All in God’s Hands
The Government Hospital in Pondicherry is on a tree-lined boulevard facing a quadrant of parks. On April 13th my brother went there for his Covid vaccine. The heat was already in the mid-thirties, so he parked his bike outside the hospital under some trees and joined the short queue. The nurses were efficient. He gave his left arm, took the jab, and went on his way.
A day later he got very sick. High fever, loss of smell and taste, a slight difficulty breathing, fatigue that left him shivering and perspiring in turns, unable to get out of bed. In a group message to my sister, mother, and me two days later, he wrote that his RAT, or Rapid Antigen Test, came back. He was Covid positive. His pregnant wife left their home and moved in with her mother, but two days later she started to feel weak, got a fever, and returned. Her test was positive too. Then her mother got sick, after that her brother, then her brother’s children. The domino effect of a family tumbling one after the other, much like what happened in the rest of India soon after.
By the third week of April the effects of political rallies, millions of pilgrims who had dipped into the Ganges for the Kumbh Mela and then returned home, and a general lifestyle of open malls, parties, weddings, and social gatherings was starting to create what is now being called a humanitarian crisis. “We Indians have an immense immunity,” a friend told me after he had gone to a club on Valentine’s Day with his wife. He sent me a video of men and women dancing to Bollywood songs under flashing lights. No one wore a mask, and no distance could be maintained in the enclosed space. Six weeks later, his father, who had traveled by train a few hundred miles away for a wedding, would die in a hospital of Covid. At that time, in late March, hospital beds, oxygen, and ventilators were still available.
It took my brother almost twenty days to be able to taste and smell again. His wife, due to deliver their baby in a few weeks, had acute breathing problems but is recovering now, as is the rest of their family. Here in London I meet a couple of friends from Pondicherry once a week, early on Sunday mornings, for a run in Wimbledon Commons. After three months of lockdown, London is slowly reopening again. Afterwards, as we get cups of coffee from Wimbledon Village, we stand on the side of the road sharing stories about our families in India. Almost everyone in the group has now either lost an extended family member or knows a friend who has died of Covid. One said his mother’s childhood friend had died that week. I told them about how my mother’s childhood friend’s forty-two-year-old son-in-law had just died. “My wife’s brother-in-law, in his early forties, died,” said another. Our conversations bring together people located all over India, who don’t know each other, but whom we love and know, connecting them unknowingly.
Then we talk about all the things that can now only be bought through the black market. Oxygen tanks and hospital beds are just the tip of the iceberg. Flu meds, cold meds, Covid tests, oximeters. You have to know someone who knows someone who will get someone to come to your home with them. Then you pay three or four times the cost and buy what you need.
The vaccines are also not free. Before the crisis turned on its head, you could skip the queue and get the shot out of turn if you paid a little extra. My friend who runs a gym is forty-years-old. His wealthy client had insisted early in March that he be vaccinated so she could continue training with him. She had gotten more than two-hundred people in her circle vaccinated, from friends to her cook to her driver, creating her own bubble of safety. If you have the money and know someone who knows someone, you can get almost anything in India.
In Shillong, where my mother’s siblings reside, curfews like the ones declared during armed conflict are announced every few days, and no one is allowed out of their house. Shops are open only for a few hours every morning, and people buy milk powder instead of milk because there is no milk. In another city, my friend runs his gym in secret. People must still pay their bills, and there is very little support from the government to help them get by — no rent concessions, no social security. Hustling as a way of living daily life is still carried out, only in more devious means than the black market of oxygen tanks and hospital beds now reveal.
From across oceans and continents, those among us who have missed India through our migrations, we who have wanted and wondered often about whether we could find a way to return, realize that it is this very moment that we had always secretly feared — a time like this when basic human needs can be sold and bought, leaving those who make less than a minimum wage to struggle for survival, to find a way to pay for a vaccine. But they won’t be able to because they barely have enough to eat.
Karma, the notion that our lives and deaths have been predestined by our own acts in previous births, is a fundamental belief. It is this belief that largely upholds the colorful and hotchpotch tapestry of the country. There is a fearlessness required to inhabit the land, to cross a road equally used by cows, bicycles, dogs, goats, lorries, vans, cars, and buffalo. To eat an unpeeled fruit that might not have been washed properly, to drink the water that might not have been filtered, to live often without power for hours on end, to battle the bureaucracy stacked against your basic rights and needs, to hope that today you will not have to slip a rupee to someone in a government office to get a document signed, to stand in a line for hours to pay your bill or lodge a complaint. All of this is a part of Indian daily life. The challenging part of it. And our ability to deal with it stems largely from our conviction that this is how it is meant to be for us. For the few who fight against it, life will quickly become a series of fatiguing disenchantments, and for those who believe in destiny, that it is a part of their daily existence, they will meet it with equipoise or quiet resignation. This Karmic belief is also at the root of our acceptance of death as a natural preordained end to life. But will it be possible to keep holding on to that belief as thousands die in this pandemic every day, deprived of life saving medications and oxygen?
Spring is thawing the skies blue in England, and there is hope in the air as shops have reopened and indoor dining is set to resume in a week. Yesterday I met up again with my friends, the Wimbledon runners. One of them said, “I know of at least twenty people who have died in India.” We stood in silence as we waited for the others to join us. Birds squawked over our heads, the green of a parrot’s wing caught our eye as it flew out of a tree, the sound of a lawn mower, sunlight on the tops of the trees, the voices of rowers on the Thames. Even during the peak of the pandemic in America and England, none of us knew of anyone, among all our friends and family here or across the Atlantic, who had actually died of it or didn’t receive the care needed.
In Mumbai this week, an actress with Covid posted a picture of herself meditating in front of a statue of the Lord Shiva, calling Covid a “small-time flu” that was scaring people, that could be banished with her mental strength. “It’s all in God’s hands now,” a migrant laborer said in another news report on the poverty of millions without any work as states across the country close down one by one.
Yesterday, my mother showed me a picture of a shaligrama, a religious stone that someone had sent to her on WhatsApp. The message with the vaguely sinister warning in small italics said that it has been forwarded many times. “Can you please send this message to all my brothers and sisters in India,” she asked me, “it says that it is a religious stone that has been taken out of the Jagannath temple in Puri, Orissa. The last time it was taken out was during a pandemic in the 1920s, and it has been taken out now again because it cures pandemics.” I sighed, and as any responsible human being inundated by WhatsApp information should do, I googled it, pushing aside the momentary pulse of hope that I had felt. I told my mother that the Google search revealed that it was fake news, ironically a fake viral claim. No, no shaligrama was taken out of the Puri temple that could cure a pandemic, there is probably no stone on this earth that could do that, I added. “But I have already bowed to it and prayed for everyone’s safety,” she cried. The prayer is a good thing, Ma, I replied, but this story about the stone is not true. I felt the heaviness of her fear and worry as she slowly mounted the steps to her room. It’s what we all feel these days for those back home in India.
Chandra Ganguly is a PhD candidate at King’s College, London. An MFA graduate from the Bennington Writing Seminars, her work has been published in BuzzFeed, Narrative Magazine, India Currents, and NDTV. She is the founding editor of the art and literature print magazine Speak.