Gulab Ghat and its funeral pyres, Patna. Pic by the author
Ratnakar Tripathy
‘Father,’ a young boy asked at the town fair, ‘Why is the man on the tightrope holding a long rod?’ ‘Don’t you see, it is the pole that keeps his balance, and holds him steady’, replied the father. ‘But then father, how does the pole keep balance’, the boy persisted. ‘Silly boy, the man is holding it steady, of course’, answered the father promptly. [a tale of unknown origin]
Prelude: The Fidgety Days
S
eptember 1, 2021: a time of wary restlessness in Patna, Bihar, India that has seen me confined to my ancestral home since January 2020, when I briefly visited Bombay for an academic conference. I haven’t stepped out of my city since, as I do not face any kind of urgency besides a pair of twitchy feet aching for travel and an overdue reunion with friends and family. A visit to them at this point would also entail an irksome quarantine within the house before I can freely mingle with them and breathe the common air. Even beyond the quarantine ordeal, I may be urged to leave the house as seldom as possible to avoid the backwash of a plague in its last though forever stretching leg. Granting I am keen to be with my own folk again, I am also wary of being confined to the intimate cocoon of togetherness without frequent respites. Having heard of sons, daughters, friends, lovers and parents stuck with each other for long months under travel restrictions, I am chary of a surfeit of human warmth and intimacy. Of course, you worry when your dear ones are not within the watching distance! But all those caring glances following each other may soon turn within, leaving everyone watched by a pair of phantom eyes floating in mid-air. Like a long winding leash held by no one but constantly snaking behind you all over the domestic space!
So, I lean back in the chaise lounge, shake my dangling feet forcefully to cure their torpor with all my frenzied fantasies. Left alone for an ever-ending stretch, I have begun to discover the countless joys that the small acts of private madness can bring. One is becoming so familiar with joys that don’t need sharing, will never be shared, are too fragile to survive the daylight and air.
The closest I came to travelling during the past eighteen months of the pandemic is through the periodic spam from my ticketing platform munificently informing me that I am entitled to change my flight dates without extra charge. Being singled out as a frequent traveler seems to cause a vague thrill as a repair, so to speak, for the immobility, even though I have no ticket to swap. Like many others, I have developed the habit of looking up photos and videos of far-flung places. The blue hills from a Croatian landscape would do equally well as an endless stretch of verdant paddy from Laos! Occasionally, I found myself absorbed in the crisscrossing routes to remote hamlets in our own Himalayas and worry over the state of the roads or the water shortages and the compromised hygiene at the bucolic homestays. Sitting at home, I bothered over reports of frequent rockslides in the far-flung mountains of Chamoli and Kinnaur. A lone yak grazing peacefully among the stark scree of Spiti made me want to join him right then and there! Images of a narrow track skirting a massif descending to a roaring stream down below brought back jolts of my long familiar vertigo and woke me from my reveries, sending me back to my bookmarked reading.
When in Bombay last year, I had already acquired an ill-fitting mask, painfully tight around the ears and wore it as often as I could without hindering my breathing. But with some inkling of the looming lockdowns in the next few months, I walked around restlessly, greedily soaking in as much of the city as I could and lingering around the swilling Powai Lake as a man with a private agenda during the lunch and tea breaks. I could see that every hum of the frivolous small talk behind me at the seminar was headed towards the looming pandemic. Towards the end of 2021 however, the conversations in Patna are already presuming the end of the pandemic with no one following the well-known safety protocols. We all know that denial is often seen as an effective antidote to the pandemic with as much assurance as the vaccine, at times more so, with disastrous consequences.
There are of course exceptions, the finnicky ones like me, who got too used to the mask during the long isolation and are loath to shed it to show their full face in its sulking nakedness. Unable to read the facial expressions on others, I am not keen to reveal my own. Who knows, thanks to the endless isolation of the pandemic, I may have developed a facial tic that I am unaware of! Despite the fuss over all sorts of niggling matters, there is already an alarming talk of an impending third or is it fourth wave in November 2021 after the festival season or February – March 2022 that is causing some nervous fretting, with everyone ready to withdraw into their shells. It is not unlike the rows of frogs poised at the edge of Powai. As my steps approached the brim of the lake, they plopped back into the water in unison.
The pandemic has put us all on the edge and even as we enjoy bursts of normalcy, many of us are still poised to recoil into safety on the slightest cue. The cocoon of familiar dangers calls us imploringly and normalcy seems unfamiliar, undeserved, undependable and premature. The frogs can sense the lingering traces of the pandemic in their sinews and are no longer used to gazing lazily at the city line rimming the bulging lake. They seem ready to lunge their tongues at a passing dragonfly but do not look up to relish the larger view.
The mirage of safety seems scary and a state of fearfulness carries the snugness of the womb. At every moment I can vividly see the sneaky pathways of the likely virus reach my body and spend a lot of time shorting all its circuitous routes to my skin and breath. Unable to move steadily on the firm ground, I seek the security of a tightrope under my feet. A good night’s sleep seems wanting when not punctuated with rattling nightmares.
