A Time Outside This Time

by Amitava Kumar

  After an early dinner one evening in April, I was listening to a radio station in New York City. A man was speaking of his experience as a temporary worker handling corpses of COVID victims in the refrigerated trucks because the hospital morgues were full or overflowing. This man, Erik Frampton, was working in the Bronx, in the trucks that could contain up to 110 bodies. It was “difficult, gruesome work.” The hospitals had run out of body bags, the heavy black bags being replaced by thin white ones. These bags ripped easily and there was spillage of bodily fluids. The scene Frampton described was chaotic and messy. When the bags failed, the workers used hospital sheets. Blood and fecal matter leaked out. Frampton and his coworker wore body aprons, two masks layered over each other, and gloves. They hoped that they were safe. The starting pay was seventy-five dollars an hour. Frampton spoke of how he and his husband were scared, and that they no longer kissed. And then, suddenly, he was speaking of his mourning for the bodies he was handling. He said, “My mournfulness for each body, my respect for each body is a literal imagination of who knows them. Who’s calling about them? What person could not visit them when they were, you know, in isolation before they had to go on a respirator and they couldn’t talk anymore? Who wants to know where that person is right now?”

  I had my ear glued to the radio in my kitchen and I was crying by now, crying for the man who was speaking, crying for the ones who had died or had lost loved ones to the virus, crying for my wife and child sitting at that moment in the next room watching a rerun of an episode of Friends. There were reports that parents who were doctors or nurses were shielding their families from the virus by staying away in a separate part of the house if they could afford it. Separate entryways, hastily constructed showers behind the garage, no shared meals. That night, as I was putting Piya to sleep, I took out my notebook to write a short story, which, given the times, I imagined as guerrilla fiction:

  SPIDER-MAN

  The man was on FaceTime with his kids. The girl was older, seven and a half. Her brother has just turned three.

  “How was your day?”

  “We made brownies,” the girl said. She looked at her mother sitting behind her when she said this.

  “Brownies,” the boy repeated.

  The mother said to the boy, “Do you want to show Dad your drawings?”

  The boy held up his drawings in front of the phone—a variety of irregular shapes in different colors that he confidently identified by names: Dad, Mom, dinosaur.

  The man said, “Show me Dad again.”

  It looked like him a bit. No face, just glasses. That is what he looked like all day, a shapeless mass in the hazmat suit. Only the color was off. His was blue, the boy’s figure was orange. Every evening at seven, when he came out of the ICU, he stripped out of the PPE suit and waited for the Uber at the corner of Linden and East Ninety-sixth.

  Then came the inevitable question.

  Once again, it was the girl. “Dad, when will you come home?”

  “Soon.”

  When this question was asked each night, he would look not at the kids but at his wife’s exhausted face.

  If he hooked his legs on the lowest rung of the fire escape outside his window, he could easily reach down and tap on the window of the room below, in which his family was already gathered in bed.

  The kids would get the surprise of their lives.

  But he didn’t want to pretend that he had any superpowers. Three dead that day, a bit better than five the day before, a ghostly procession of growing numbers.

  * * *

  —

  WE SOMETIMES CAUGHT sight of Jamuna hovering in the corner of our screens during our Skype calls with Shikha. This is what happened. In late May, to ease Jamuna’s worries about her daughter, who was to sit for her exams in June, and needed to be safe and also to study, Shikha suggested that the girl could move in with her. Purnima, that is the daughter’s name, was going to be the first in her family to go to college. Shikha was thinking of Jamuna, small and thin, in her airless room with her sick husband, and the teenage girl trying to study, and she said, “Tell her to wear a mask when she comes. She can stay in the guest room. We will stay out of each other’s way for two weeks. She can study all day. I’ll give her food and she can eat it in her room.”

  Jamuna was crying at the other end.

  “You don’t like the idea? You will miss her too much.”

  “No, Didi,” Jamuna said.

  “Warn her, please, that I’m not as good a cook as her mother!”

