A Time Outside This Time

by Amitava Kumar

The plane was in a holding pattern for a long time. I dozed for a while and dreamed that I was talking on my phone and transmitting the virus to whomever I was talking to at the other end. In fact, it became clear that the illness was streaming out of my phone not just to the person speaking to me—who it was, I couldn’t remember—but to everyone who was on my contact list. I was walking on the street in New York City and talking on the phone when this realization hit me, and when I looked up, I saw the police in black uniforms and masks swarming toward me from all directions.

  Why did I think that it was I and not the state that had been criminal in its disregard?

  * * *

  —

  I CAME BACK to an empty house. On my flight, I was afraid that we would all be quarantined when we landed at JFK, but no one stopped us to even check our temperature. On the train north, a nearly two-hour ride, I encountered a good crowd of passengers, exhausted commuters eyeing each other warily, no one daring to sneeze. There was no stacked mail in our mailbox and I guessed Vaani had made an arrangement with the post office. In my suitcase, there was leftover cheese and I had that before falling into bed.

  Waking up early, before dawn, and finding no coffee in the house, I went to the twenty-four-hour gas station nearby and got myself a cup of some undrinkable stuff. Then, the wait for the grocery store to open. The surprise of finding no chicken on the shelves and no canned beans either. And this baffled me, no tofu. I had in the past barely stopped to pick up a pack of tofu from the stacks in the refrigerated section and now when I wanted just one there was nothing. People around me appeared to be acting in a frenzy and a new fear then entered me: I was afraid less of the sickness finding me and newly fearful that I wouldn’t be able to feed my family when they joined me. It seemed prudent to pick up cans of tinned tuna. I had seen bottles of hand sanitizer in the gas station that morning but had decided to buy some later, when I went to get groceries. In this store, the largest in town, there was no hand sanitizer left. No gloves, no wipes. On the way back, I stopped at the gas station to pick up three bottles of hand sanitizer.

  Days passed. In the note that the residency director sent all the fellows saying sorry but we would have to leave on account of the crisis, she hoped that we would perhaps hit a more creative stride when we returned to our homes. “When Shakespeare was quarantined because of the plague,” she added cheerfully, “he wrote King Lear.” I wasn’t writing King Lear at home, I wasn’t writing anything. I was a vegetable lying on its side, all its roots focused only on extracting the news. I read that a Pew Research Center poll found that 62 percent of adult Americans believed that the media were exaggerating the effects of the pandemic. The reporter had interviewed the inhabitants of a Texas town who said things like “we just need to trust the Lord to solve this.” The man who offered that quote was at church passing out cards that read “C.O.V.I.D. 19” as an acronym for “Christ over viruses & infectious disease” and a comforting Bible verse.

  In India, in the middle of March, in his first acknowledgment of the new coronavirus, Prime Minister Modi addressed the nation on TV. He called for a public curfew from morning to evening the following Sunday, for a total period of fourteen hours. On that day at 5:00 p.m., he said, people were to come to their windows and balconies to display their support for health workers. “We will clap our hands, beat our plates, ring our bells to boost their morale and salute their service.” In response, one of the prominent spokespersons for Modi’s party tweeted that the ancient Hindu scriptures instruct us that temple bells and blowing into conch shells kill germs—and how profound was Modi’s idea of asking 1.2 billion Indians to clap hands, beat plates, and ring bells together. The farce didn’t end there. A rumor that gained wide traction soon afterward was that the coronavirus has a life cycle of twelve hours and Modi’s fourteen-hour curfew would help break the chain and curb the further spread of the virus. A fact-checking group pointed out that the proposed curfew would help with social distancing but not eliminate the possibility of infection. This is because the coronavirus can survive on surfaces for up to three days and infected individuals can spread the contagion for up to three weeks. And despite such warnings, when the hour came and went, the spread of fake news continued. Posts like the following: “NASA satellite videos LIVE telecast has shown that the coronavirus is retreating in India…The cosmic level sound waves generated have been detected by NASA’s SD13 wave detector and a recently-made bio-satellite has shown COVID-19 strain diminishing and weakening. Proud to be an Indian.” A few days later, Modi announced that on the following Sunday, every Indian should stand at their doorstep or on their balcony at 9:00 p.m. and hold a candle, diya, flashlight, or even a lighted mobile phone, for nine minutes. Vaani’s sister, Shikha, forwarded us a WhatsApp message she had received and appended to it a face-palm emoji: “Corona virus does not survive in hot temperature, as per research by NASA. If 130 candles are lit together, temperature will increase by 9 degrees, as per IIT professor. So, Corona will die at 9.09 PM. Masterstroke by Modi.”

