Today perhaps your only association with the word 'polio' is the Sabin Oral Vaccine that protects children from the disease. Fifty five years ago this was not so. The dreaded disease, which mainly affects the brain ans spinal cord, causing stiffening and weakening of muscles, crippling and paralysis - which is Why I am in a wheelchair today. If somebody had predicted, when I was born, that this would happen to me, no one would have believed it. I was seventh child in a family of four pairs of brothers and sisters, with huge 23 year gap between the first and last. I was so fair and brown haired that I looked more look like a foreigner than a Dawood Bohri. I was also considered to be the healthiest of the brood.

---

In his childhood, the narrator looked "more like a foreigner than a Dawood Bohri" This was because he was