  The girl arrived in the afternoon. Two days later, a little before lunch, a subinspector of police was at the door. Tall man, sunglasses, dark forearms. His badge said kuldeep rawat. He was wearing a mask, although it only covered his mouth and chin. There had been a complaint from the housing society. Tenant rules didn’t allow you to keep your domestic help as residents in your flat. It had been reported that Shikha was keeping her maid in her flat. The other disturbing matter that needed to be investigated, the inspector said, was that, in the middle of a pandemic, Shikha had brought into the building someone who was possibly infected by the virus. A police vehicle was waiting downstairs. Both Shikha and the girl would have to come to the police station to answer questions.

  “Why not ask me questions here? This teenage girl is not my maid; she is my guest. She is studying for her exams.”

  Mr. Sudharshan, the Canara Bank manager, had come out of his flat at the end of the short corridor and he was looking at Shikha rather sadly. At the other end, Asha Sud stepped out in her customary housedress. (“That name rings a bell,” I said to Shikha later. And she said, “Oh my God, that’s so Freudian or something.” I searched my memory but, fortunately, it wasn’t Freudian at all. Asha Sud’s name was familiar to me because Shikha had filmed her beating on a thali with a piece of metal at 5:00 p.m. screaming, “Go, Corona, Go.”) None of the neighbors expressed any concern or offered any support. Shikha suspected that there had been a discussion about her on one of the WhatsApp groups. This was a collective thing.

  Inside her apartment, Shikha asked Purnima to put on her mask. She called her friend Dushyant, a lawyer, and asked if the cops had any right to summon her to the police station in these circumstances. Dushyant said, “The short answer is yes. Where are they taking you?”

  “Sector Twenty.”

  “I’ll be there in half an hour,” Dushyant said.

  Shikha and Purnima, with Dushyant standing in the heat outside because he needed to smoke, were kept waiting at the police station. That is when she sent us her first message on WhatsApp. There was the scare about the virus. If there was some bizarre arrest made and they were put in detention, they would be risking getting infected from so many people squeezed into small spaces. But Vaani and I, sitting with our breakfast, looking out at the trees in our backyard, had another worry. A white police officer in Minneapolis kept his knee and weight on a Black man’s neck for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds, even after the man on the ground had lost consciousness and then stopped breathing. The dead man’s name was George Floyd. Despite the pandemic, the country had exploded in protests. Everyone, or maybe just the white people, was for the first time seeing the police for what they really were. The boot in the face.

  Vaani was drinking tea and eating granola (for some reason, always dry granola only, without milk or yogurt). While waiting for news from Shikha, I read out to Vaani a report from that morning about how monkeys in Meerut stole the coronavirus blood samples collected from patients there. I thought she would find that amusing, maybe even feel pride at the mischievous intelligence of the animals with whom she had been working for so long, but she just shook her head. “Stupid bureaucrats.”

  Then she broadened her theme. She wanted to address the stupidity of her colleagues. An op-ed in the Times had discussed an old social psychology experiment demonstrating the followi
ng: If the participants in the study had just washed their hands they had a more positive attitude toward immigration than did those who hadn’t. The op-ed, written by a psychologist at an Ivy League institution, argued that with all the hand washing we were currently engaged in, our moral outlook would take on a more tolerant, even a more generous, tone. A personal feeling of cleanliness leading to an attitude of altruism.

  Vaani imitated Piya’s childish, incredulous voice: “Really?”

  I was buoyed by her skepticism. Not because one shouldn’t trust empirical data but simply because the evidence of things being otherwise is there for all to see. A month earlier, in Palghar in Maharashtra, two monks and the driver of their car were beaten to death by villagers who suspected them of being thieves. The monks, one of them seventy years old, were on their way to a funeral. Due to restrictions on travel during the lockdown, the monks and their young driver had taken a rural road. The village mob, armed with axes, stones, and sticks, fell on the strangers because of WhatsApp rumors about thieves on the rampage during the pandemic. In one of the videos of the incident, the older monk is seen coming out of the police building with a policeman. The police are far outnumbered by the villagers. The monk, his head bleeding, pleads for his life—but is quickly dragged away.

