A Tale of Two Pandemics
He used to call my mother Di. His name was Sanjeev, but his daak naam (pet name) was Apu, and he was the fourth sibling among eight brothers and sisters. Apu was a quick learner: the first one to swim across the pond, the first one to learn how to bicycle on his own, pedaling with one leg because he was too little for the big bicycle he had found in the neighborhood. Ma says that she always thought Apu knew he didn’t have much time, so he learned everything fast.
In 1964, they lived in Karimganj, part of the Sylhet district, which was divided in two during India’s partition. Karimganj is located right at the international borderline between India and Bangladesh, standing between two rivers, Kushiyara and Longai. One part went to East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), the other to India. More than fifty percent of the population was comprised of people like my Dadu, who had fled the predominantly Muslim East Pakistan, along with their families, migrating to the Indian side seeking work and a home in small cities and towns across Assam and West Bengal.
In 1961, the seventh and last known pandemic of cholera began in Indonesia. It reached Bangladesh in 1963, and India in 1964. Outbreaks of it have since continued, though mortality rates dropped to less than three percent by the 1990s and less than one percent today. A mixture of salt and sugar in water to replace lost fluids is what now saves lives so easily.
Ma says for days they had been hearing that there was cholera in town. People were dying in homes of people they knew, but the kids went to school every day. Rani, a dark-skinned girl who used to sit behind Ma — a big smile, two braids down the sides of her face — was the first one to disappear in Ma’s class, then their teacher. Later they heard his two sisters had died, too. But shops stayed open, and Dadu went to his office. Small town life continued, vegetable sellers on the side of the road, corner stores selling milk, flour, and sugar, rickshaws and bicycles crowding narrow streets, washer men at the rivers, families using different parts of the same riverside for pujos, bathing, and defecating.
It was towards the end of October, after Durga Pujo and the statues of the goddess Durga had just been immersed in the rivers and lakes. The weather was starting to get cold, and my Didima, with eight children below the age of sixteen, was always busy cleaning rice, washing the vegetables, some perhaps grown in the patch of earth in front of their home, squatting on the ground in front of the clay stove fashioned out of a heavy aluminum bucket. How did Cholera enter their home? Only Apu got sick. Did he swallow the river water when he was playing in it with his friends, racing across its green surface slick with slime? Apu was twelve and in the fifth grade in 1964 when he died of cholera.
He awoke one morning with a severe stomachache. Diarrhea mixed with blood. Within a few hours he was so dehydrated that they carried him to the nearest hospital, but it was full. All medical centers were crowded with cholera patients who stood little chance of survival; they were in the absolute epicenter of the disease. No isolation wards, not even a single empty bed available. Mats were laid out for the sick in rows on the ground, and on one of them my grandfather put his own son down slowly. The rooms were heavy with the smell of bodies marked for death. Apu lay there the entire day. That evening, in a soft voice, he told Didima, “Ma, I feel like eating an orange.” They were the last words he would speak.
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Less than five miles from where I live in London today lies Broadwick Street. More than a century before the life and death of Apu, John Snow figured out that cholera was a water-borne disease, on this very street. Then called Broad Street, it was the center of the 1854 cholera pandemic, and most had fled the area as a way of escaping the disease, believing falsely that it was airborne. Snow, known by many as the father of modern epidemiology, lived close by and had previously connected another cholera epidemic to water by tracing contaminants in the water supplied by a company, but the water company had denied any responsibility.
When the epidemic broke out on Broad Street, John Snow walked around the neighborhood interviewing residents who had not yet left. His interviews led him to find that most of the deaths were located near a hand pump on the corner of Broad Street and Cambridge Street. Taking a water sample from the pump, he discovered that it contained “white, flocculent particles.” By the time he was able to convince the parish under which the pump fell to remove the handle and disable it, the cholera cases had already started to drop, to “plateau” as we have been hearing in the news repeatedly these days about Covid-19. Once the handle was removed, the spread of cholera stopped completely.
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On March 7th of this year, I returned to London after a short trip to India in pursuit of research material for my thesis at King’s College. The virus was already making the rounds, and my husband and I had considered the risks before I left. Was this a real threat? We didn’t know. Growing up in a small town in southern India, I’d had malaria twice, typhoid once, and bronchitis several times. Today some studies suggest that the antibodies from such diseases might help combat the virus. My return flight via Lufthansa was cancelled, and I was glad that I was rebooked on a partner flight. By the time I returned home, the threat of the virus was a medical certainty. Almost two weeks after my return on March 25th, India announced a total lockdown. A less stringent lockdown in the UK was already underway.
By 1971, considered to be the end of the cholera pandemic, 155,000 cases of it had been reported. In comparison, at the moment of writing this piece, the total affected by Covid-19 has crossed the three million mark with more than three hundred thousand deaths spread over two hundred countries.
John Snow charted the Cholera spread in 1854 on a dot map. Right at the center was the infamous pump at Broad street. A renowned epidemiologist, Bradford Hill, wrote in 1955, “For close upon 100 years we have been free in this country from epidemic cholera, and it is a freedom which, basically, we owe to the logical thinking, acute observations and simple sums of Dr. John Snow.”
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The West Brompton cemetery is less than a two-mile walk from my home in London. I set off one early morning looking for Snow. Early morning runners zig-zag away from each other down the central path from the entrance, but just a few paces away down a side road, I find his place in the earth marked by a silver coin embedded in the paved road. Is this where the guided tour of famous bodies begins? His marker is number one.
The headstone, a carving in white stone of an urn overflowing, marks his life and his death, 1813-1858. Queen Victoria was among Snow’s early and most prominent clients. The dedications on his gravesite reflect the gratitude doctors have to Snow for establishing the importance of research in eliminating disease.
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In the customs of Hindus, Apu was cremated. Unlike Snow, he has no plaque or piece of earth commemorating his brief life. I don’t want to upset my mother with more questions about the brother she lost, so I refrain from asking her what they might have done with his ashes. A Christian friend of mine once told me that her biggest complaint against cremation is that there is no final resting place to mourn a lost one. From dust to dust.
It has been more than fifty years since the uncle I never knew died. Adrift forever in his childhood, my lost uncle comes to me with no news from the other side but this: what we have lost will one day come ashore. Dadu moved the family to Shillong after Apu died and there my mama’s baadi, my maternal uncles, still reside. I have visited that home often, but I’ve never seen a picture of Apu, never heard anyone speak of him except Ma. She says for many years she imagined she heard his voice calling out to her the way he used to, Di.
Ma was fifteen when Apu died. For days Didima cried, calling for him, Apu, Apu, Apu. Her youngest child, then three or four years old, would weep with her too, clinging to the ends of her sari. He said to her, “Ma, call me Apu, Ma call me Apu.” No vaccine was ever invented or needed for Cholera; instead a treatment was found. I read that we will never be safe until we find a vaccine for Corona.
It is mid-May now. I have been welcoming the sun and summer through the living room windows where the light shines on us while we work, my children sit close by. I glance at their heads bent over their homework as though in prayer. In this sun-lit room I sometimes hear sirens passing by. I read the news, I clean, I write, I read, I love, as much as I can, for now. Every day I resist the urge to make a plan, to dream of a tomorrow when this is over.
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.