Such, such were the joys of Corona

 

‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ of Corona*

 

I am embarrassed to admit this, but I have to face the truth. Corona, the most dreaded word in our lives today and the fearful virus at large in our lungs, brought many pleasures in my life and I enjoyed them unabashedly, though maintaining a stoic façade.

 

I returned from Sri Lanka after a weeklong holiday in mid-March. My hospital advised me home quarantine for seven days. Sri Lanka then had fewer cases of Corona infection than our state. There were no quarantine guidelines in country. I was peeved at this irrational decision. But it appeared, hospital was keen on proffering me with a little furlough. I remonstrated but accepted the decision with appropriate forbearance. Next day I took off to visit a friend in a nearby city: two holidays, end to end.

 

Hospital’s corridors forever crammed with visitors, like the lawns of India Gate on a sunny winter noon, became desolate overnight, like the grand avenues of Lutyens’ Delhi, lined with naked trees in peak autumn. Clinicians rued their fate. Hospital bosses pulled long faces. Human Resource cronies dropped hints about hospital’s precarious health, worse than the pandemic-bitten nation’s. I awaited the salary-cut which arrived sooner than expected like summer in a north Indian plain.

 

Dwindling business in hospital brought long idle hours. Few colleagues bewailed the dreadful effects of prolonged ennui. I have for long evolved a convenient philosophy of work. My work at hospital is to nourish my life that doesn’t begin or end with hospital. In fact, it seems to begin when I reach home after work. I am fond of Anaesthesia that I have practiced for close to three decades now. I practice it joyfully and sincerely, to the extent I am capable of. But I have been fortunate to know what is essential for a few bare joys in my life. Without these my life would be sapped of all vigour and will degenerate into a mere mechanical act of living.

 

I remembered Bertrand Russel’s essay In Praise of Idleness. ‘I want to say, in all seriousness, that a deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in virtuousness of work, and the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organised diminution of work,’ he wrote. These are noble words and never fail to inspire me. I commiserated with my woe begone colleagues for this deplorable worklessness and quietly slithered to an isolated corner. I read and wrote much during these weeks, more joyfully and more intently. I learnt anew, that Idle mind is not the devil’s playground but a nursery of many beautiful things.

 

Pandemic brought another gift in our lives: social distancing. Every sixth person in the world is an Indian, while our land mass is just two percent of world’s. People living on a piece of land in my country number almost nine times as elsewhere. We live in a giant Chawl. This demography asides, there are cultural reasons that bind Indians together like iron filings to a magnet or bees to a mound of jaggery. We derive security in physical proximity of suffocating proportions. A person who seeks space around himself is kinky, almost antisocial. Corona gave sanctity to the need for solitude at work, on road and in bazars. I could boldly advice the person behind me in the billing que, trying desperately to peep into my goods’ basket, to keep adequate distance. A loner could seek comfort of a secluded space, without inviting derisory looks from colleagues. Social distancing came as a blessing.

 

I live in a city that has had an admirable past. It played an important role in the 1857 revolt. It was a thriving industrial centre for almost a hundred years, beginning mid-nineteenth century. Communist Party of India was born here in 1925. Then the city snoozed. It frittered all its past glories on the way and was reborn as the Paan Masala capital of India, its one stellar contribution to our culture in modern times. Till a decade back, a huge billboard near Railway station, announced this singular achievement of the city with restrained pride. ‘Welcome to the City of Paan-Masala’, it read. This deadly mixture of areca nuts and tobacco, addictive like opiates, brings much into the lives of its lovers besides the simple joys of nicotine. It endows them with increased chances of developing oral cancer. For the city it brings the jubilant citizen, chewing masala with a philosophical nonchalance, spitting all over the town with an enviable dedication and freeness of spirit. While cycling on city roads, it is a task no less skilful than of a trapeze artist, to dodge the forceful spittle of fellow cyclists, motorists and pedestrians. Corona enforced face mask and social distancing, while restricting the fundamental freedom of Masala devotees, permitted me to ride my cycle with a carefree roughness, I had never experienced before. City is now lumbering back to its traditional ways. But I still hold dear to the Corona-bestowed-licence and occasionally vent my irritation at an innocent soul who unloads the endowments of his ballooning mouth onto the road.