  So, no, frequent hand washing isn’t likely to cure humanity’s ills.

  After three hours, Shikha was let go. She asked the policemen if the housing society would have filed their stupid complaint and the police would have decided to act on it if Purnima hadn’t been a poor tribal girl, an Adivasi. Shikha told Inspector Brij Bhushan Singh that Purnima was suspect in the eyes of her mostly upper-caste neighbors who couldn’t imagine an Adivasi staying in a home like Shikha’s except as domestic help. Sheer bigotry. Also, this was harassment, especially when a pandemic was raging. At which Inspector Brij Bhushan leered at her and asked, “Madam, why are you complaining? Have we done anything bad to you? Were you molested here? We gave you water to drink while you waited, did we not?”

  I asked Shikha on WhatsApp if she was going to address the press and provoke Vaani’s ex, Sikdar, into making outrageous statements on his show. She replied, “Shitdar is busy with other things. These days we have locusts coming from the West and Shitdar is on TV each evening screaming that the locusts have been trained as terrorists in Pakistan. Such a pest!”

  For her amusement, I then forwarded Shikha a tweet by an economist at Johns Hopkins. His tweet read: “My colleagues @JohnsHopkins have informed me that #CowUrine does not ward off the #Coronavirus. #India needs science as a guide.” Beneath the tweet was a photograph of bhakts in saffron, seated in the lotus position, marigold garlands around their necks, holding glasses of amber fluid.

  * * *

  —

  I HAVE ALWAYS been the one who keeps asking Shikha for news from India, anything to overcome this feeling of distance and alienation that begins to affect me. In recent days, it is Shikha’s brief messages, without any hellos and never with any personal news, that greet us when we wake up in the morning. Last week: “We were reading reports here that your doctors and nurses didn’t have enough protective masks. But it appears your police has everything it needs.”

  I resumed the routine I had followed at the villa, of reading pages from my journal and making further notes. A couple of days ago I asked Shikha about the sociology student-activist in Delhi who was denied bail while the ruling party politicos who incited rioting and arson by Hindu mobs have gone scot-free. In response, Shikha wrote to say that the student was pregnant, and maybe that should not be the part that is emphasized, but celebrities in India had tweeted their shock at the killing of a pregnant elephant but hadn’t found it important to protest on behalf of a pregnant activist. Then she sent a link on WhatsApp to a video of an assault on protesters by the LAPD. She first wrote, “We want to know why your cops are simply copying our cops!” and then, an hour later, “Does that country have a law that says the police will beat the shit out of its citizens after the 8 PM curfew? I wonder why our police, on the other hand, thinks of it as a round-the-clock job.”

  That night, I adopted an academic tone and asked Vaani what she could tell me about the hurried judgment that the men in uniform form about us. A smile crossed her face as if she were an astronomer who had, at last, spotted signs of water on a distant planet. I’m exaggerating and I know Vaani would be annoyed if she were reading this—and yet, the truth is she is never as passionate, as full of joy, even as much herself, as she is when discussing social psychology. I apologize to her in advance for these pages, of course. It is necessary for me to report that, as she ate the mattar paneer and rice I prepared for our dinner, when I asked Vaani whether her psychology research could shed any light on the sad fate of George Floyd and so many, many others, she said quite easily, “Have you heard the term Korsakoff syndrome?”

  I hadn’t, but a small flower of happiness blossomed in my heart. Imagine a flower of a delicate hue, a pale violet or a selfish blue. For the length of this discourse, I was to be the recipient of Vaani’s full and undivided attention. Korsakoff’s syndrome is a form of amnesia, she began. A person suffering from this condition is unable to retain any information or form new memories. Vaani was telling me about this because in a study involving patients with Korsakoff’s syndrome, psychologists found that those men and women showed the same pattern of likes and dislikes for people and objects as the other participants in this study, who were not suffering from this syndrome. So, for instance, all the participants were shown photographs of a “good guy” (as described in fictional biographical information) and a “bad guy.” Twenty days later, the Korsakoff’s patients had virtually no memory of the biographical information; nonetheless, nearly 80 percent of them liked the “good guy” in the photos better than the “bad guy.” Even in the absence of any conscious memories of the reasons, these patients suffering from chronic amnesia still had appropriate unconsciously generated positive or negative feelings about people and objects they had previously encountered.

