Pandemic in the Time of the Tories
Faced with a stubborn pandemic, I
remember all those times, decades ago, in India, when we took death and
destruction by epidemics as a recurring event. They left their forever mark. My
father's brother had a face pockmarked by small pox in youth; his elder brother
died of small pox at the age of twenty-two. Their mother cried quietly in
the night, for many years, while I listened to her sadness, sleeping on the floor,
on a mat in her room.
Cholera came and
went. Achamma (paternal grandmother) filled empty half-coconut shells with
cow-dung solution, firmly believing that Mariamma, the witch of
pox, would be kept off by that. We had to drink lemon juice with coarse brown
sugar blocks (vellam) scraped into it. It was vile. In the wartime, there was
no sugar.
Plague was rare,
but in the empty shell of a half-built house, opposite my home, a whole beggar-group
died one by one. The Municipal bin-wagon came to take the bodies away. This was
in 1945, when the second world war raged in Asia; the owner of the
abandoned house was caught in the war there and could not return to India until
many years later. We put arsenic everywhere to kill rats, but the vermin
flourished; the municipality sprayed the gulleys and gutters and eventually the
epidemic died out.
Now we have Covid. How do you shut a
country down in this day and age, when populations are constantly travelling,
meeting up, depending on each other for services and succour? WHO expects it to
peak and wane eventually; there is no evidence of that yet. This disaster will
have its worst impact on the homeless, the poor, the uneducated, all
handicapped in different ways. The current government shows no sign of being
concerned. It has the money-men to keep on side, so the country cannot be
locked down.
Some Tories believe in herd – immunity. The
herd is the ‘other’, not themselves. How many have to die for the Government to
sit up and take notice? Right now, they are busy preparing for Christmas and
the prolonged hangover after.
