A Scattering of Marigolds: Death, Migration, & Covid-19
In March 2020, at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, the CDC had yet to recommend mandatory masking, but my friends and family in India had already begun life under a strict lockdown. They might have had at most three confirmed Covid cases, but the Indian government chose to lock a population of 1.4 billion inside their homes. My cousins weren’t worried a bit. “We aren’t scared of Covid,” their text said on WhatsApp. “We’ve conquered worse things,” they bragged. “Terrible air pollution (Delhi’s air quality ranks lowest in the world), malaria, dengue. Covid is no match.” Scientists confirmed their hypothesis, crediting the low Covid numbers in third world nations to stronger immune systems and younger populations. But while my cousins remained sanguine, I, living in the first world, gave in to panic. For two whole weeks I refused to step out of my apartment, not for groceries, not for a jog.
A year later, just as I was receiving my Pfizer vaccine at a CVS, the Covid crisis in India took a turn for the worse. In April 2021, India experienced a massive second wave of the pandemic, and the official number of recorded cases passed 2.5 million, with 300,000 new cases and 2,000 deaths per day. The Delta variant had arrived. My cousins stopped sharing congratulatory videos about their near-invincible immune systems. People they knew, people I might have known had I remained in India, were scrambling to keep their parents alive. Even though they live thousands of miles away, their fear got to me, even as my near and dear ones in Massachusetts were getting inoculated.
I tried to make myself useful to people in India. I started on Twitter. I retweeted retweets from Delhiites requesting oxygen tanks. I poured over journalists’ photos from rural India where people were dying and suffering unnoticed. One of the most haunting of these photographs showed an aerial shot of the Ganges riverbank. It was a puzzling angle, and without depth or a reference for size I mistook the gray background with the orange bits as scattered saffron strands on a clay plate. If only. The caption dispelled my doubts and hopes. The saffron strands were dead bodies wrapped in orange cloth, left along the holy river by people who couldn’t afford to give their loved ones a proper sendoff. I couldn’t help but see myself and my family’s life reflected in the photo. One of those orange blobs would be me one day. I’d be taken to the Ganges in exactly the same way, wrapped in a saffron cloth, or inside a canister for my ashes to be scattered into the river. I’d return to the Ganges, no matter where in the world I might have died. The river has given my family final passage for generations.
I still mourn my family’s decision to leave India, even though it wasn’t my choice to make. I mourn because I, like many others, feel guilty for leaving. My elders chose the comforts of the first world over the third; we contributed to the brain drain; we turned our backs on our fledgling nations.
It could be argued that we contributed to the community by unburdening an overstretched healthcare system and economy. We thinned out the competition so more people could avail themselves of the limited opportunities.
I’m not sure exactly why my uncles landed on American shores as medical students in the 80s, why they left India. For the entirety of their careers they saved American lives, and throughout my childhood I was instructed to look up to them because they had found the holy grail: they had “succeeded” not just in India, but among the best and brightest of the first world. Had they ever felt guilty for leaving? I never had the chance to ask.
I believe something else motivated my uncles’ departure, an event that re-shaped my family profoundly, yet rarely gets talked about. I mean of course the partition of South Asia. In 1947, when the Indian subcontinent split, millions uprooted from ancestral soils and tried to replant themselves hundreds of miles away across new borders. Our family, like many others, did not flourish in independent India’s soil. In Lahore, now part of Pakistan, my family feasted on Persian poetry, Sufi and Punjabi devotional songs, and the rich artistic traditions that were born out of Hindu-Muslim syncretism. My grandparents could swim from the shores of heavily Arabicized and Persianised Urdu and Punjabi languages to the shores of heavily Sanskritized Hindi. They could cool off at an 11th century Sufi shrine, then get drunk on the delights in the old walled city’s bazaars. The industrial town of Kanpur in north India, where they landed after Partition, turned out to be nothing more than a refugee stop for them. In independent India, many of the syncretic Hindu-Muslim traditions were ruptured. Aside from their college cricket and swim clubs, no other cultural activities tied my uncles to their birth town. Their birth town was just that — a place where they gained consciousness. Lahore was so much more: a cultural, historical, social, political, and even linguistic landmark.
My experience of migration was slightly different. By the time I arrived in the U.S. I was fifteen. I had completed tenth grade, the end of high school in Bombay. I might have missed out on the Punjabi and Persian texts of my grandparents, but my cultural education consisted of Hindi short stories, Urdu Bollywood songs, English translations of 1001 Nights and Russian fairy tales, and a generous helping of Enid Blyton books and Nancy Drew. This particular combination could not have come together anywhere else but in the soil of postcolonial, socialist-for-an-hour, pre-globalization India. At the time I didn’t know what I was missing out on, and loved the literature I’d been given.
I had to leave it all behind — all my books, even my beloved Nancy Drews (never did I crack open another one). While I was adjusting to a tiny town in North Carolina (population: ~2,000) and starting a job as a housekeeper at a motel, my school friends in Bombay were planning for college, delighting in newfound freedoms such as traveling alone on local trains. They acquired new books and new friends, while I looked forward to my meager paycheck from thirty-hour work weeks at $5.15/hr (the state’s minimum wage at the time), while watching my parents’ marriage succumb to the stress of adjusting to this new country. For many years I wondered whether my life would have been better had I stayed in India; I’d have friends, I’d be starting college earlier, and my life would have looked like a toothpaste commercial.
Migrants are often stuck with the dilemma of wondering on which side of the pond they’d feel happiest. Covid certainly has been a time when my mom and I have wondered if we ought to have stayed in India closer to our friends to be of help to the larger community. But for equally pressing reasons, such as personal health and combating a global pandemic by not overloading the already overloaded healthcare system of India, we are grateful to live in the first world.
Is that really the end of it? I think not. Our personal satisfaction is rarely contingent on our own well-being alone. The well-being of those we love, and even of those we barely know but toward whom we feel the responsibility of kinship, weighs on our conscience. We would prefer to hope that our eyes have betrayed us. We hope that the orange blobs in a photo from our homelands are scattered marigolds or saffron threads, and not premonitions of death, reminders of our inescapable fates. We stay here, in America, but sometimes our hearts flutter off, far, far out of our bodies and away.
Shilpi Suneja was born in India. Her first novel, about the long shadow of the 1947 partition of India, has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and is slated for publication in Fall 2022 from Milkweed Editions.