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consume milk without suffering indigestion. Any virus intentionally keyed to react with the production of the digestive enzyme lactase would certainly be an instrument of exceeding bluntness with which to wage against the then-wealthy West. But it would be an instrument nevertheless.
    I remember the Styrofoam cups of orange juice or coffee which I helped pour and serve from trestle tables in meetings at school halls. I remember laying out the special biscuits; flat, eggy things which tasted vaguely like pizza even when they were sweet. I remember the scrapy microphones Mum and Dad leaned into as, founder members of the South Birmingham Branch of the WRFI Society—WRFI, or Wide Range Food Intolerance being white plague’s official name—they invited comments from the floor. Leo was also there at these meetings whenever he was up to it, hanging back at first but invariably pushed into the spotlight as an example of what WRFI sufferers could achieve. The local press got interested. He even gave an interview on regional news although publicity for the sake of publicity was something he’d always hated, especially if it meant giving a wide airing to his piano performances, which, despite their easy brilliance, remained an embarrassment to Leo, who could only ever compare himself to Glen Gould or Alfred Brendel. He only played in public, he once told me, because if he didn’t he’d never become any good at it, but now he was accosted by neighbours about this or that lovely tune they’d heard him play, and so it went in that rainy spring of England’s small monsoon, when, amid their many other activities, Mum and Dad decided to put our house up for sale. They planned on buying somewhere bigger, closer to Edgbaston or possibly Harborne, away from this place which they somehow blamed for Leo’s condition, and also, although they never quite said it, from the encroaching ethnic poverty of Balsall Heath. They talked about finding a nice, big Victorian house with a proper music room for Leo and a full-sized piano, although the For Sale sign was frequently vandalised, and people were superstitious about new diseases, and the right offer never quite came.
    Something between one in fifty and one in two hundred native English people were said to be suffering from white plague by then, although the numbers remained uncertain, and there were many experts who still disputed WRFI’s existence as a separate condition. All I knew was that Leo had been well until that summer’s afternoon when we’d smoked dope in the garden and I’d made him his special sandwiches, and that he’d never been well since. His diet—which had to cope with his small intestine’s widening intolerance to a whole range of carbohydrates—was a complete minefield, and our fridge was its booby-trapped fuse. Woebetide anyone who took anything on Leo’s special shelf. I never did get the talk about drugs from my parents which Leo had predicted, but I got several about my need for caution , for simple common sense , and for responsibility . Not that my parents weren’t always acutely conscious of how difficult life could be for the sister of an ill sibling, and there were times when Mum would put an arm around my shoulder, and try to talk, or to listen, or say nothing at all. But I’d always stiffen, clam up, squirm away.
    If Mum and Dad blamed themselves, or our house, for Leo’s condition, I was more clear-cut. I blamed God. I took my cue from the fundamentalist websites which claimed that white plague was the vengeance of God or Allah or Jehovah, and then from my grandparents who saw Leo’s illness as punishment for not having been baptised, or not having gone through the rituals of the samsaras, or simply for my parent’s ill-advised cross-cultural marriage. Of course, the prayers, the offerings, were well meant, but I’d always hated those grisly images of Christ nailed to two squared planks of wood, whilst Nan and Pa’s Hindu gods with their many