  After a visit to the bank, I came home to attend an online seminar. The college faculty was being introduced to Zoom. For my virtual background, I chose a photograph I had taken of the villa with the serene expanse of the lake behind it. (“Oh, Satya, where are you?” asked a colleague in computer science whose own dark wall wouldn’t give anyone cause for a sudden feeling of fernweh.) For an hour or two that afternoon I felt I was back at the residency and in that new space of quiet I wrote the first piece of fiction I had written in days. Did it belong in Enemies of the People? No, it was more a record of the time I was living in. Another way of saying, the world has me in its jaws but I’m still alive.

  “WHERE DID YOU GET THE MASK?”

  The bank robber wore gloves and a mask.

  The teller, a middle-aged woman, had been meaning to buy a mask for herself. There had been reports that they would be needed in a few weeks’ time.

  This is a bank robbery, the note said. Be quiet. I have a gun. Give me all the cash. I have the coronavirus.

  He had underlined virus.

  Four years earlier, in the bank’s branch in a Cleveland suburb, the teller had faced a robbery. Men with real masks and shotguns. Scary stuff.

  This guy looked normal—no, safe—in that mask. She was known to have a sharp tongue but she didn’t immediately say: “You have the virus? Go to a hospital. This is a bank.”

  The teller seemed to feel, without knowing this or even thinking about it much, that they were entering a new time. So much was uncertain. Also, there was no long line of impatient customers in the bank, in fact, no line at all.

  Still holding his handwritten note, she nodded and then asked a question to delay the inevitable.

  A bottle of hand sanitizer sat on her side of the bulletproof glass right next to the red button that would ring the alarm in the police station.

  “Sir,” she said, setting the note aside and reaching for the bottle, “is it okay if I first disinfect my hands?”

  * * *

  —

  I WAS BACK from my residency for two weeks before Vaani and Piya returned home from Cambridge. Although I was on a sabbatical from my college, I received regular updates by email. The students were not going to come back after the spring break. Everyone was to be on Zoom. It was still unclear when the students would be able to return to campus—two weeks? a month? after the summer? And then it was certain that we were in really deep trouble. We had to focus on the immediate need to be safe and stop the spread.

  Shikha, Vaani’s sister, is an animal lover. She has her sister’s compassion, but there is an obsessive quality to her caring. Shikha sent us the news on WhatsApp that a zoo in Germany may begin feeding animals to animals as funds dry up in the pandemic. The administrators there had said they were going to spare the zoo’s twelve-foot polar bear, Vitus, till the end but they were prepared to sacrifice the other, presumably
less popular, animals. “If you guys in the West cannot feed the creatures in your zoos, what is going to happen to the already malnourished animals in the zoos in India?”

  Just that question following the link, nothing else, not even a greeting. As if we had been carrying on a conversation all morning about how to take care of the planet. I turned to Vaani and asked, with just a touch of irritation in my voice, “When did we assume control of the West?”

  Vaani laughed. The laugh didn’t mean she agreed with me. She was laughing with joy, showing love for her sister.

  I shouldn’t complain about these notes from Shikha. I have a need to know. The news is my obsession.

