Kathmandu. March 1984

The rickshaw wallah’s thin legs pedalled further, further, further into the unlit night. I was disoriented. Uneasy. The stranger riding with me—was she really a Red Cross nurse? Why had I so trustingly volunteered to come with her, out here in the dog-howling dark? Why had I foregone my usual travelling caution?

She was desperate for my blood, that’s why.

I had been eating at a restaurant popular with western tourists. She had sidled, pleading, from table to table, long skirt swishing, dusty toes exposed in well-worn sandals. Other diners looked at her with disgust, as if she were a beggar—a white beggar, the worst kind, they hissed.

But, as it turned out, she was looking for Type A positive. Now tourist landmarks disappeared. We passed vague dark shapes—rickety houses, sleeping cows. Cooking smells entwined themselves with wafts of ripe filth.

I asked the Red Cross nurse—a young German—why my blood was needed so urgently. There was a poor person, she told me. He was haemorrhaging, his stomach lining eaten away. It happens all the time here, she said. Few people could afford to visit doctors—and there weren’t many doctors, anyway. So locals self-medicated, using over-the-counter drugs. Then they haemorrhaged.

He was weak. He probably wouldn’t live, even with my blood.

We reached the Red Cross compound, low buildings moored in a sudden pool of strong white light. A Nepalese family, miserably huddled in the foyer, looked up. Hope and relief flickered on weather-beaten faces.

I lay on a bed. The pillow had a depression in it from many heads, and the pillowcase was greasy. My blood was tested, drained out of my arm, and hurried somewhere, out of sight.

I felt faint. I’m squeamish.

As I recovered my equilibrium, the man’s family murmured something to the nurse. I saw her face rearrange itself in a complicated way.

“Coke or Fanta?” she asked me. “They want to buy you a can of drink. They want to say thank you, thank you.”