Each year as monsoon-bearing clouds arrive over eastern Uttar Pradesh, so does a pestilence. Hundreds, mostly children, fall ill with fever, convulsions, and disorientation. So familiar are people with these symptoms that at the first signs they rush their children to Baba Raghav Das Medical College Hospital, Gorakhpur. Few other hospitals in the eastern Uttar Pradesh region either have the doctors or the equipment to handle this affliction. And so, the journey of children from nearly 15 d