Defiance and Grappling: A Philosophical Stalemate
My philosophical reflections on the pandemic began oddly though unavoidably in a state of panic after an encounter in my neighbourhood during its first wave in March 2020. ‘Meditations on Panic’ – a heading like this will make no more sense of course than ‘Reflections on Life from a Dentist’s Chair’! Or a ‘Travelogue by an Absconding Felon’ fleeing from cops along a scenic landscape teeming with fast-forwarded meadows and scurrying wild life! But I nevertheless decided one cannot entirely leave philosophical ponderings to a state of quiet composure. Thoughts of a philosophical nature occur when they do and mustn’t be dammed up when they exude on their own. During the long months of the pandemic, the one encounter that drenched me with philosophical thoughts for a long time to come, went as follows:
On a hurried and nervous sortie to the neighbouring shops, I was taken aback by a maxim painted on the windshield of a car in bold red. Definitely not a cliché or a quote, the cheeky rhyme in Hindi was aimed at the Covid virus or even fate itself:
‘Shamshan ke o raja,
Mere samne to aa jaa’
[Oh, king of the burning ghats (crematorium), I dare you to come face to face with me]
I noticed a beefy arm stick out of the car window, the muscles rippling through the Magyar sleeve and a bright young face shimmering through the glass with great defiance. The wilting marigolds from the wreaths on the bonnet and a faint smell of the incense indicated he had just come back from the neighbouring crematorium. With the city’s largest crematorium by the banks of the river Ganga, my neighbourhood is accustomed to all manners of mourning, ranging from loud music to quiet sobbing to the glum haste of those who were quite done with the departed and simply wished to be rid of the body. The shrill and almost festive processions dragging behind the bodies indicated that the reposed woman or man lived to a ripe old age, dying a natural death. When the celebratory music and the cymbals seemed markedly lavish, the bier most likely bore a woman lucky to die before her husband and escape a demeaning upgrade to widowed piety. I have little idea how the progeny and the husband coped with their griefs in the midst of the ceremonial gala. The idea perhaps was to drown their sorrow or lack of it in decibels. This was a time when I had just found out the right type of mask to wear, the exact medications to hoard up, and also the sufficiently potent disinfectants to bomb the virus out of my breathing precincts.
Left alone to fend for myself in a large house, I had no immediate responsibilities, besides worrying remotely for others. Of course, I took good care of myself, following every safety protocol that seemed enforceable. To give just one example, I washed my hands frequently and with great deliberation, bathing every single finger and the crinkles like a pampered house pet. Ever watchful of fighting on all the fronts against the malevolent virus, everything I did was aimed at the ceaseless slaughter of the microbes. Instead, the intrepid mourner, if one may call him that, threw an open dare to Yamraj, the god of death within his own fief! The boldness of the macabre motto bang in a season of rampant deaths seemed to resonate with some passersby. When some of them broke into dismal chuckles, they seemed embarrassed by their own laughter. Soon, the unmasked youth sucked through the bottle of his fizzy drink and went his way with his companions who seemed overawed by his audacity and unable to show him any overt sympathy. This was an act of grim insolence filled to the brim with a sense of indestructibility, running through every fibre of his muscles and bones.
Unable to draw a line between an orgasm and a lethal motorbike crash, the raw muscles were innocent of the actuarial arithmetic familiar to the middle-aged. The small group at any rate had triumphed over death momentarily by witnessing someone else’s. They had just sealed their conquest by pushing the body of a mortal, however dear into the raging flames of the electric pyre. After all, burying someone else may be the closest we can get to being immortal. Aiming his fist at the skies, the defiant youth, I concluded, felt highly offended by the gods for hauling up his father over the unending staircases!
Everyone around the car though seemed clearly affected by the wacky sacrilege and the brief moment of the chilling glee was followed by a grim thoughtfulness routinely seen on the forever wrinkled faces during the height of the pandemic. After taking my father, my mother, and then my favourite uncle and aunt to the same burning spaces through the years, the cremation ghat had long become personal to me. I could never again pass the lane without a rush of faces flashing through my mind. What horrifies me to this day is how the attending Dom hit my burning father with a stout club to crack his skull. I was told that this was no act of cruelty and quite necessary to ensure the full incineration of the dense skull bones that shielded the human brain so dearly. Of course, it was also part of the custom for a son to offer a large chunk of half-burnt parental flesh to the sacred Ganga, supposedly by way of a customary offering to the river creatures such as fish and turtle. Among all the images, what has never left me was the sight of my mother’s wrinkled toes as her body was slid into the furnace with unusual gentleness in slow motion. I have to make a slight effort before I can conjure her face in its sparkling entirety but the last frame of her receding toes still slips back instantly with little trying.
Between the Watchtower and the Cave
I believe that the Covid pandemic of 2020-2021 has introduced many of us to a type of anxiety that is almost beyond the endurance of ordinary mortals. With the pandemic on its way out for many of us, it may be hard to recollect its peak months of March-July, 2021. In fact, we may have succeeded in disremembering the scourge long before it really comes to an end! One obviously doesn’t understand an experience before it has happened since despite all anticipation, it is not there yet. When it does happen, you have the excuse of being too entangled in it to understand it. But once you have been through it, you again have the curious pretext of looking at something that is no longer there once again to figure out. To have something right in the face frontally, well synchronized with the luxury of complete detachment is to ask for too much, even though detachment is equally a good excuse for lack of cognitive interest and attention. The irony apart that there is no such thing as ‘complete detachment’ or unqualified objectivity since between us and the Covid virus for example, a microscope is both a means of observation as well as separation as the shaper of our perceptions! In case you thought the media images of the spiky virus are as faithful as our passport photos, you need to have a talk with the scientist who gave you the synthesized images. As for the forensic inexactness of passport photos themselves the world over, the less said the better.
There is thus no dearth of juggling rationale for not knowing or not even trying. Our grappling with the pandemic seemed hard enough when we were in the thick of things. But it seems no less incomprehensible to me now at a point when we may have left most of it behind. I simply don’t understand what I went through for the past eighteen months, all those months that seem detached from the rest of my life like a deadened carapace to be shed. So, all I can do is begin with some rudimentary questions, small piecemeal clues that may give me an idea of what just happened. After all we humans have this unstoppable urge to make sense, an urge difficult to discourage and instead made keener by the unruly opaqueness of things and feelings.