  For example: In the Hindustan Times, a report about a migrant worker who stole a bicycle from a man in a village in Rajasthan. The Indian government had imposed the most brutal lockdown to control the spread, but this had meant that millions of poor, starving migrant workers and their families had been left to find ways to return to their villages. They were trekking hundreds of miles on highways and train tracks. This particular worker, the bicycle thief, was on his way home to Bareilly in Uttar Pradesh, more than a hundred miles away. The owner of the bicycle found a note, written in Hindi, that the worker had left behind: Namaste ji. I am taking your cycle. If possible, please forgive me. I have no means. I have a child, who is disabled and cannot walk, and it is for him that I am having to do this. We have to reach Bareilly. Your guilty—A traveler.

  At a press conference in early March, a reporter from NBC asked Trump: “What do you say to Americans watching right now who are scared?” Trump responded: “I say that you are a terrible reporter. I think you had a nasty question.” At that same press conference, Trump touted hydroxychloroquine, a malarial drug unproven as a COVID-19 treatment. He said, “Let’s see if it works. It might and it might not. I happen to feel good about it, but who knows, I’ve been right a lot. Let’s see what happens.” Two days later, he again made a push for hydroxychloroquine, calling it a “game changer.”

  Even while Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, cautioned against the use of hydroxychloroquine without adequate testing, prescriptions for the drug went up by 200 percent when compared to the same period the previous year. Why were doctors prescribing a drug to fight COVID-19 when its effectiveness had not been proven? Almost half a million prescriptions had been filled. Why? Vaani told me that there had been an experiment from some years earlier in which the researchers told actors to go to doctors and pretend that they had symptoms of depression. Some of the actors were instructed to ask explicitly for drugs while others were not. Patients requesting antidepressants were more than twice as likely to receive them, whether their symptoms called for the drugs or not. In the case of hydroxychloroquine, Trump’s active touting had an effect on common citizens who pushed the demand for prescriptions. This was how people behaved, doctors as well as patients. That is what I learned from Vaani. From Shikha I learned something else. “Thanks to you,” her WhatsApp message began, “thanks to your President, the officials in Mumbai were going to try out hydroxychloroquine on thousands of people in the Dharavi slums. This would have gone on for fourteen days. The excuse was that social distancing isn’t possible in a slum. Sure. But is it not possible to still be scientific and ethical and humane even where social distancing isn’t possible? I think we got infected by Trump’s foolishness when he came to India in February.”

  * * *

  —

  THERE IS A dogwood tree at the end of our street that fills me with joy. The week that it had burst into flower was the week there were the highest number of deaths in this county. More weeks passed. The flowers were gone and yet my small backyard was drenched in green. Vaani and Piya had been back from Cambridge for seven weeks. Everything was now closed there. I had earlier thought I would drive up for the Boston Marathon but of course it was canceled. Vaani liked the green outside our kitchen window here. The yellowwood that she calls the most beautiful tree in the world and, further away, my favorite during the last days of April, the American chestnut with its upturned chandeliers of white.

  A reason to live. Give people that and watch the death rate fall. That is what Vaani heard on the radio, and she began to make notes on the top of the newspaper in her kitchen. The reporter said that in the early 1970s, two psychologists performed an experiment in which they got a Connecticut nursing home to give each one of its retired-age residents a plant. Half of the residents were assigned the job of watering their plant and they also attended a lecture on the benefits of taking responsibilities in their lives; the other half had their plants watered for them and attended a lecture on how the staff was responsible for their well-being. After a year and a half, the group that had been encouraged to take more responsibility, even for such a small thing as a plant, proved more active and alert, and appeared to live longer.

