ABSTRACT
In his novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez (1988) compares the affliction of his protagonists’ lovesickness with that of cholera, and then makes a further allusion to the anguish (cólera) of economic and political divisions in late 19th century Colombia. It was during the summer of 2005 as I was reading this book that I started speaking with women undergoing treatment for breast cancer in Kochi, a city of roughly two million people on the Malabar Coast of India’s southernmost state of Kerala. Their words about the current of emotions that followed diagnosis (shock, fear, anger, worry) echoed the sentiments of García Márquez’s protagonists, and I realized that their suffering grew out of a similar intersection of material and relational concerns.