To take a small example, just recall for a moment the blunt question frequently asked not long ago – ‘what if the pandemic never came to an end? And what if we have to live with it forever’! Yes, this is the penny that many of my friends dropped on the phone with measured casualness. The desultory misgiving was put to me in the manner of an aside, a sighing soliloquy by friends who let me decide if it was something I should respond to. But to me it sounded like a radical philosophical doubt that allowed no headway beyond the premise. Of course, the concern sounded quite excessive and warped when coming from others! But when it gushed forth like a toxic spillage out of one’s own mind, there was no stopping.
Quite strikingly in late August, 2021 however, when a close cousin called me to check on my well-being, he admitted to my utter disbelief that he had forgotten the whole sequence of events from the months of March to July. Despite my convulsed reaction, I realized so did I. During those climactic weeks we thought would remain forever etched in our memories, we called each other twice a day to compare our notes on Covid – starting with the latest item on local news, we routinely wandered off to the remote continents and countries including distant Peru and Brazil. The pandemic had turned my cousin, otherwise indifferent to current affairs, into a virtual newshound, an aggregator of Covid’s latest who sent daily posts of clippings, videos and data to an ever-enlarging audience on his multiple WhatsApp groups. Gifted with a good memory, he had all the figures and compositions of sundry drugs on his fingertips, and could rattle off names and locations of doctors, chemists, suppliers of oxygen cylinders, availability of hospital beds as well the numerous hotspots ranging between our own town and distant Kerala or Bangalore. Initially an enthusiastic follower, I soon felt saturated with Covid news, what with the multiple schools of thought voicing their conflicting views, as genuine data became scarcer by the day. With mortuaries, hospitals, cremation grounds and graveyards the only reliable index in the last instance, the whole exercise had begun to seem too morbid and fruitlessly bleak. But my cousin remained unrelenting through the long months right till the deaths came down from the thousands to double digits. The abrupt awakening of the dormant statistician in him, I suppose, helped him rise above his personal anguish and fears. Nevertheless, as soon as he felt safe from the risk in its direst phase, his memory failed him and he wanted me to re-forward all the daily dispatches he had sent me through WhatsApp. He said he had had to delete them periodically to remain in step with the latest. It made me wonder if the man had emerged from an amnesia or had just entered one. ‘I remember nothing from those days’, he claimed, fully aware of his grandiose binge of record keeping. Like an archivist sleepwalking through her foggy maze of documents and files, having forgotten what she came looking for!
‘When will this scourge come to an end’! And ‘would our lives have changed for good when it does’?
Many of my friends faced me with these oracular gems so directly, it became impossible to dodge them when left alone. These are not questions that lingered beyond a brief moment, allowing me to ponder over them in a state of calm, but kept recurring like flashes of lightening, leaving a searing trail of damage in their wake. Each time I sat down in the manner of a patient and systematic thinker to brood over them, a petty household chore would distract me and I would leave the mountain of the philosophical conundrum aside to deal with a minute pile of dust in a corner or some other overdue house chore. The questions thus occurred at the unlikeliest moments such as the pause between one mouthful of my breakfast and another, souring the morsel beyond repair. But these are just a few among the many lethal conjectures assailing us with the quiet force of unstoppable nightmares. Stripped of their psychological tone, the emotive surplus and its nervous symptoms, the anxiety hid a solid nub of worries to be chewed forever like an unending cud. When not purely medical, the worries in brief seem largely philosophical in nature, connecting us to those narrow and often concealed margins of our daily lives that the pandemic has placed in the full glare of attention. Fully aware that I wasn’t expected to answer these questions for others, I kept chewing over the cud, unable to swallow it or spit it out.
A few months deep into the pandemic and the repeated lockdowns, I became concerned if the pandemic would change our lives forever. Whereas the fear for one’s own life and that of the dear ones continued, it was increasingly tamed by a strict regimen of safety with no exceptions.
Each time I cursed someone for getting close to my skin and my breathing space, I made sure to remind them that I was as much of a threat to them as they were to me. Strangers were pleased to hear that they were not singled out as threats and that in all modesty, I acknowledged my own potential as a carrier of the deadly virus. A social diplomacy based on hostile parity thus helped in preventing several arguments and bickering during days when one could end up making a scene wherever one went.
The cops came chasing after the maskless urchins right through the narrowest lanes till they ran into a dead-end. They soon gave up when they realized that with the lack of other amusements, the children had turned the chase into a game.
After the initial panic of the pandemic and the endless phone calls, my quarantined life acquired a pattern that remains largely intact even as late as October 2021. Although I continue to seek reasons to break out of it, I have only succeeded very partially in sloughing out of the ‘recommended’ practices to follow. Of course, I no longer wash my vegetables over and over again and proof my groceries, or obsessively sprinkle sanitizer all over my shopping, I still go through a moment of wary shudder before shoving foodstuff into the frig. When I get an occasional visitor, we go through a bizarre choreography, moving through the house like two Ping-Pong adversaries determined to stick to the two different sides of an imaginary table by way of distancing. When left alone, I tend to brood over a new lifestyle even as it tapers towards some kind of normalcy yet ill-defined. How has life become different now, how different has my own life become, are the questions that often occur uninvited. But through all this, like an alarm getting louder by the day, I could sense that my death was no longer as alien an idea as it earlier seemed. This created a fog of mourning in advance primarily for myself but also some others in distant places. This was not unlike the stock of obits editorial offices in newspapers keep ready in advance, just in case! And not unlike some animals either that feign death and rigor mortis when threatened by a swooping predator!
The trouble with thinking of your own death is you cannot posit it and stop but instead continue as usual to imagine a world without you in the most elaborate way possible. Recreating a world without you then turns out to be as intricate and populous a fantasy as a life yet unlived or to be lived in the future. On most days, it was far easier to imagine the lives of others in my absence, but my life without theirs seemed unbearable in no time as I ran the sequence of familiar faces in my mind.
