I got used to medication. I am somehow oscillating between commitment and uncommitment towards a kidney disease group. I would like to participate, but hey, I am not sick enough yet to be part of the club. Anyway, instead of boring everyone with repetitive tales of which symptoms I am showing I will let you into the wicked circus of my life.

I was born in a disease stricken, damp, hot and stinky Calcutta in the year 1974 during monsoon rains. I was born in a private hospital with rusty cots and a pre-historic respirator as recalled by my mother. My mother, who had studied law and then married my dad, a Chemistry and Plastics engineer and moved to Switzerland. My mothers family had always had money. My great grandpa is said to have had a golden Rolls Royce and I can confirm that my grandparents had a staff of seven people including a cook, maids and other "people", as they were simply referred to. My grandmother was cat crazy and ran a "cat shelter" of fourty cats. While refugees from Bangladesh were dying outside and Mother Teresa's halls were full of lepers and the dying, we would tend to the fight wounds of tomcats, neuter them and raise kittens by the bottle. Still sometimes a party of three, my grandmother, my aunt and my mother would go to Mother Teresa to donate items, money or medicine. I was never allowed to go along.

My mother grew up in quite luxury, with the best of education and more freedoms than most of her country kinswomen. All that changed when her beautiful, charming and talented sister declined to marry a prince and eloped with my mothers guitar teacher instead. That happened a few years before my birth and by the time I was born, she and her mother were on talking terms again, but the relationship between my grandmother and my aunts husband always was a little awkward.

When I was in Kolkata once, as a child, I remember seeing a dead beggar lying on a garbage pile being eaten by stray dogs. I pointed it out to my mother and threw up in the taxi in which we were driving, but my mother pretended that I must have been mistaken. That image still haunts me today. I wonder who had disposed of the dead body on a garbage pile and how hungry the dogs must have been to eat a human being.