Neighbours. Everyone has them. Sometimes they get along with them, sometimes they don't. My wife and I are fairly lucky. We live in a suburban neighbourhood full of flats. Front and back, our house contacts four others; our two next-door neighbours and two that adjoin our backyard. We've never had any major problems with any of them but our relationships with each vary. On the right rear we don't know the people. On the right, next door, we're cordial with them, never socializing or anything else. On the left, next door, they are very good friends of ours. We socialize with them frequently and they are among our closest acquaintances. And then there are the left rear people.

They're different without a doubt and neither my wife nor myself cares too much for them. Their names are Manorama and Danesh. Danesh sells real estate for a living. Manorama is mostly a housewife but she works part time as a receptionist at some insurance company. They have a son named Tarun who is the same age as my oldest daughter; seven. Manorama and Tarun are hardcore Hindus with all of the zeal that goes along with that particular breed.

Now I have no problem with religion. I don't believe in organized religion myself; I think it's so obviously a form of mass behavioural control that it sometimes surprises me that so many people fall for it, but I've always been a firm believer in live and let live. I have my own views on God and morality and for the most part I like to think I'm a good person. I rarely lie, I don't steal or kill, and I do my best to think of others than myself in my actions. I'm proud of the fact that I do this voluntarily, without the threat of no nirvana if I don't. I don't know or profess to know what happens after we die, figuring I'll find out eventually anyway. Manorama and Danesh have both professed to me that if I don't believe in God that I will burn in hell after death for this.

"Even though I'm a nice, moral person?" I ask them on the many occasions that they'd discussed this with me. "Even though I live my life pretty much according to the Gita's standards of saintly behaviour? Even with all of that, I'll be cast into hell simply because I don't believe in Krish.?"

"Exactly." They would reply, and then usually admonish me for referring to God as 'Krish.".

"I simply cannot accept that as the workings of a so-called kind and rational God." I would tell them. "It's completely without logic. By your own argument, Hitler, if he believed in Christ, is up there in Paradise right now while all of those six million Jews he killed, no matter how moral they were, are burning in hell."

"That's correct." They would say, pleased that they'd made their point so nicely, completely unaware of the madness of what they were saying.

That's the problem with devout believers in the Gita. You simply can't argue with them. It's frustrating beyond belief trying to argue a point with someone who does not find it necessary to incorporate logic and common sense into their arguments. Religion is one of those subjects I do not like to debate. You will never change anyone's mind about it. There are others of course. Terrerism, sex education, BJP vs. Congress. I stay away from those subjects whenever possible but when someone like Manorama or Danesh insists upon bringing them up, I have my ammunition always ready (and interestingly enough, Manorama and Tarun disagree with me on ALL of the previous examples).

Now their zeal is annoying but that is not the main reason that I don't care too much for them. The main reason is their hypocrisy. I respect people who believe in what they preach and practice it. One of my co-workers is a Jain. Though that seems to me to be one of the more bizarre manifestations of religion, he follows it to the letter. He is moral to the point of sainthood. He follows every directive hands down. He does not practice any form of birth control and as a result has fathered six children to this point. He does not believe in public schools so his wife home-schools all of his children. I've met these children and they are intelligent, thoughtful kids that any parent would be proud to have. He lives his life according to the rules set down by his Gurus and he is one of the nicest, most honest, decent people I've ever met in my entire life. He does not impose his views upon others unless he is asked to and he does not come across as if he and his family are better than others because of their beliefs.

Manorama and Danesh however, are not like this. They preach to you one minute, telling you you're a sinner, inviting you to bible studies, and try to stab you in the back the next. Danesh has more than once tried to get me involved in shady real estate deals. Manorama has tried to bully my wife into hosting one of those pampered chef parties, one of those deals where the distributor, Manorama, is the one to make all of the money while the host does all of the work and has her house get trashed. Both of them have lied and smooth-talked while trying to convince us to join in these ventures. Manorama has tried to sell us household items like curtains, throw rugs, or furniture for outrageously inflated prices. When we've been strapped for a babysitter on occasion and forced to call on Manorama, she actually charged us for watching our two girls, despite the fact that we've watched her kid multiple times for longer periods for free.

