It’s happy hour. On the second floor of Naz, the delighted shrieks of two dozen children running wild with red heart-shaped balloons mingle with the gentler tones of college volunteers trying to contain the fever-pitch excitement in the room. The spirited woofs of Sultan, Brutus and Blackie — the canine guardians of this chaotic haven — provide a fitting refrain to the raucous cacophony in the dorm-like room. Two caregivers discuss the day’s menu as they clear the mess of cards, crayons and colouring books on the floor.

The din settles to a hushed buzz the moment Anjali Gopalan, the imposing matriarch of this little kiddiedom walks into the room. The children appear glad to see her, but a trifle intimidated, like the sudden appearance of a strict parent at a junket. “Aunty, I’ve finished my homework,”one boasts in a bid to score a brownie point even as a caramel-eyed imp makes a desperate case for escape from her daily milk drinking ritual. ‘Aunty’ silences her with a firm no, then softens and asks her about school. When she enters the adjoining room, a tiny infant lifts his scrawny arms from the cradle as if to greet her. The latest addition to the care home, this 5-month-old HIV-positive orphan — like his older counterparts — was left at this building’s doorstep. To be saved by Naz. Or perish.

Gopalan, 50, was initiated into the world of HIV in the early 1980s while doing community-based work on migrant labour and the gay community in the US. Having seen how the HIV epidemic had panned out in America, she knew it was a matter of time before it hit the homeland. She returned to India and founded Naz Foundation in 1995. Set up with money donated by her late brother — a doctor who died of cancer — Naz has grown into a formidable force that works with HIV-infected people across the board — children and college youth, gays and heterosexuals, women and men. “We believe the epidemic impacts all people at various levels and work both on prevention and care. Counselling, training and outreach work are all part of our work. Including the health melas we do, we access between 10,000-15000 people in a year in some way or the other.”

The home-based care programme, which houses 34 children besides working with 300 families in the community providing counselling and link ups to hospitals, is closest to Gopalan’s heart. The bustling establishment is a beacon of hope in the bleak world of HIV/AIDS where a twisted adage ‘prevention is better than care’ seems to govern the distribution of HIV/AIDS funding. While virtually all the government aid for HIV/AIDS goes into prevention programmes, the actual patients living with the virus are deprived of aid and left to languish without basic nutrition and medication. Currently funded by Johnson and Johnson and many different individuals, the Naz care home has had aid from Richard Gere and Vijay Amritlal Foundation in past years. But Gopalan is quick to point that most traditional donors don’t believe in funding care-related activities. “They see it as a black hole. But my point is you can provide quality institutional care and you can monitor it.”

Naz stands out for its quality of care, replicating a real home for the kids both materially as well as emotionally. “I want to give these children what I would give my own kids. For me that’s the bottom line. The kids must get what is the right of all children. Good nutrition and quality education are key. Add to that a full-time doctor on call, round-the-clock-nurses, regular CD4 count tests and care-workers who tend to the children’s basic needs from washing their clothes to packing their tiffins. Over 20 children are on anti-retroviral treatment. But they lead normal lives, attending a private school run by another NGO, doing homework with the help of tutors, taking yoga lessons, watching movies and going on picnics. “The kids do so well that we often forget they have the virus.”

But underlying the normalcy of their lives are deep-seated identity issues relating to their disease. Gopalan says the older kids — the oldest one at Naz is 14 — are aware of their disease. “We asked them whether they wanted to talk about it to others. Except for the youngest one who was 9 -and perhaps still too innocent — everyone chose not to disclose their status. Children are not stupid— some of them have seen their parents die. They know they have been abandoned by their families. I’m not saying people need to hide their status, but children are a lot more vulnerable.”

What about all the attention focused on the virus — the countless HIV/AIDS awareness campaigns, the movies made on the subject, the celeb endorsements? While agreeing that things are different from what they were 10 years ago, Gopalan rues that the stigma surrounding the virus persists. “Everyday you pick up the newspaper and read about infected children being thrown out of school or some HIV infected woman who has delivered is not getting the services in the very government hospitals that are providing the drugs to prevent the transmission of HIV from mother to child. It’s a very slow process to see change at this level. Most interventions in HIV/AIDS are happening through NGOs. And that’s not surprising because the government isn’t comfortable talking about sexuality.”

Deeply connected to the children at an emotional level, Gopalan still marvels at how they came to be part of her life. “I never wanted children of my own. I guess I never saw myself as a maternal person. But look at my life now!” How do the kids relate to her? “They are scared of me because I’m strict. But if they don’t see me for two or three days, they want to know where I am. If they’re sick, they want me there.” Although she is quite a disciplinarian ways, Gopalan says it’s impossible not to love the children. “Whether you like it or not, they make you love them and respond to them. And these kids are so full of life. Sometimes I think if I had a terminal disease, would I have been like that? I really admire them.”

The dire need of the hour, Gopalan says, is to provide services to people who really need them. Most donors see care merely in terms of medication, she says. But merely giving drugs is not enough. For people to tolerate the drugs, they need to eat. “Among the families we work with, it’s not uncommon for us to have seen that the chulha has not been lit for three days. People are dying without basic nutrition. There’s nothing for orphans. Today, institutional care is a bad word in the mind of most donors. The latest buzzword is community care. But my question is, will communities really take care of HIV-infected children who are orphaned or left abandoned? I don’t think that’s realistic.”

Gopalan also rubbishes the recent government report published in a leading daily claiming that the number of HIV/AIDS patients in India has halved to 2.5 million. “People like us will challenge that till our dying breaths because it just doesn’t ring true. The fact is that there is no way to track the exact number of infected patients in India. We also don’t have the mechanism to count the number of infections or deaths from the virus. But if you talk to people like me who are providing services and working at the ground level, we will all tell you that we are seeing a steady rise in the number of people accessing our services. That’s indicative of the fact that the numbers are not going down.”

Though she is keen to train other NGOs to emulate Naz, Gopalan says she has neither the resources nor the energy to take in more children into the care home. “People often tell me 34 is an inconsequential figure in the midst of the millions of infected children in need of care. Earlier it used to upset me a lot. Today my response is ‘at least 30 kids’. I know I can guarantee these children a secure childhood and a good life. I will secure their futures before I die. I’ll do for them what my parents did for me — provide a good value base and a good education so they grow into good adults and give back to society.” The philanthropist says if she starts looking at the big picture, she gets paralysed. But one look at the five-month old in the cradle and she knows what she is doing helped a life blossom. That’s tremendous. I feel enormously privileged.”

Topping Gopalan’s wish list for the future is security for the existing children at the care home. “If we had an endowment that enabled us to have 3 lakhs a month — that’s what we spend on the care home — we wouldn’t have to worry about donors.” She is also keen to find a separate space for the older boys who are on the cusp of adolescence and need privacy. “I need to find someone to give me the resources. Right now I’m just trying to keep my head above water. We are managing very well but it’s a constant battle. But in the past whenever I have wished for something, it has happened. One thing, I’ve learnt in life is that you never know who will believe in what you believe in.”

The daily rollercoaster of financial strains and funding worries is exhausting but Gopalan says she cannot imagine life any other way. “The only other things I do besides Naz are gardening and spending time with my dogs. But that doesn’t mean I don’t think, ‘Oh God, why don’t I leave? Why am I stuck here? Enough is enough.’ I say all of this, but there’s nothing else I’d rather do. This is not work. It’s life.”