There were days when I would often try and steal a glance at the occasional passersby from my balcony and wonder if the moving figures down below shared these questions with me. Their crouching, stealthy gait resembled people in hiding rather than ones boldly out in the open, ready to meet the eyes of a peering stranger. Adjusting their masks with great care, they stared timidly at the shielded faces of the passersby, hoping to dodge the familiar neighbours and the inevitable and endlessly recycled palaver over general welfare. During the lockdowns, the eerie silence of the narrow lanes in my neighbourhood was occasionally broken by a distant shout somewhere deep within a building I could not locate. The stray dogs however continued to howl over the worrisome change of human behaviour, yammering and fighting territorial contests in broad daylight in lanes that earlier belonged to them only after the dark. They were hungry and rediscovering their feral selves. An empty and unkempt lot next to my compound promptly filled up with overgrowth and I saw some of the strays burrow deep holes in the moist soil in search of mice, moles and bandicoots. They formed gangs and stared hard at the dangling polythene bags carried by men with their shopping, hoping for a crumb of something to get by. They spent their nights redrawing their territories around the diminishing garbage dumps. With everyone including rats, moles, owls, crows, dogs and broods of mongoose, all denizens of my neighbourhood becoming more visible than usual, a wealthy neighbour told me that the fewest cases of Covid came from the nearby shanty of rikshaw drivers. This was probably a statistical hiatus that nevertheless seemed to make him feel quite cossetted and vulnerable to a virus that failed to hurt the poor as part of a divine scheme. A sickly envy of the poor and the godforsaken was clearly in evidence. The irony being that the sheer economic hardships caused by Covid- affected paymasters took a heavy toll among them!
When I think back to the peak months of the pandemic, I see myself and my neighbours obsessively running between their watch towers and their caves. They peeked from the balconies and the terraces and then vanished in the deep recesses of their indoors becoming invisible and inaudible for long periods. This was a time that many of us took up the alternating tasks of going into hiding as well as keeping a watch over the humanity. As I burrowed deeper into the interiors of my existence, distancing myself from everyone around, I also found myself more aware and vigilant as I began calling friends and relatives I hadn’t spoken to in years. Most of these were long chats with much news to exchange to make up for the years of silence. With no one in a hurry during the initial weeks of the lockdowns, the conversations often turned reflective since there was no way to fill up the years and decades with mere facts or updates from the official resumes. With the easy aid of my phone and the ever-intact internet, I kept a close track of the global events as busily as a news desk in a media office. Soon, I found that there were many others who spent all their time keeping track of remote happenings like the number of patients in Italy or a province in Spain or Indonesia and were qualified to discuss and compare their observations on the latest global trends. Generally averse to visualized data, I began to scan graphs of all kinds in their pinks, yellows and blues. The irony of it was of course that even as my entire social network regularly warned each other to isolate and distance, each of us anyway behaved like sentries posted at watch towers busily semaphoring messages hither and thither. Comparing statistics from different states, different countries and continents became an obsessive routine with some of us.
Abruptly during the months of April-May 2021, when the deaths were peaking, the overused crematorium furnaces were exploding and the long queues of the dead left the burning ghat crew exhausted, the interest in data collapsed overnight. As the PR machinery of the Indian government began to clamp down on the actual figures, I found the statistical discussions taper off rapidly. The shy knocking of the pandemic on our doors had turned shrill and loud, jangling everyone’s sense of security and decency at the same time. With the burning ghats in my neighbourhood as the only reliable source of hard data, I went out for occasional peeks at the rows of bodies from a safe distance – like a meercat surveying the savannah from a high perch, before it bolted down into its hole of safety, shepherding her clan back into the secure cave! Yes, all this rather incredibly reminded me so much of a wild life show on the African Meercats I had seen long ago – choosing a rampart, a termite mound or the pinnacle of a tall shrub, they surveyed the landscape around them. Nervous and breathing hard, they stood up like human bipeds to map their surroundings for safety, and the moment a threat was spotted, they would all scurry back into their holes, with their snouts sticking out of the burrows and furrowed eyes blinking into the camera lenses.
Gulab Ghat during the recent flooding of Ganga in Patna. Pic by author
Between Arrivals and Departures
‘…the new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting. In this sense of initiative, an element of action, and therefore of natality, is inherent in all human activities. Moreover, since action is the political activity par excellence, natality, and not mortality, may be the central category of political, as distinguished from metaphysical, thought.’ [my emphasis]
–Hannah Arendt, Prologue, The Human Condition
As a facetious attempt at personal mythology, I often bantered with my close friends how my otherwise unremarkable abode stands sandwiched between the high points of birth and death – on my left in Patna stood a gynecologist’s clinic which emitted cries of newborns at the oddest of hours that was often heralded by a burst of the chloroform used in the caesarian surgeries. The cloying whiff of the anesthetic was explained to me by a friend of my mother’s who once admitted her daughter in law to the clinic – it seems our gyno neighbour routinely discouraged natural birth to inflate her bills. The practice seemed downright odious till the tale revealed another layer. It turned out that the young women these days insist on the caesarian mode anyway to escape the racking pain and often connived with the doctor against their mother in laws.
The lane on the right was the standard route for the noisy processions shouldering their dead to the crematorium by the river bank. Suitably and warningly called ‘Ghagha Ghat Lane’, it perhaps indicated the abrupt depth of water on its banks, if you have a penchant for make believe etymologies! Fifty meters down the river lay the main cremation ground of the ironic sounding ‘Gulabi Ghat [Rosy Ghat]’ that encouraged further etymological speculation. My guess is the ghat was so named by the trading boatmen who made big profits from funerary flowers, including roses unloaded at the site and perhaps took a rosier view of death than others.
