SHIFTING FOCUS

Up until this point, Coronavirus has not impacted everyday life in Kolkata. Though I’ve been checking in daily with the news and with Nandita, paying particular attention to the evolving UK and Indian governments’ policies, the pandemic has not yet affected my plans or the daily life of those around me. There have been a few cases around Delhi but nothing in Bengal and there is a sense, with some of those I’ve spoken to locally, that somehow the Indian disposition is resilient against infections such as these.

As we return from lunch this Monday, the first signal of change being afoot reaches us. We’ve been to a neighbouring district for lunch and as we walk back in to Kumartuli, we’re stopped by a motorcycle police patrol. We’re told that Westerners (who have been the transmitters of the virus into the country to date) are no longer allowed in the district without masks and hand sanitiser. I’d bought hand sanitiser for this trip long before there’d been a run on it back home, for general cleanliness, but I don’t have a mask. We’re turned away.

I feel disconcerted. Unsettled. I become increasingly distracted and anxious and this continues to build momentum over the next 36 hours. I’m lucky enough to have limited direct experience of overt racism but this minor act is a reminder of how unjust life is, and has been, for so many others so often. Turning my attention to my immediate situation, I have to find a mask. I need to finish the piece, and urgently, it is clear, if I’m to be able to finish it at all. We spend a fruitless hour walking from pharmacy to pharmacy, in the heat of the afternoon when many stores are closed. Those that are open don’t stock masks. I’m ready to give up but it feels urgent to complete the scheduled afternoon of work.

We walk past a tailor who is kind enough to give me a strip of fabric to wrap around my face. I hope this will be sufficient to allow our re-entry to finish the work of the day. We will find an actual mask elsewhere in the city later that evening for the following day’s work.

We head back into the workshop. I’m much more self-conscious now. Not just because of the cloth but because clearly the mood is shifting, and I’m unsure by how much, but I know there is a sense that Westerners are the carriers of the Coronavirus. I do enjoy the fact that I can now make invisible facial expressions under this fabric, in response to what’s going on around me.

We don’t cross the police again, and work continues for the rest of the afternoon unhindered.

I read later, once I’ve returned to the UK, that the death toll in British-ruled India from the 1918 Spanish flu was 13.5 million, easily 25% of global deaths.

Monday 16th March 2020