Coronavirus diaries- Part I

It's been a long time since I've written, but living through what may well be the defining months of our time, I wanted to add my experiences and thoughts to the millions that are being expressed on multiple platforms.
In late January, when the first coronavirus news came out, and then in early February, going into Chinese New Year, no one thought it would come to this. There may be some small disruptions, but nothing that would stop the spinning of the world.
And then China put everyone in Hubei in lockdown; then everyone else across China, the first cases outside of China started to crop up, and I remarked that it would probably get worse before it got better, but even then, I did not guess how bad it would become.
My remark came from the supply chain impacts we were seeing - and then it was mostly supply side, with factories unable to come back after CNY. I didn't imagine a demand side disruption of this magnitude.
My Chinese colleagues were trying to ship masks to China, and they were getting held by customs.
I worried about my parents - traveling from India to UAE - travel spread accounted for most of the spread across other parts of the world at that time. I worried about my sister, traveling back to India from the UAE - she would go to visit my grandmother, and even that looked risky. But we were also looking at cheap flights to Asia, and wow! Bangkok looks so cheap!
Events moved fast. First the lockdown in Italy - Milan, the Italian tourists in Agra... it was strange, unbelievable that Italy, then France, Spain, Germany, should all be going into lockdown, and the US was not affected.
Only a few cases here, and of course, the ship parked off the coast of California, waiting to be allowed into port, only Trump didn't want the number of cases to increase (!)
And the cases did seem low - given the amount of travel from just the Bay Area to China and Europe, nothing to say of everywhere else. The numbers had to be artificially low - due to limited testing - everyone knew that. A couple of cases in Seattle, in Los Angeles... no epidemic yet. Markets were still high.
And then the crash as the sudden realization sprung everywhere all at once that this was not going away - there was a rate cut, which seemed to briefly make things better, before turning entirely ineffectual, and then days and days of red bleeding all over the market. Seems like a good time to buy. Except two things - 1) Just when I place a limit order, the markets jump back up 2) I place an order and it goes through, and then the market sinks again.
Things started shutting down everywhere. Microsoft was one of the first companies to recommend working from home. Bay Area companies were slower to respond. Apple was one of the last. Taking it one week at a time, and then they realized that this wasn't going away soon, and extended it to Apr 7th. Will it end by Apr 7th? No one knows. It seems like we may be in this for the long haul.

Saying goodbye to my grandfather.

This has not been a happy New Year. It started with my grandfather’s death on the 3^rd, a poor omen to begin the year. As I grow older (and I don’t think I’m all that old), the tragedies seem to pile up on me.

But my grandfather was old when he passed. He had been sick, neither his mind, nor his body were what they were. He may well be in a better place. It is those of us who are left behind who are bereft.

I remember him declaiming Shakespeare when I was 6 or 7…

“Let me have men about me that are fat.

Sleek headed men such as sleep of nights

Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look

Such men are dangerous.”

His massive “Complete Works of Shakespeare” was a book like a rock. Covered in brown paper, and printed in tiny characters that would ruin your eyes. I used to pour over it in the small bedroom in my grandparents’ house, when I was supposed to be “studying”.

There was one year that my grandmother had gone to visit my aunt in the US. My grandfather was left to fend for himself. I had always imagined him as an old-fashioned man, one who had never entered the kitchen, but there he was, making arachu vitta payasam – an enormous amount of work and other, complicated dishes! My grandmother complains that he got more credit for his occasional cooking than she did for years of excellent dishes.

We travelled to Payalur with Paata. While he was able, every year, he would attend the festival at the temple there. I remember the kolam, the walk to the hills, the narrow street with old fashioned houses, the thinnai, the dark rooms upstairs filled with strange treasures like strings or thermacol balls

I remember also, being older, and him taking my mother and I to visit his sister Chaalam atthai. It was a little cottage, that seemed to be set in the woods. An old kitchen, no mixie, my grandfather ground the coconut with a stone, by hand, to make an excellent payasam.

I remember that he loved mangoes, he would buy enormous numbers at the market during mango season, cut them, eat them and pronounce his verdict. We would all fight over the andi – the seed of the mango, to which the best part of the pulp was stuck, and which was the messiest to eat.