With its burning platforms and with a large staff of the Dom caste busily negotiating the ceremonial toll and the prices for sundry funerary materials, the entire site often carried the appearance of a busy bazar patio. Imbrued in sandalwood fragrance, it was always livened with loud negotiations at various stages of the final disposal. The ghat also offers the option of a modern electric crematorium with fixed fee, a clear recourse for the poor and also those with no stomach for open incineration of their dead. But in all my life, this is the only trade where I have witnessed the spectacle of men bargaining with utmost belligerence and weeping at the same time. Being shattered by the death of a dear one is obviously no excuse for being conned by the arrogant masters of the burning ghats, the untouchable Doms who get their own back for all the slight at the hands of upper castes. So, the mourners could be seen wiping their tears with one hand and bargaining forcefully with the aid of the other.
The metaphysical cliché of birth and death, I thought, made the location of my home more interesting than it really was. My existential positioning also placed me on a privileged perch to philosophize with full license!
Legend also has it that my entire neighbourhood called ‘Mahendru’ refers to emperor Ashoka’s son Mahendra who along with his sister Sanghamitra sailed away from these weirs to distant Sri Lanka as the messengers of Buddhism with its gospel of Dukkha [human suffering as ontology] and compassion or Karuna. Somewhere around here in mid-river, the Magadha imperial armies fought their naval skirmishes against the republic of Vaishali that resisted advances across the river – the tussle between democracy and empire, between the equable stupa and the imperious phallic pillar was settled several centuries before Christ under extremely wet conditions, goes the legend with some historical basis. This reading of time and place suited my historical vanity, as it does for many Biharis who see their past as largely ancient and little else since then. With the exception of course, of those regnal years when a Bihari candidate tops the nationwide IAS exams, turning from pitiable subjecthood to the bully masters of the Indian bureaucracy!
Over the years, I found that the funeral processions on my right were made musical by a professional singer with a virtual monopoly who followed them on a cart equipped with a harmonium and an accompanist. He sang his fixed repertoire many times during the day, making the raucous trips to the crematorium in great haste to keep pace with the fast-moving biers. His songs ranged between the ‘nirguns’ of Kabir to melancholic filmy songs from decades ago that carried the appropriately doleful ring. At any rate, the qualifying refrain ‘Kahat Kabira [says Kabirdas…]’ can easily turn any random apocryphal rhyme into a Kabirdas quote when intoned with sufficient gravitas! Occasionally, top scorers from the international charts took over, making it to the local funerary pageant. Psy’s ‘Gangnam Style’, a global chartbuster from a distant South Korea remained a rage for several months in 2014. A gospel of global mimicry with references to a posh Seoul suburb, the ‘Gangnam’ track seemed oddly befitting in the humble Mahendru Mohalla, without anyone realizing it!
I sighted the funerary performer more than once on his way back. He was not singing anymore and seemed well rested on his slow-moving cart, his eyes half closed in peace after the elegiac frenzy. Even the bullock dragging the cart seemed somnolent. The singing pro was no longer the maniacal performer rushing the body to the burning log heaps of the crematorium. He was just a performer in a highly unlikely professional niche. He had a tolerable voice, well-suited to the loudspeaker and the ability to take his shrieking to a very high pitch in a changing medley of wailing pathos and ecstasy.
Once in a while both the anesthetic smells and cries from the left and the loud sounds from the right synchronized, braiding into an indistinct din and hitting me with the fundamental cliches of human life for a few prolonged moments. Unlike Arendt’s riven ontologies of birth and death however, I faced the cries of birth and the discordance of death in the same breath, commingling in a common premise of a cyclical existence. Each time a new life descended across the compound wall from my house, an arrival would be followed promptly by a departure on the other flank. Arendt seems both tentative and arbitrary in stating that ‘…natality, and not mortality, may be the central category of political, as distinguished from metaphysical, thought.’ ‘May be’, she qualifies! Clearly, she chose the crib over the crematorium as her ontological compass, but a god, any mighty god who would take an equanimous view of both birth and death, would probably look shiftily from left to right, from right to left and just end up feeling amused at the cosmic equivalence of waste and procreation.
The amoral and amusing cosmic ‘Leela’, a ludic worldview, left no place for ontological bias in a flattened metaphysical landscape, of course! But Arendt’s preference did seem a wee bit clouded by the license she grants to a philosophical line of thinking that takes the wonder of conception, cell divisions, birth, hatching, metamorphosis, the whole lot of new beginnings as less deserving of metaphysical reflections than death, the one thing we will never know much about till it happens. When it does happen, it is mostly too late to think anything of it. She pushes natality too far into the daylight of politics as the philosophically starker aspect of the human condition, which seems unfair to the equally big mystery of birth or just plain being. Not to acknowledge the opaque gravity of death is certainly too coarse and perverse, somewhat like my challenger youth back from the crematorium. But endless reflections on fatality seem as futile as inevitable and inescapable.
The pandemic took so much of my philosophical sap out of me, thanks to such trance-like meditations. I kept coming back to the banal conclusion that nothing happens after you die except some bereft folk trail behind to ensure that no vestige of you is left intact. Ashes to ashes!
In fact, much of the funeral ‘Shraddha’ ceremony is in effect aimed at pacifying the spirits of the dead who may have left behind some overactive and malicious desires with harmful after effects. The idea of hurting loved ones posthumously seemed outrageous if also oddly satisfying for making their presence felt, despite the complete and definite removal from the stage of life. Unlike Chitragupta, the divine auditor of Yama the god of death who maintained a register of human sins and good deeds, I had little interest in keeping a tally of the anonymous comings and goings via my neighbourhood, of course! What a task for a godly scribe anyway known for his education and learning! But doesn’t it seem striking that we require an elaborate funeral ceremony running through thirteen days of Shraddha just to affirm the finality of life’s cessation? As if man must confirm the doing of God or nature, depending on one’s belief, by putting her own stamp of annulment. Isn’t it also ironic that human desires are seen to outlive their biological lives and not vice versa, and mandate recurring appeasement?