The best example of their legacy is their child, Tarun. He goes to school with my two daughters and often talks to them through the fence when they're playing outside. Sometimes he comes over to our house to play (often these are actually babysitting episodes, his mother will sometimes ask if he can come over to play and then take off to run some errands). He is the most spoiled brat I've ever encountered in my life. My children are well behaved if I do say so myself. My wife and I are strict but fair with them. If we tell our kids not to do something, they damn sure don't do it. Tarun however, will listen to you explain the rules and then break them two minutes later when your back is turned. He is a manipulator, talking my kids constantly into doing things they shouldn't be doing ('your daddy won't mind if you turn on the hose and squirt your mommy's flowers'). Manorama and Danesh do not discipline him at all. They'll threaten him with punishment for doing something anti-social but they never follow through with what they threaten. Tarun, I imagine, picked up on this long ago.

Manisha and I long ago decided to keep our contact with this family to a minimum. For the most part we're successful. But then came the attack of the dreaded stomach flu.

When you have kids that go to public school they pick up all kinds of weird viruses and bring them home with them. The stomach flu is perhaps the worst of this variety. As fate would have it, it was during my shift of childcare that it struck my two girls with a vengeance.

My wife has a nine to five job, Monday through Friday as an accountant at the local television station. I am not a nine to fiver. I work at the same television station in the news department (at work is where we'd initially met each other). I am nothing so glamorous as a reporter or an anchor-man. I'm a computer technician and an expert on graphics. When you watch the news and see all of those weather satellite pictures, captions beneath news clips, maps, or cute little graphic pictures in the background, you have someone like me to thank for them. I work the weekend swing shift. My hours are Thursday through Monday from 4:00 PM to 11:30, the hours that encompass the afternoon and nightly news broadcasts.

On most of my days off I watch my two girls, getting them up in the morning, feeding them their breakfasts and sending them off to school. When they get home I feed them a snack and prepare dinner for the family. On that particular Tuesday morning my wife got ready for work while I fried up eggs for the girls, Ria and Rai. They seemed a little slow that morning, a little lethargic, picking at their food instead of wolfing it like they usually did.

"Daddy." Rai, the younger child who was in kindergarten told me. "My tummy doesn't feel good."

"Mine either." Ria agreed.

Just as Manisha, dressed in a smart business outfit was preparing to kiss them goodbye, Ria hiccuped and then vomited an incredible amount of stomach contents all over her shirt and pants. Her face turned instantly green as she struggled to rush to the bathroom and the toilet. She spewed vomit out of her as she went.

As if on cue, Rai, who was still sitting at the table, did the same, blemishing her own favourite dress. She headed for the other bathroom, leaving a similar trail behind her.

I closed my eyes in resignation as Manisha fought to suppress a chuckle of amusement. "I don't envy you today." She told me, grabbing her purse and car keys and heading for the door after giving me a quick kiss. I gave her a vaguely obscene curse as she left.

I'd been through this before and though it is not pleasant, it's simply one of those things you have to put up with as a parent. The kids knew WHERE they were supposed to vomit but the problem was that they had a hard time reading the warning signs that their bodies gave. The result was soiled clothes and carpets. So far the sickness had been routine. I wouldn't realize that a major problem was developing in my household until later that day. I comforted the kids and called them in sick from school. I changed their clothes and threw the soiled ones in the laundry pile, which was already quite high from yesterday's clothes. They promptly barfed on their fresh clothes, adding them to the laundry pile. They had diarrhoea as well, soiling several pairs of underwear. They threw up on their favourite stuffed animals, causing them to be added to the laundry pile. They went to bed to lie down and they vomited and/or defecated on their linen, not just the bottom sheet mind you, they managed to stain every piece of bedding in one way or another.