  A novel titled Enemies of the People, its preoccupations tied closely to the present moment, is the plant I have been nurturing in order to stay alive myself. I will live long, unless the virus kills me. This novel and the memory of the residency must be occupying my subconscious. I fell asleep in the afternoon and dreamed that I was in car with Bev. Were we in India? I remember the desert around us. There had been an accident on the road, and, as I drew closer, I couldn’t slow down and our car had plowed into the wreckage. And then I was at the hospital, on a white bed, explaining to Jimi, who might or might not have been the doctor, that I had been exchanged in an experiment on the highway. Do you know the bystander effect? You can see the video from the 1970s. A person is sitting alone in the room that is filling up with smoke. This lone witness leaves the room to ask for help. The same scenario is repeated with three people. Everyone looks furtively around, expecting someone else to act. Did Jimi nod and say anything in response? I cannot remember. I would have liked him to say: “Yes, in the case of the penis thief, all the agency is usurped by the accuser. No one questions him. Oddly, by joining the mob, everyone is still displaying the bystander effect. They sacrifice their individuality to join the mob.”

  * * *

  —

  “OH SHIT, MY bai’s husband has come down with Covid.” This was on WhatsApp from Shikha. Her maid Jamuna had called her to say that her husband had the virus. This put a stop to Jamuna’s daily visits. Jamuna and her teenage daughter would now need to be quarantined. This didn’t mean much to us—Shikha employed Jamuna to clean the apartment and then cook a meal each morning, so that she had dinner waiting for her when she returned home—until we got the news that Shikha had been threatened with arrest over the matter.

  But that happened later. We were trying to find order in our lives. Vaani read somewhere that the coronavirus can last on plastic surfaces for up to seventy-two hours. Groceries and perishables we washed or wiped down with disinfectant but you cannot do that with paper. We laid out in the hallway all our mail as well as our daily newspaper. After three days, we opened our mail, and it was the same with newspapers. I was following the news incessantly on Twitter and online on my computer, but reading the news in print, a childhood habit that I had never given up, meant that I was able to discover how much the world had changed in three days. And how quickly.

  Did I feel bad about this? No. I had lost all sense of time. Days blurred into each other.

  Besides, everything was falling apart. Things were getting worse. Reading the news in print from three days ago was like going back to better times. Not exactly like being present at the dawn of creation—but close. No, but really, this is what I mean: suppose it was March 24, and I was opening the newspaper, which that day in my house was from March 21, and, on that day, countries like Laos and Myanmar were still free from the virus. It was as if on March 21 they were still safe, in another century, except the reality was that on March 24, when I was reading the March 21 newspaper, both Laos and Myanmar had reported their first confirmed cases
. This made all the news I was reading more unreal than usual.

  I wasn’t writing much, but I reminded myself that even though Enemies of the People will be about the lies told by the failed state and the lies we tell ourselves, I also wanted an uncondescending recognition of the power of small people and small lives. Against the lies of the rulers, the unaffected truths of the struggles of the ruled. Also, also, at the end of the day, pitched against fake news, the truth of fiction.

  During the Indian lockdown, a fifteen-year-old girl named Jyoti Kumari carried her father, Mohan Paswan, on the rear carrier of a bicycle from Gurugram near Delhi to Darbhanga in Bihar, a distance of around 750 miles. She covered this enormous distance in seven days, getting rides for short distances on the way. The father’s leg had been injured in an accident—he was an auto-rickshaw driver. He was unable to work and their landlord asked them to vacate their home. And so, Jyoti bought the used bicycle from a neighbor and set out on her marathon journey.

  But truth takes strange forms. Once this story was reported in the news, the Cycling Federation of India asked Jyoti to appear for an all-expenses paid cycling trial. If she succeeded in the tests, she would be provided support and accepted as a trainee at the National Cycling Academy. When I read this new installment in the news, I imagined Jyoti Kumari in her modest home in Darbhanga; she had performed such an amazing feat, but how did the Cycling Academy wish to reproduce the desperation of wanting to reach home during a lockdown? Of saving her father’s and her own life? Apparently unmoved by Ivanka Trump’s tweet calling her journey “a beautiful feat of endurance,” Jyoti Kumari turned down the Cycling Academy’s offer. She said that she needed to focus on her studies, which had been disrupted recently, and, besides, she was feeling tired after such a long journey.