Internationally acclaimed scholar Dr A S Dasan has found that the rigors of quarantine can be more debilitating than being in the throes of yellow fever itself. What's more, if the airport authorities appear overzealous to lock away suspected carriers of the disease, the quarantine centre itself is just as anxious to let them out provided one produces the `necessary papers', of course.

But the Bangalore-based Dr Dasan, who has been invited to pen the biography of novelist Mulk Raj Anand, is not amused. If he was aghast at the goings-on at the Immigration counter of the Chhatrapati Shivaji international airport,his experience at the quarantine centre at Andheri (E) was nauseating. This is his story.

Dr Dasan, who arrived at the airport on July 3, after an international conference at Nairobi, says he and three other passengers were detained by Immigration for failing to produce the mandatory Yellow Fever Vaccination Card. Explaining that he was not aware of such a document, he recalls: ``At no time either at Nairobi nor Mumbai had Immigration bothered to ask me for it. My neither did my travel agent nor the Kenyan High Commission, which granted me a visa, mention this pre-requisite. Finally, at Mumbai, we were told to pay $ 100 and walk out. All four of us refused.''

Dr Dasan, who was elevated as a reader at the University of Mysore only last week, continues: ``I tried to convince them that I had to report there for my new assignment the next morning. They did not relent.'' The Immigration authorities therefore promptly dispatched him and his co-passengers to the Andheri hospital. Once there, Dr Dasan realised,his trial by quarantine had just begun.

Recounting his six-day sojourn at the centre, he says: ``One of the passengers on my flight produced an immigration certificate faxed by her lawyer son in Lagos within hours of our detention. The document did not even bear her signature. Incredibly, the airport health authorities okayed it and she was released that same day. The document had been verified by the Indian embassy in Nairobi, which is closed on a Sunday!'' Dr Dasan guffaws in disbelief.

During his stay at the hospital, he says he endured the most dehumanising experience of his life. Slum-dwellers from the vicinity openly defecated in the compound, there were puddles of sewage everywhere, stray dogs, pigs, mosquitoes and cockroaches were permanent inmates, the toilets did not flush and for food, the passengers had to coax and bribe the attendants to buy edibles from stalls in the vicinity. As for doctors, well, there weren't any.

``That place was inhuman, never mind being a quarantine hospital,'' saysDr Dasan. Three patients were huddled in a room, defeating the purpose of isolation. ``I was allowed to go out to phone. Visitors are banned, but they nevertheless came. There were drinking sessions galore,'' he says.

The turning point, however, was his release. Apart from the exhilaration, he realised that wearing down the authorities' patience was all it takes to get sprung from the hospital -- before the stipulated six days. ``Following our questioning as to how another passenger was allowed to leave early, the authorities suggested we could also leave early! So, at 1 pm today, 10 hours before our official discharge, we were released thanks to their `goodwill gesture','' says Dr Dasan.

A gold medallist from Dublin University, Dr Dasan has a Ph D degree on The Poor and the Oppressed in the Novels of Charles Dickens and Mulk Raj Anand. Now he looks forward to writing the novelist's biography.