Lala is a young man but not a healthy one. Weight loss has pinched his face, giving it the shape of India; his silences end in coughs. Lala stopped taking medicine for tuberculosis (TB) because he started feeling better and ran out of money at roughly the same time. Now the disease is back and he can no longer afford treatment. He may be among the half-million Indians who will die this year from TB, which kills five times as many as malaria, striking mainly those in their prime. These are avoidable tragedies. Tuberculosis is almost always curable, and the cure is not expensive. When death happens on an Indian scale it is because the health system is not working. Few Indians, knowing as they do that their state is riddled with cracks just the right size for people like Lala to fall through, are surprised when it does.
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