Trucks Highways India and AIDS

On India's Roads, Cargo and a Deadly Passenger from NYTimes

Some 80 percent of truckers' wives who came in for voluntary testing and counseling tested positive, she said, usually because by the time they came in their husbands were on their deathbeds, and denial could no longer be sustained.

G. Karuna, 24, was another woman who fell prey to the peregrinations of her husband, a long-distance driver from a family of truckers. When they both sought treatment for tuberculosis or opportunistic infections at hospitals, they hid his occupation, since many private hospitals now turn truckers away.

After her husband died, his family blamed her, a cruel vengeance some in-laws inflict on the widows. They have made treatment and prevention that much harder.

She was forced to sleep on the path outside; the family refused to share even a loaf of bread that she had touched. Soon their whole village had ostracized her.

Ms. Karuna cried as she told her story, but that story also conveyed an uncommon
strength. She had left her husband's family and her village to start a new life on her own. She became an activist with the Social Educational and Economic evelopment Society, an advocacy group in Guntur, trying to save other truckers'
wives.

She showed women pictures of her handsome husband before he sickened, and after.

She told the wives to know what their husbands were doing outside the home, to negotiate the use of condoms with them, to get treated for sexually transmitted diseases. Her husband's relatives still teased her: "Why are you working so hard? You also will die."