| The visiting Angel of Death nowadays is invariably a VIP. If there is anyone dying of starvation in Ethiopia or Somalia, the emaciated victim is subjected, apart from the flies and the squalor and the life-sapping debilitation, also to the indignity of a fleeting visit by a VIP or famous filmstar. Who can forget the haunting images of the gamine actress Audrey Hepburn, wafer thin herself for different reasons, clasping the husk of a black child? Or of Sophia Loren, a better-nourished Italian, holding the matchstick fingers of a dying child whose dehydrated eyes had sunk as deep as dry holes into the hollows of his skull? |
| It is difficult for an average person to understand what succor a dying child who has never seen a Hollywood film could derive from such a transient visitation. The milk-white hand of an actress does not drip nourishment, nor does it have the healing property of a royal hand which could in the olden days, it was said, cure an illness known as the king’s curse, or even today, through the compassionate ungloved handshake of Diana Princess of Wales, alleviate the leper-like isolation of an AIDs patient. |
Published in THE NATION 5 Dec. 1992, and reprinted in THE ARMLESS QUEEN (1994). |
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