Earlier, the sounds of the funeral singing barely stood out amidst the general din of the busy riverside lanes but the silences of the Covid lockdowns accentuated them as muted verdicts of great import. In contrast to the common practice, the Covid ridden corpses were brought to the ghats in special purpose mortuary vehicles and were cremated in businesslike silence, their bodies wrapped not in saffron but the forensic plastic tightly wound many times over, turning them into translucent human cylinders. During the peak, when the crematorium furnaces were overworked, the dwellers of shanties close by complained of the foul smell and the suit emanating from the tall chimneys belching the gaseous remains from hundreds of bodies. The eateries catering to the exiting mourners shut down and the shopkeepers withdrew indoors. A place of pious bereavement had turned into a stinking slaughterhouse and was no longer a site of terminal commerce. The ill-equipped and exposed Dom professionals who handled the bodies charged hefty amounts for their hazardous job and worried over their own likely death due to the infection. The bodies passively went through the last haggle of their lives before turning into ashes. So much of it seemed so inhuman till I heard a funeral attendant, a person from the Dom caste speak to a journalist in a video – he said that without the protective gear used by the paramedics and the transport crew, he wondered how long he would last.
‘Shouldn’t I charge the extra amount for the risk I take in all the time I may have got’, he asked quite convincingly.
But the utter humanity of his despicable avarice hit me with full impact when he stunned the self-righteous reporter into silence.
‘Who will cremate me when I die?’ His blunt question ended the nagging video interview.
The Burden of Hope and the Relief of Danger
During the peak weeks of the pandemic, when I called a friend after days of dithering, I desperately hoped he would tell me he is fine. No, in fact I would have cursed him if he wasn’t, after I made the difficult and courageous decision to call him with a heavily pounding heart ready to explode. It was therefore akin to coming back from the edge when he picked up the phone and said ‘hello’, a single sound that condensed tons of relief in one breath. He was there and so was I in a mutual act of confirmation that will remain unsaid forever! the fact being of course that once relieved, I found I had nothing much to say at all and we mostly ended up talking about the weather or the menu for the day.
But I have to admit I had another list in my head of all those who were officially more prone than others. Even among them there were a select few whose bouquet of chronic ailments spelled an almost definite doom. The medical phrase ‘co-morbidity’ has defined their existence ever since the scourge turned up at out doorsteps. I realized I had developed an intolerance for bad news and was turning incapable of hearing tales of suffering from my dear ones. I had turned ferociously binary between living and death, with no space left for serious illness at all. The reason was simple, namely there was nothing anyone could do by way of help. Even a polite and routine ‘how are you’ thus became at the same time painfully vacuous and also too loaded with suspense and anxiety. Often these token queries were made to simply hear a prompt confirmation of someone’s well-being. The question had lost all sense of inquiry and no longer serving as a conversational gambit, it could in reality end the conversations that would nevertheless drag awhile in pretense. It carried too big a weight of anxiety to mean anything but simply ‘you better be fine’ like an urgent and insistent reprimand.
To confirm and reconfirm the continued existence of my dear ones became a premise for my own intactness. I found myself calling others on the phone or leaving a brief ‘hi’ message on chat windows for no apparent reason but to seek some quick evidence of continued presence. Every response confirmed my own existence to me. Like a man standing in the front of the mirror and afraid of not finding his reflection before him!
I was aware I was leaving some of my friends quite puzzled since they had known me to be a very infrequent caller, dismissive of attempts at idle chats in the past.
Quite early during the pandemic, when I received a call from my only close relative in town, that falling sick with Covid is not an option what he meant was to warn and remind me that with two young children and wife at home, he won’t be able to attend to me or even fix up a decent doctor, an oxygen cylinder or a drug of choice for me. He won’t be able to do so even for himself, he assured me. Poor fellow was just saving himself the likely embarrassment and shame of not turning up by the bedside if I fell sick.
Behind the call lay a story he told me much later. A couple of days before he called me, he was pressed to contact some big guns in town to arrange an oxygen cylinder for a close friend and had failed miserably, being left with a wounded ego for all his pains. He had often boasted to me that there is little he cannot get done in our city. But his elaborate warnings carried a despairing appeal, namely ‘please do not bother to call if you come down with Covid’. He was just being very practical of course! There is nothing he could do if I did. It was at these brief moments that my pandemic anxieties briefly lingered over the urgent matter of my own well-being, a concern I did my best to avoid by worrying over others in the most obsessive way. I quickly sprayed some sanitizer on various surfaces, switched on fans and opened windows to shoo out the virus before settling down at my work desk again. Did I forget to mention the elaborate bath I had to have immediately?
During the same time, a top journalist from Delhi admitted on the social media that his self-importance was left in tatters after making similar appeals for oxygen cylinders in the city. A star TV journalist known to millions of Indians found that the only person who could have her dead father cremated was a driver of her cousin’s who commanded the votes of a whole lane in Gurgaon and compelled his municipal councilor to arrange a berth in the crematorium. For the next few days, the media star sang paens for her late father on Twitter, though she forgot to mention our driver for ensuring a smooth vertical journey for her darling dad. I am not sure if anyone else had the grit to jump a queue of corpses to seize a burning platform in the midst of the jostling men in masks and protective gear.
After my cousin called, I was made aware suddenly that my walk to death if and when it occurred may be very solitary one with barely an attendant willing to shove my body into some kind, any kind of furnace or grave. Strange that living alone bothered me far less than dying alone, and the imagined sight of me as a lonesome corpse floating in the Ganga, with a bevy of crows nicking their occasional beakfuls out of my plump thighs became unbearably real.
Similar sights had after all become common in the town of Buxar, with some of the corpses sailing all the way to our good old Gulabi ghat and making news.
