“Come on, wake up,” says Bins. “You have to try this. It will be good for you.” He knows that there’s nothing I hate more than being woken up with bright lights. But he turns one on now. “You will enjoy it!” he yodels in my ear while pulling off my nice warm comforter. “The most amazing thing!”

“What?” I snarl, finally crawling out of bed. He waits till I’ve got my eyes fully open, have brushed my teeth and am now sitting grumpily on my bed with a mug of hot tea in my hands. “Look!” he exclaims, “It’s a gadget for measuring blood sugar!” I can’t believe he’s woken me up for this. “I don’t understand,” I say. “When we want to measure our blood sugar, we go back to Delhi, call the diagnostic centre and they send a nurse over in the mornings...” Bins and I have been doing that for the past several years. “No, no,” says Bins. “This is much better.”

He shows me the little kit he bought in Delhi but only began using after arriving here. “I’ve already done mine. Your turn now,” he says, telling me to choose a finger. “For what?” I ask. “To puncture, of course,” he says, “what else?” The kit consists of three parts. There’s a glucometer, a cute little gadget that reminds me of an old-style pager, with a slot at one end and an LCD screen; a container filled with tiny strips of plastic; and a lancing device. This last item has a vicious little pin called a lancet inside it. Bins got a bunch of one-time-use lancets just so that we can share the lancing device without — yuck! — sharing needles.

I hold out my left ring finger. Bins pushes the lancing device onto the tip and — “OUCH!” I yelp as the lancet pierces my skin, producing a ruby-red bead. “Pooh,” says Bins, “it’s nothing!” Now he pushes one plastic strip into the meter. At once the LCD blinks on. “Quick! Bring your finger-tip close to the strip!” says Bins. The drop of blood is immediately sucked in. The meter blinks and pop! There’s my result: 121. “What’s that mean?” I ask. “You’ll live,” says Bins, “but you must aim to stay under 110.”

He writes the result down in a little book, then shows it to me, proudly. “See this?” he says, glowing with pride. “In the beginning, that’s me: 113; 117; 122. But look! Last week I have started to come down — 109! And 103! And this morning, I win the Grand Prix with ... 96!!! Amazing, huh?” The little gadget, like a stern nanny, tells him every morning whether or not his day’s carb-intake has strayed beyond acceptable limits.

“You will also do it every morning,” he says. “And the two of us, we will conquer the Demon Diabetes!” “But it hurts,” I whine. “No pain, no gain,” says Bins, philosophically. “Anything’s better than diabetes.” For once, I completely agree.

Manjula Padmanabhan , author and artist, writes of her life in the fictional town of Elsewhere, US, in this weekly column

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