Rohit Oberoi knows all about the hidden cost of AIDS.
Out of work and out of society, Oberoi, 34, and his brother Vineet, 28, learned they carried the AIDS virus seven years ago.Since then, they have become India's new untouchables, shunned like a scourge by their neighbors, local shop owners, taxi drivers and even the doctors who claim to be fighting the AIDS pandemic.
"I'm very angry with the situation," Rohit Oberoi said. "For the past 4 years, I have had no doctor and no treatment. The medical institute refuses to see me. They say, `You are not dying. Go away. Come back when you are dying."'
Both hemophiliacs, Rohit and Vineet Oberoi were infected from blood produced by the Serum Institute of India, based in the western city of Pune.
But that was only the start of an ordeal that has become a common tale in India, now home to 1.8 million people infected with the human immunodeficiency virus, the most of any country in the world.
Although the blood institute subsequently was closed, the Oberoi brothers have received no compensation. A public inquiry like the one regarding tainted blood in Canada isn't even mentioned as a possibility in a country where doctors and medical institutions enjoy virtual immunity from public action.
As for counseling groups, sympathetic doctors or treatment wards, there's almost no support for a person with AIDS in India.
And so, living with their parents who are both retired government workers, the Oberoi brothers have resigned themselves to a denouement in seclusion in a New Delhi suburb.
The Hemophiliac Federation of India has no resources to help them, save for the advice to stay placid and cool when bleeding starts. For bouts of tuberculosis and meningitis, the brothers try to help each other, although a local retired doctor also brings them medicines.
Most painfully, perhaps, they've learned to veer away from the public ever since the Indian press splashed their pictures on front pages.
Despite government promises and expensive public-awareness campaigns, AIDS continues to strike terror in India's public imagination.
When Rohit Oberoi was declared HIV-positive in April 1989 during a blood attack, the nurses put a sign on the end of his hospital bed reading, "Positive."
Even today, confidentiality remains a distant ideal. Only last week at the country's leading hospital, the All-India Institute of Medical Science in New Delhi, a doctor informed a young man he was HIV-positive in the middle of a waiting room, in front of his parents and dozens of other people.
With so many other curses filling the hospital's wards - car crashes, infant diarrhea, bomb blasts, obstructed labor - why, one doctor asked privately, should he extend himself for a small group of AIDS patients?
Other doctors have refused to operate on HIV-infected people.
The Oberoi family has come to accept such pariah status. The father, who worked in India's parliament, remembers colleagues refusing to shake his hand. The mother remembers the watchful eyes whenever she walked down the street, until the family decided to move to another part of New Delhi.
For Rohit and Vineet, who rely on home treatment from each other, their only hope is for imported Factor 8 concentrate, which they need to control their bleeding. Each injection costs about $30, and they need up to eight injections a day during attacks.
Bitter and isolated, they don't expect that help to come from their own country, which they say has relegated them to the 1990s version of a leper colony.
"I am too much angry with this country," Rohit said. "Here are so many people making money from AIDS, but what do they do?"
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)