I have lately done some peripatetic reading in search of some solace in the midst of the angst and melancholy of the ongoing Covid-19 realities wherein relatives of thousands of people dying in “homes, on the streets, in hospital car parks, in big cities, in small towns, in villages and forests and fields” are desperately begging for a government that works and at least helps them out just in time, by matching hospital bed, oxygen, plasma and vaccine and other care supplies with the demand for them. You might have read the open letter in this regard to the Prime Minister, in the National Herald, by Arundhati Roy, the author of her famous debut novel, The God of Small Things.
I really do not know how in such desperate hard times, when many teachers and students have passed away, solace can be found other than in merely accepting, and resigning oneself to the calamitous circumstances and reckoning with the human behaviour as it is, including irresponsible misbehaviour and madness. It is a moot question if the attempts at finding solace and tranquility via inward journey through breathing control and mindfulness (non-judgemental awareness of the present moment) or fasting or using brain-enhancing drugs called nootropics, which include stimulants, hallucinogens and even vitamins administered via an intravenous drip (sometimes all at one go) and the like can be effective ways of escaping from the quotidian fear, anxiety, misery and grief in the Corona Age.
A dreadful plague in London was
In the year sixty-five,
Which swept an hundred thousand souls
Away; yet I alive!
Thus wrote Daniel Defoe at the end of his book, A Journal of the Plague Year which has been found to be a great literary hoax but all the same now hailed for its truthful revelations of the 1665 Black Death (Bubonic Plague, far nastier than Coronavirus) that can be tracked backwards to 1603 (Shakespeare’s England), and to the most fatal pandemic recorded in human history during 1343-53. The book which is freely available online thanks to Project Gutenberg, is full of vivid descriptions of the way the pestilence moved through the different neighbourhoods of London the precautions taken to fight it, and the chilling progress of the carts loaded with corpses accompanied by cries of “bring out your dead”. We come to know what it was like to walk up a main road with no one else about; how people got around the containment orders from the government; how people were reluctant to admit incidence of infection in their families; how some people were so wicked as to deliberately infect others; how some people were wreckless in opening up taverns and spending their days and nights drinking, mocking everyone who objected to it and eventually dying of infection; how the poor were disproportionately affected as they lived, as they do now, in more cramped conditions and were more susceptible to taking bad advice; how the rich fled to safer places; and how the pestilence flared up all over again when people thought it was safe to go out. We can feel the distress of the families denied proper funerals for their loved ones; the mass panic as people tried to understand where the disease came from, how it was transmitted, how it could be avoided, and what chance one had if one caught it. We also notice like in our times how fake news and fake practitioners multiplied answers to all the questions of the people.
The arrogance, complacency, boastfulness, outright negligence and impotence, and blatant lies and blame games of the political class and the corporate and their intellectual agents as we have been witnessing in our country and abroad in dealing with the corona crisis can be reckoned with a peep into The Human Comedy by Honore de Balzac. This is a colossal work by the founder of Modern Realism which refers to depicting everyday things as they are without romanticisation or stylisation. It is freely available once again thanks to Project Gutenberg. Balzac had revelled in portraying his time (19th century) and human nature with a thorough botanising of the social classes of his time and depicting class struggles, notably between the bourgeoisie and the nobility. His analysis of the human kingdom was analogous to the analysis of animal kingdom. According to the inequality-economist Thomas Picketty, Balzac is a key to understanding the one percent people (the power elites) driving today’s capitalism, much to the detriment of the 99 percent people at large.
How to keep relationships alive and whether love life can survive quarantine and lockdown are some other botherations of the people seeking solace in the time of coronavirus. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s masterpiece Love in the Time of Cholera is a best read in this context. It deals with lovesickness as a plague comparable to cholera. There is physical pain as well as emotional pain in longing for relationships and physical intimacy irrespective of one’s age. It also deals with the fear and intolerance of aging and death, which is so relevant now as the aged are the primary victims of the coronavirus. Bloated corpses turn up intermittently and disturbingly in the novel and it is rather ambiguous if the bodies are the result of the disease or the result of anger, which if not controlled can end in violence and ultimately war. Thus cholera needs to be taken in many ways—as a killer, an excuse to take a long love-filled boat journey or a metaphor for war based on anger and frustration. What do you feel when you see yourself in relation to the Covid-dead-bodies floating in the Ganges? Love, hate, both or what?
Finally, this poem by Nandini Sen Mehra can be taken as the literary way of finding solace by pitting the personal disquiet and the fury of the masses against the carelessness, incompetence and selfishness of those in power in dealing with epidemics and pandemics:
And night has come upon my land,
the carrion birds encircling
and prayers ascend on pyres lit,
the shadows fast descending
and leaders know not how to lead,
they gape, they watch in silence
while each new day brings grief afresh,
no help, no rest, no guidance
and those who come with sturdier boats,
will row perhaps to safety,
but most, will flay, in desperate need,
expendable humanity
what will remain, when the storm has passed,
when many so loved are lost,
what will be changed, within our hearts
what will this time exhaust
may then we not allow ourselves
to be led by those inept,
for want of air while many died,
unmoved, while many wept
may we never again be fooled,
by words, by power, by greed,
put not our faith in men of stone
who use us for their need
and know that when the night was dark,
who came to hold our hand,
it was the stranger, the ones unknown,
who share this wounded land
it was the one you did not trust,
the ones who were the other,
and when the leaders all had fled,
in him you found a brother
so let no powers again succeed,
to divide us at their will,
let love remain in our battered hearts,
the hope they could not kill.
This poem, titled as “For the land of my birth India…”, is found on the website of Hindus for Human Rights, which I wholeheartedly endorse. It is perhaps part of the 100 poems collected in her debut poetry book, “Whorls Within”, which I look forward to reading.
BY : Annavajhula J.C. Bose,
Department of Economics, SRCC
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