The tragic episode from Delhi was narrated to me firsthand by the same driver who had worked for years for a very dear and cherished friend who lost his life soon after the journalist’s aged father. In the course of a long chat punctuated by sobbing on both sides, the inconsolable driver also sent me a video without remarks – the brief clip showed my friend on a stretcher, all wrapped up and sealed in a transparent bag, his face a blur under the reflected lights of the crematorium. The camera followed the body right up to the blazing mouth of the furnace and then abruptly came to an end. The young driver who had been a devoted and faithful companion for my loner friend for decades was clearly so immersed in his own hurt, he could only serve me with some mindless misery by way of commiseration. I had asked him for a recent photo of my friend and hoped to remember him by his outstandingly bright smile. Instead, I was compelled to read all my loss in the grotesque video, which I am now unable to watch again but also reluctant to delete from my phone.
Return from the pandemic land
The pandemic with some exceptions, is thought to be waning in a large part of the country. But I can see how Covid has made a lasting impact on me and many friends, relatives and acquaintances who adapted themselves to the pandemic in unseen or conspicuous ways. I am not sure if they will succeed in recovering their older selves as I knew them. I have, I believe, been transformed in some profound ways, not all which may be visible to me as much as to some others who have known me long enough to tell. My friends have now begun attending classrooms that are supposed to be hybrid, combining the online and offline options among students. A friend who teaches music has registered her shock on our WhatsApp group at what her students are telling her – when her online classes began a year ago, they had complained that the experience was very unsatisfactory. But the same students are telling her now that they like the virtual format better. To be teaching music through demos compromised in quality by the internet apps and hardware was bad enough. But to be told that the online mode is more acceptable can be downright humiliating for a dedicated teacher. Despite being startled by the musical example that requires more than usual face to face input and interaction, I had foreseen this long ago. I had warned some close friends several months ago that the lifting of the lockdown will manifest its own problems. Both introverts and habitual extroverts will find it equally difficult to return to their familiar surroundings. Even close friends and family, I had speculated. will have to deal with a phase of unease with each other’s corporeality that they may not be able to discuss openly.
But I also understood in advance that much of such unease will simply wither away as I begin to accept myself in my new mode of being. We had shrunk our horizons to suit the pandemic and are now finding it difficult to crawl out of the hiding places and stretch our bodies. The outdoors seems blinding, the laughers seem too loud, and affections seem too slippery as we begin to get back our toeholds, descend from the tightrope and walk upright all over again. So, my essay is as much about the precipitate plunge into the pandemic, the time within as well as the painful sloughing off that would necessarily follow. It is a bit like the prey who is no longer followed by the predator but doesn’t know that, since he never got a chance to look back to make sure either way. Racing ahead of himself, and accelerating forever, he pauses in disbelief but continues to run even though he doesn’t have to.
For nearly two years now, the news platforms, social media and messaging services have been plying a variety of apprehensions and uncertainties over the pandemic, most of which are easy to share and talk about. But there are questions and wonderings that surround us in our twilight states when we bounce our own thoughts within our heads. Sometimes, we juggle such chimeras sportingly but most often it is the fearsome ogres that use our mindscapes for their free play and refuse to withdraw unless shut out forcibly. Like insubstantial wisps of cotton, they have a habit of charging right back when swept out of the mind. We provide them with a safe haven by concealing them from public view where they are likely to be ridiculed, rejected or perhaps even worse purged too glibly as problems to be solved by scientists, doctors and public health experts. The pandemic has released all such fears to roam freely through our heads and a reprieve from the scourge when it comes, is unlikely to put a leash on them for all time to come.
Dodging Danger: Piecemeal Nightmares as cure for Wholesale Doom
When others react to our most outlandish fear with aversion and incomprehension, it is not because they do not share them. On the contrary, it is because the thought has crossed their minds far too often and they hate you for bringing them up undeniably. I have for long felt that my moments of heightened anxieties as well as dull boredom hide within them the most burning philosophical questions if I care to look within. I have gained little philosophically from staring at a blank ceiling or a mountainscape in search of philosophical questions or answers. This essay is devoted to all such stubborn puzzles that came in the wake of the pandemic and will continue to dwell with us as lasting legacies for a lifetime. There is already some talk of a prolonged phase of susceptibility before the virus calms down and we develop adequate defense against it. But that there is always a next virus to worry over is not something we will forget in a hurry long after the pandemic subsides. Much of our anxieties lie low like a murmur in the midst of the more obvious din of daily existence. The Covid pandemic has created a wide range of overt concerns that are widely shared, well-known and also increasingly well-researched by scientists busily collecting data on how the virus acts and how our bodies respond to its behaviour.
After all a lethal virus with no particular animosity towards us, seems more dangerous than someone trying to hurt us on purpose. There are of course some doubts over calling it a living being at all. But that an inert toxin should charge at us so full of intent and with such grave consequences makes it difficult for us to avoid the aggressive language of war.
But even as we become more knowledgeable about the viral chains and discuss them in open fora, a certain overload of anxieties and fears continue to accumulate at the back of the mind. Many of them seem atypical in a tragic sense in that they are our own and hopelessly cumulative too. However hard we all tried to merge our sufferings into the vast tide of general humanity, a little private window into our own fears keeps rattling its shutters as a reminder.
The pandemic angst is also unique as the many generations among us have had no firsthand exposure to anything similar and have never lived through one. Although many amongst us may have begun to believe that the present exposure would have them prepared them for the future onslaughts, I believe that to be near impossible for all time to come. The best we can do is prepare ourselves over and over again for a life when the pandemic wanes and terminates. My historical perusals from the days of earlier scourges like the black death or cholera are little help despite the creative splendour and consolations of a ‘Decameron’ or Newton’s theory of gravity, both of which are reputed to have fructified during the phases of empty isolation at rustic retreats. I cannot imagine these archaic generations being used to bouts of the pandemic any more than we are, although they may have been more resilient in bending to their fates. But who knows if they were also a lot more desperate and defiant in trying to escape the scourge through magical potions, alchemical formulae, and obscure chantings! I like to imagine that someone who underwent several waves of the scourge in their lives, always and repeatedly came back to live another and one more life as a discontinuous stint with no sense of preparedness. At least in our time, our rulers create an aura of a war fought against the virus with the help of our experts and technologies!