  “You are saying the police at some deep unconscious level are choosing George Floyd as criminal and inhuman?”

  “I’m saying that racism, because of their upbringing, and the media, and sometimes even science, is part of the social unconscious of American citizens. Certainly, cops. They need not even be conscious of the series of choices their brain is making. The one who is Black is obviously the criminal. And a narrative is to be supplied, if not immediately available, to make that true.”

  “If psychology has located this cause, can it also suggest a cure?”

  I was halfway through my question when I knew that Vaani would point to another experiment.

  A psychologist at the University of Amsterdam, Reinout Wiers, had asked patients who wanted to stop drinking to come to his lab for two weeks. Weirs asked them to sit at a computer and use a lever to classify photographs. If they saw an alcohol-related photograph (objects like bottles or corkscrews, wineglasses, etc.) they were to push the lever, and if they saw something else (say, a beautiful landscape) they were to pull the lever. The pushing away of alcohol-related objects was intended to increase the avoidance motivation and, Vaani said, Wiers really succeeded in changing the unconscious attitudes of his patients from positive to negative.

  Was it as simple as that? I tried to imagine a psychologist asking cops to sit in rows in front of individual computers. The cops would see a certain face and be asked if the person was good or bad. This would be repeated across a range of faces and attitudes. Women in cocktail dresses, for instance. A white man carrying a briefcase. Black youth wearing hoodies. And then, at the end of the test, the psychologist would discuss the results, exposing the biases of the participants. The meeting would break for a simple, healthy lunch funded by the taxpayer. The psychologist would then ask the participants to be seated in front of the computers again. If you see a Black face, please pull the lever toward you.
If you see an alligator, push the lever away from you. This repeated exercise would alter in time the unconscious mechanism of the cops’ minds.

  But isn’t that what training should be about? One would think that anyone entering the police force undergoes tests and exercises that foreground popular biases or stereotyping and help officers navigate them. Instead, all the evidence we were seeing everywhere was so disturbing. I had doubts about the particular method that Vaani had described—to be honest, it appeared a bit silly—but I didn’t say anything. I helped her clear the dishes.

  * * *

  —

  IN INDIA, SHIKHA was safe, but the poorest were dying by the roadside and on train tracks. And here in America, while we had so far escaped unscathed, Black people were being killed not just by the virus but also by the police. I saw that my friends, especially if they were white, were putting up posts about having contributed to bail funds for the protesters who had been arrested. There was news about an Indian man in Washington, D.C., stylish, intellectual-looking, who had given shelter to scores of young protesters corralled by the police after the start of curfew. Not only had he done that, but he had the fine sense to deliver succinct lines to the press. “I’m not a hero, I opened a door.”

  I was quite ashamed, to be honest, for having done nothing. All I had done was take care of my child and my wife. My child who, by the way, seemed to be regressing to an earlier childhood, sucking on her thumb, wanting to be held through the night. For several days now, I hadn’t thought about Enemies of the People. All I had done was make journal entries about rumors and lies. (The problems that the pandemic had brought to the fore! From Ghaziabad, in Uttar Pradesh, came a story with the headline “Mother Sends Son to Buy Groceries, He Returns with Wife.” The mother had complained to the police, the police had complained to the press.) All my journal entries about the bad faith of the politicians and the beliefs and experiences of people during lockdown. How was that going to benefit anyone? Oh yes, the future historian looking for evidence not of what those in authority recorded but, instead, ordinary people with ordinary anxieties living through a pandemic, was going to find in my journals a record of a writer who had returned from a residency and exchanged WhatsApp messages with his sister-in-law, who, at least, was courageous enough and generous enough to court danger.