currently working on a dystopian thriller about gene editing experiments gone wrong.