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UNFORGETTABLE
President Chandrika Kumaratunga will commemorate the life and work of HIV crusader Dr. Kamalika Abeyaratne on her 71st birth anniversary on Wednesday, June 22.
At a simple ceremony to be held at the BMICH, the President will also convey a heartfelt message to the people of Sri Lanka of the need for strong political leadership in the campaign against HIV/AIDS. Dr. Kamalika died on December 11, 2004 due to complications from asthma.

By Kumudini Hettiarachchi
Poignant memories. Minute details tucked into the innermost recesses of the mind. Filled eggs in the shape of ducks……“she used to cut tiny orange feet out of carrot for them”. The memories overflow of a person no more. Wife, mother, child specialist, HIV activist and friend.

Most of all a person with compassion and humanity towards the voiceless, the stigmatized and the ostracized. This was Kamalika Priyaderi Abeyaratne, a member of the upper echelons of society who had the courage to come out and declare, “Yes, I am Positive”, and bring the battle against HIV/AIDS into the open, even facing the barbed ire of jealous peers who attempted to tarnish her good name. Dr. Kamalika Abeyaratne who died last December is to be honoured on her birthday which falls on June 22.

“What most people don’t realize is that of Kami’s 70 years of life she was HIV positive only for nine years,” says husband Dr. Michael Abeyaratne who was by her side literally in sickness and in health, till death parted them.
Dr. Kamalika contracted HIV through an infected blood transfusion after being the victim of an accident while on the way to the south to conduct free health clinics for the men, women and children there.

That was her way of life. “The other day, I met a person who showed me her diagnostic card as a child, with Ammi’s signature,” says daughter Nilu, adding that even now people stop her and go into lengthy explanations how Dr. Kamalika treated them when they were children or their children. “She was terribly popular. Her little patients were from all walks of life. What broke her heart was that she was unable to be with kids, once diagnosed with HIV.”
So what was her mother like? Not a typically fussy mother, she never breathed down our necks, says Nilu, 39, who is a temporary lecturer at the Post-Graduate Institute of Archaeology of the Kelaniya University.

“She was an inspirational woman. At the height of her private practice, she was extremely busy. Hospital visits, ward rounds, one hour for lunch and back to the hospital. Later it was time for her private patients who were more her friends than patients,” says Nilu.

The time her own children had quiet moments with her was when she would come back in the afternoon from the Lady Ridgeway Hospital, have a quick lunch, take off her saree and have a half-hour lie down in her underskirt and blouse. “That was the time we would discuss this and that with her. Tell her our fears and problems and anything that came to mind,” says Nilu.

Though she was busy and popular, evidence of which her four children had from their young days, when they used to hear the coughing and shuffling outside the windows of their rooms in their home down Fifth Lane, where people queued up from about 3-4 a.m.to get an appointment to meet her, Nilu says, “Ammi always had time to do the little things which mattered to us. She baked cakes, and not just on and off but regularly.”

“She managed to do all those things because she was a very organized person,” stresses Dr. Michael. “She never got into a flap.” It was with the same equanimity that Dr. Kamalika faced the 1988-89 JVP insurrection, when a little piece of paper could shut the biggest corporates in the country. “Never, never in her life had Kami ever struck work, whatever the provocation,” says Dr. Michael immediately harking back to the first insurrection of 1971, when both of them were working at the Anuradhapura Hospital. “We practically ran the hospital, because most of the others had gone away.”

But the second was very hard, says Nilu. “It was soon after, that the family got scattered.” Dr. Michael was working in Saudi Arabia and Dr. Kamalika was running a ward at the Lady Ridgeway Hospital in Colombo. When in her ward one day, with most of the others implying that “they won’t do anything to a woman”, a group armed with guns had walked in. An argument ensued between the house officer and the armed men but finally the men had gone away. The house officer had warned Dr. Kamalika to “leave right now and not come back”.

