Safety in Delhi?

I made a friend recently. Elsie, I'll call her, runs the antique stall in the village. A real eccentric, smells wonderfully of expensive perfume, hugely charismatic and jolly in the extreme, she asked after Zach. 'How's your boy?' she enquired while Monk, my waggy Max replacement, bounded up at her in joyful exhuberance. She knows Zach. When he's reasonably sane he takes Monk for walks on the Heath. He passes by Elsie's stalls and stops, no doubt to louchely light a cigarette and chat to Elsie or to talk with Ken her partner about the latest football stories.

I imagine Zach there on a cold winter's day, collar up, huddled over lighting the fag, while Elsie regales him with the latest local gossip. He's charmed her. When she saw me after Sam had returned from Delhi, she then too enquired about Zach. 'Where's your boy? I haven't seen him for weeks...' I told her what had happened to him. The journey to Leh. The meltdown. The drugs he had apparently been fed by the 'friends' he had made while they watched him as one does a clown or the funniest comedian. Her face fell and tears reached her eyes. 'I know just how you feel,' she said to me. She didn't have to say much. I could tell that she really could empathise. 'You know,' she continued, 'it's not his fault. When you start to lose it, the distance between the time that you can stop and do something is so small, so very tiny that it's almost an impossibility to do anything about it...' So she knows a lot about this, I thought.

Today, after being dragged around the corner by the ever-affectionate Monk, almost knocking over the bric-a-brac and pictures and into Elsie's arms, she asked again after Zach. I considered the question. How do you answer it? 'He's safe,' I said. She looked up at me and smiled. 'Well, that's something, isn't it? At least he's safe.'

I suppose he's safe. We're, what, five, six thousand miles away? We have to trust the hospital, the consultant, the attendants, nurses, Ragesh... We don't really know what's happening there but then we didn't know what was happening to Zach when he was in hospital in Greece or Ecuador or Thailand. Various people gave us feedback. The only feedback we get from Zach is that he 'shouldn't be there.' When asked by Sam why, his answer was that he should still be in Leh, 'fighting the fight in Iraq/Afghanistan...' Whatever that means. Still delusional, is the reply.

So safety is paying hospital bills and bills for Ragesh and extra bills for Ragesh to go and buy food for Zach because Zach refuses to eat the food at the hospital and then there's more clothes to buy for him and... Well, it's still safer him being there than here because at least we know that he's not knocking around the streets of Delhi, making his home in a market and scoring as much as he can from the local dealers. Well, at least I hope he's not...