There is after all not much point in cursing the fake newspaper headlines or the political leaders when every unmasked or masked neighbour and friend have turned into carriers of the toxin and deliverers of the contagion in as personal sense as possible. An absconding ruler or a heedless physician thus seem less of an enemy than your own child or parent who may come to hasten you towards the ultimate journey.
Baring the Pandemic Anxiety
The reason I am unable to leave the months of April-May 2021 behind is not that I am too deeply scarred to think of anything else. What keeps drawing me back to the pandemic is how it transformed me at least temporarily into a stranger and a person I found difficult to live with despite the obvious lack of choice. Whether a complete relief from the pandemic will again reset me into my old self or some imagined default is not something I can foretell. But for long now I have been hearing echoes of my own plight from others who wish to reemerge as intact as possible whenever that becomes conceivable.
The relevant questions here may be – do we need to be philosophically equipped for an eventuality that may not come to pass or instead simply hope that we are able to escape it? Is any kind of philosophical preparedness even possible, except perhaps as posturing pomposities to be hurled around at others and to be used as crutches? It is one thing to face a challenge when it occurs but is it even possible to be ready for an exigency like a pandemic in advance? Isn’t it better to don a quality mask, to wash hands frequently, to mingle sparingly with others and to vaccinate, instead of brooding over the well-known probabilities?
So, behind the question ‘will the pandemic ever come to an end’ lies the worry if I will emerge from it the same human being I was till a while ago! This is a mutating fear that can turn up in many shapes and choke our impulse to make sense of the life around us.
In this sense, what I write here is an invasive imposition of the most painful sort on those who wish to be quits and move on unthinkingly into whatever the future may bring despite the uncertainties. The reasons however, are neither morbid fascination for suffering, nor obsession with historical documentation and audits. There is an urge in me that drags me beyond the realms of tragedy and hope to make sense of what it means to steer a life through the thick fog of the pandemic. The human appetite for making meaning travels straight into the grave, remaining alive right till the last possible moment. Such is the omnipotence of the meaning – making us the animal that we all are! Nothing can stop us from making sense right till the moment we still can. Even the most resolute nihilist among us must repeatedly and regularly remind herself that nothing needs to make sense and seek frequent reaffirmations of the proposed void from others.
My focus here is not so much the enormity of the disquiet but its inner texture and configuration. The pandemic of anxiety is also marked I believe more by an unstoppable turmoil than a static or dull pain settled reposefully in the manner of a tragic sorrow. It seems to resemble the restive and shifty needle of a compass forever unsettled and directionless. Therefore, even though the scientific, medical, epidemiological, logistical, and administrative aspects of the pandemic are complex enough, it seems important to me to locate the seat and the existential stance that lies at the core of this anxiety. My purpose here is neither diagnostic nor therapeutic since I have no training in these areas. All I can hope to achieve is to delineate the philosophical predicament of a being caught up in the web of the pandemic. Buffeted by the ubiquitous shock waves of anxiety, a person may move back and forth between a defiant daredevilry and the dread of a hunted animal. He may wish for a mean, a fulcrum or a balance where he can enjoy a relative composure. A lockdown may provide a temporary relief and a prolonged withdrawal into a remote corner of the country may seem like an appropriate answer. But with no definite schedule marking its end, the pandemic is difficult to avoid altogether.
The existential concern that lies at the core of the pandemic, I believe, is that it yokes and synchronizes two contrasting form of anxieties that we as human beings simply cannot grapple with when they come together in unison. First, it is difficult enough to think of a world without us, a world stamped by the singularity of our absence. If that is not bad enough, our imaginations unavoidably push us to foresee ourselves dangling in a vacuum and stripped of our near and dear ones.
To see the world without us and to visualize ourselves without the world: these invade and suffuse our imaginations with a force impossible to overcome. We are more used to these two threats making their appearance on our mental horizons one at a time or alternately in situations we define as extreme or ultimate. It is the synchronized terror of both that brings the human capacity to make sense, to extract meaning out of a given situation to a nil. This is a state of nihilistic panic occasioned neither by the threat of death nor loss but a concerted assault by both.
A puzzled child may take long to appreciate that it is indeed both the acrobat and his rod from the little tale at the outset of this essay that uphold the balance on the tightrope or mar it. And not one or the other! When overcome by fear and fretfulness, they may both contribute to a steep drop into the abyss. But given a state of poised resolve, the man and his stick may ride each other across the abyss.
An Afterword
This is the first half of a longer essay, a report on the Covid experience and its endless echoes in hyperbole that exaggerates the prominences to bring them into a more visible relief. Our everyday lives are far too heavily biased in favour of flat dullness, like the bodily routines of breathing, eating, farting, sweating, excreting, bathing, all of which are vital and time consuming. Vital for our wellbeing and forever taken for granted, the fact is without them, we would all be dead.
We thus tell ourselves and others stories, fully formed or inchoate that help us rise above the diffuse mundaneness of daily lives. Our stories do not happen in the sense life events do and are emanations that will never be commensurate with our daily existence.
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Ratnakar Tripathy is a Visiting Faculty at Asian Development Research Institute [ADRI], Patna. His interest areas include popular/regional cultures and languages, migration, cinema, caste, digital economies, and philosophy of the sciences. He has a number of academic publications in these areas. His last research project focused on the digital music cultures in Himachal Pradesh [2016-18] at the IIAS, Shimla. He is currently planning a similar work on Jharkhand.
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Ratnakar Tripathy in The Beacon
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