"OK guys, I'll be there at the specified time and get me the areas-the hottest ones." I called up the group's control center and told.

The plan for the big hunt was going on and they were recruiting the hunters from all the hunting areas. Even though most were old timers some of us were first timers to. I was, even though, second timer. But the last time when I joined the annual hunt around this time of the year I had a prized catch and so they remembered me and were willing to put me in the dangerous game of hide and seek with one of the nature's dangerous creatures capable of sustained human destruction.

So the instruction was to meet at the waterhole at Malka Ganj at 4 pm, sharp the coming Friday. "Yes, I am in!" I made a big fist and came home proud. My wife and my daughter opened up the front door and my small daughter gave me her mesmerizing smile and stretched out her arms as if saying, "Where were you Papa?" I immediately took her after washing my hands and as we had tea with my wife I was thinking inside, "How do I break the news. That I would be away from dusk to dawn for 6 days for the big hunt. That three of us from the Institute were selected for the job. (I shouldn't dare reveal that I had volunteered for the job myself)"

Finally after waiting for my wife to take her last sip of tea I finally said, "I'll be away from dusk to dawn for 6 days starting Monday. The hunt -like the one I went last year." My wife who was weary taking care of the kid single handedly the whole day, just looked at me but said nothing in either direction. She just carried on with her more daily chores. Finally we had dinner and slept.

Then the terror struck. I had closed all the doors and the windows were all grilled and out of a blue the creature entered the house and hit me so hard that I suddenly woke up. I woke her up too and asked her to put on the light because I wanted to see the bruise, the abrasions-the signs of onslaught of the enemy who attacked a sleeping man. There was no sign at all but my body was in extreme pain and a throbbing headache was so severe that I was sure he had planted a bomb that might burst anytime. Was it because of the fear that I was attacked or were these his ways? I then started having the chills so much so that I had to use the hot water bag.

This was the story of the hunter being hunted even before the game began. Actually I had been enlisted for the WHO backed monitoring activities of National house-to house pulse polio activity in Delhi and I had to report for duty at the Malka Ganj Office the last Friday. I was excited about the whole project more because it was polio and I always wanted to be a part of the bigger picture and that I could tell Blessy (my daughter) later on that I also took part in the fight against this disease called Polio.

Staring Monday we were supposed to span out the whole of Delhi and hunt for houses ---all houses and check for all the P and X marks on the front doors and ensure that they were marked after ensuring that all children below 5 were vaccinated and not just like that. The x mark suggested that at the time of visit the house was locked or nobody was there to ascertain that there were children or no children in the house.

At first it looked so futile an exercise but when I joined the exercise last year I realized the importance. Lets take this example. Was it the slums or the sparse villages that pose problem for us? No it wasn't. It was the unauthorized colonized which has again unauthorized houses many of them 3 to 4 storeys. In many of these colonies houses would come up so fast that when you come with the same Micro-plan of the previous pulse, it wasn't suitable for this time. And just imagine a polio worker going up and down a hundred 4 storeyed houses and knocking each and every door for a mere 50-100 buck for the day! So the possibility of the worker just visiting the ground floor only and occasionally yelling for children would have been the usual thing. We were supposed to go and check that this wasn't the case in our assigned area.

I could still remember the last day of the monitoring last year. I was in one of the lasgest-unauthorized colonies located in North-West Delhi. About a hundred houses were found unmarked. The houses had just the mark of the earlier pulse and that day the house-to-house activity was finishing. I then called all concerned. The Assembly coordinator and a dedicated schoolteacher had also been called to the spot. Then the whole area was vaccinated again. Even finding a handful of unmarked houses in an area was taken as an alarming sign. When I reached the head quarter I was already exhausted but we were very happy at the catch. I felt proud and came back home. I will do it again, I will do it again…

I tried jumping out of the bed but the headache was horrible. Knowing that dengue was also nearby and that I should not take any unnecessary medicine, I lied back and just took paracetamol. The fever continued on Thursday and at around 11 in the morning I had to reluctantly make the phone call to NPSP Malka Ganj, "Count me out this time. The hunter is hunted."