Around the same time, Dr. Michael had got a call from a friend in Sri Lanka that his wife had nearly got shot and in a sweat had made arrangements to get her over to Saudi Arabia immediately. However, Dr. Kami’s cool reaction had been, “I am not running away.” After much persuasion she had got two years no-pay leave and joined Dr. Michael.

For Dr. Kamalika, tragedy and sorrow were nothing new. When just nine, her world had crumbled first with the death of her father, Prof. G.A.W. Wickramasuriya – the first Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology in the Univesity of Ceylon -- whom she adored and soon after, the death of her younger brother at the tender age of seven from polio.The next shadow over her life had come when her own family, Dr. Michael, herself, daughters Aruni, Nilu and Shalini and son Dayan had to come to grips with the fact that Aruni was dying of cancer. “She was 27 and a final-year medical student in England. She died in 1988. Ammi bore her sorrow bravely and helped my sister through her pain and anguish,” says Nilu.

Adds Dr. Michael, “From about the time we married, she used to meditate and she found strength through meditation to face the loss of Aruni.” As father and daughter travel down memory lane, about the devastation that followed the discovery that Dr. Kamalika was HIV positive, the acceptance and finally going public, Nilu says, “When people heard that Ammi had HIV, the phone began ringing off the hook. Hundreds of people called to show support and just to stand by her with the simple words, ‘She saved my child’.”

Surrounded by dogs, most picked up by Dr. Kamalika not only in Colombo but also during her forays into the remote areas to hold free clinics for the rural folk, dubbed kele clinics, Dr. Michael points out “the black and white fellow named Pamunuwe wele doggy and the matching one, Pole Pansale Saki, that Kami insisted we take from the street near the Jathika Pola”.

On a more serious note, he explains how while working in Anuradhapura during the second coming of malaria to this country, Kami was the first to discover the rare hereditary blood disease G6PD deficiency in Sri Lanka which gives a bad reaction to certain anti-malarial drugs.

“After she was diagnosed with HIV, she was considered a pariah. Kami was reduced to a nobody. She was cancelled down to naught,” says Dr. Michael.
Was she? The answer seems to be a resounding no. For Dr. Kamalika lives on not only in the hearts of her family but also the thousands of children she treated and held close in Colombo and the rural clinics including in the Mahaweli areas and the border areas at the height of the conflict. Yes, she also lives in the hearts of all the shunned HIV/AIDS victims for whom she threw open not only her home but also her very being.

ACCIDENT that led to HIV
Dr. Kamalika Abeyaratne was in the front seat, with son Dayan driving their hatchback. Dr. Michael who had the flu was in the rear along with a wooden box of drugs. It was 6.30 a.m. on November 1995, and the threesome were on their way to Tangalle, where Dr. Kamalika was to hold a Nawajeevana clinic, the home-based rehabilitation programme for handicapped children.
At Ambalangoda, a child ran across the road and to avoid hitting the boy, Dayan braked. The car skidded and hit a concrete block. Dr. Kamalika was seriously injured- both her lungs were punctured. First taken to Balapitiya, then on to Karapitiya she was later brought to Sri Jayewardenepura Hospital.
“She was given ‘two bloods’ in Karapitiya and ‘34 bloods’ at Sri Jayewardenepura,” says Dr. Michael.

She came out of hospital two months later. The following April she got a bad attack of jaundice. “Kami was tottering. She was hospitalised again and it was then that she was tested HIV positive. “That’s when she became another AIDS case,” says Dr. Michael.

Later an inquiry found that Dr. Kamalika had become infected through a contaminated blood transfusion given at Sri Jayewardenepura Hospital.
Then began her saga of firstly facing and accepting the traumatic reality, followed by the battle to win dignity and dispel stigma for HIV patients. She was the founding secretary of Lanka+, an organization for HIV positive people set up in 2001. Her biggest achievement was securing free drugs for those suffering from HIV.

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