 

Season of marriage seems to have passed me by this year: roads have been quieter, traffic smoother. Vibrancy of a North Indian wedding pageant, treading the busiest streets of the city, like the victory march of an emperor, has to be seen to be believed. As motorists are stranded for hours on the road, an oblong, middle-aged, respectable-looking gentleman, in a three-piece suit, his face drenched in sweat, wreathes in ecstasy in the centre of the procession. He is trying to emulate an intoxicated—which he is—cobra, dancing to the lilting music of the loud boisterous band. Another similarly attired man is enacting the snake-charmer, swaying madly as he plays his imaginary wind-pipe. The prudence, the reserve, the refinement of my millennia-old culture is on display. As fraught motorists look for an inch of space to move forward, bejewelled and silk cocooned women of the party—seemingly unwilling—are pulled into the circle of dancers. Once in, they dance with abandon, gyrating wildly, waving dupattas and loose end of their sarees in the fun-infested air. Groom sits on the horse dispassionately, horse as weary as the harried, besieged commuters.

 

Every marriage season brings with it long sleepless nights. Deafening vulgar music seeps through the walls of my house as I turn in my bed, trying unsuccessfully to dam the flood of these hurtful notes. I haven’t faced these demons since the day Corona entered our lives.

 

Spirituality of my fellow countrymen blooms like a thousand-petalled lotus on the days and nights of festivals. Earth is then agog with fashionable Bhajans, devotional songs sung to the tune of popular Hindi film-music. A Bhajan is avowing complete surrender to the supreme. While its music recalls to mind its original lyrics, which narrate the agony of a lovelorn lady suffering pangs of separation and neglect from her beloved. This arouses intense feelings of piety and religion. My quite evenings have been spared the invasion of these cloyingly devout notes for some time, ala, Corona.

 

Our food with its exotic spices exudes an exotic aroma. Each spice, be it Heeng, Jeera, Saunf, Kaali-mirch, Methidana, or Daalchini, plays a subtle role in the process of digestion. Latter is central to the existence of an Indian and the cornerstone of their subjective experience of wellbeing, in their ephemeral sojourn through this illusory world. But whiff of these dietary insignia, blowing in the closed confines of an office suite—chock-full like every other public space in the country—is not as delicate as the captivating smells emanating from hot food. Thankfully, mandatory Corona accoutrements protect our contacts not only from the virus lurking in our breaths but from much more.

 

City roads were splendidly deserted for a short while. I will forever cherish those forlorn streets, the derelict bazars, and the ever-open gates of railway crossings, as I zoomed past these delectable sights on my cycle, ringing the bell frenetically, just to hear the peal of the rolling sound on the desolate roads, bereft of traffic din. My friend in Bangalore told me the other day, ‘you wouldn’t believe! Bangalore now feels like the sleepy town of early 1980s. What with all software geeks working from home?’ Memory needs only a gentle nudge to lapse into the reverie of old Bangalore. A walk on the MG road was an ambler’s paradise: At one end Cubbon park, flanked by Chinnaswamy stadium and Army Parade ground on one side and some fine old buildings on the other. Bangalore had many such majestic boulevards.  I could walk here for hours. City lost this serenity in the rush of IT boom and the growth zoom. It needed a Corona to reveal to us glimpses of its old glory, but only for the briefest of time.

 

In these apocalyptic times, my ruminations on the joys of Corona, I suspect, would appear outright criminal if not the ravings of an unhinged mind. Winston Churchill, as he worked on the formation of United Nations after WW II, said famously (it would appear Churchill never said anything unfamous), ‘Never let a good crisis go to waste.’ This spirit of free enquiry applied to this disaster in future, might bestow at least a passing footnote to the ponderous history of the pandemic, perhaps with the byline, ‘Such, such were the joys of Corona.’

 

 

* I must apologise to Orwell fans (I’m one of them) for stealing this ethereal phrase from the title of one of his essays.