He was a religious man- on Tuesdays he would not speak until noon, save to do his prayers and not eat salt all day. Sometimes he would desparately want to say something, and he would have to make himself understood with gestures and “Mmm…mmm’s” and finally resort to writing. He believed in Hanuman. When I was in Cambodia last year, I was so excited to see so many Hanuman murals and statues, I brought a t-shirt home for him. I didn’t know he would never even be able to wear it.

I’ve met his friends, those he knew from childhood to old age, Kunjalam maama with the dogs, who lived just a few streets away, Appai maama… most of them are gone now.

The loss of memory, of knowing who he was, who we were, seemed to creep up on him slowly, each time I saw him, a little more lost, of mind and body.

A few years ago he would walk out into the hall, listen interestedly to all the news, and demand an extra cup of tea to drink with us (though Ammai had already given him one earlier); a year and a half ago he would sit up in bed, and while he often mistook one person for another, he was still very much there.

I saw him only a month ago. I’m glad I went. He was frail. He gave me a hug, and though I’m not sure he knew who I was, I’m glad to have had those last moments with him. 

The Reamker- Different perspectives of a familiar story

Thailand and Cambodia, in every temple – even the Buddhist ones, you’ll see pictures of the Reamker (Ramakien in Thai) – the South- East Asian version of the Ramayana. In Cambodian, and Thai classical dance (khon), puppet shows, paintings, in ruined cities and in gold leaf covered temples, there are references to the story. It is in fact, the national epic of Thailand.

The story has less of a religious tone. While Rama is still acknowledged as an avatar of Vishnu, the character that leaps out, captivating your attention is Hanuman. Unmistakable in his mask, only men are allowed to play the him. He’s not Hanuman as we in India know him -  celibate and pious – this Hanuman is a charmer, a romancer, with three wives, and a number of girlfriends.

A favorite story – a dance that I saw performed in both Cambodia and Thailand was of Hanuman and the mermaid. The merpeople carry away the stones for the bridge to Lanka. Hanuman investigates, and finds a beautiful mermaid – Suvarnamaccha – in some stories, actually Ravana’s daughter. He courts her and wins her, and she agrees not to destroy the bridge, and so the army moves on to Lanka.

Like the monkeys of Thailand, Hanuman is everywhere, even where we would not expect to see him; at Suvarnabhumi airport, a large statue, where he’s on the side of the devas, churning the ocean of milk, and the same scene again, at Angkor Wat, in a huge carved mural, not to be missed, right at the back of the temple.

Back in San Fransisco, there is an exhibition in the Asian Art Museum on the Ramayana and its influence across Asia. After another Cambodian dance performance there, I asked the dancer why the story of Hanuman and the mermaid was so popular. “Its how the people make the story their own” she said. The myth, having travelled across the world, has touched people through the centuries, and itself is changed in its turn.

Remembering my Grandmother

It’s been two weeks since my grandmother passed away now, and I’m sitting writing this in the airport.  I learnt about it, when my mother messaged me over Whatsapp, as I was pulling into the parking lot at work. The first thing I tried to do was to call up my parents. My dad was too choked up to talk. And then I cried, briefly, quickly; I had a call I had set up for 9:30 AM that it was too late to cancel. I pulled myself together and took it. I kept my voice low, and I don’t think anyone on the call realized. And then, I sat at my desk, trying to cry quietly, until my manager came and stopped shocked. I cried to her, and then I got back to work, and every hour, every so often, I would find tears rising to my eyes again and again. But the body and mind are resilient, and there’s nothing like burying yourself in work for getting over grief, and the first time I laughed after the news, at a joke that someone told at work, I was shocked; the sound seemed too loud to my ears. I’ve laughed many times since then, with my friends, with my cousins, but sometimes, as I think of her, when someone talks about her, as I write this now, my throat tightens up, and my eyes grow hot.

I guess I didn’t actually believe that she would die so soon. It wasn’t that I thought she was particularly strong – she was delicate and fragile, the volume of her seemed to be made more of the sari she was wearing than flesh and blood. But I guess I thought she wouldn’t die simply because she was mine- my grandmother, and surely, she couldn’t be taken away so quickly, before I saw her one more time, before I was ready to let go. But the truth is, I was never going to be ready to say good-bye. But her death has made the pillars of my world seem a little more brittle, and I look my remaining grandparents with just a little fear, and hold on just a little tighter than I would have a year ago.  The distance between the US and India, bridged so easily by flights, phones and email, suddenly seemed interminable.

She was, as I said, a small person. She lived simply. Her affection was shown in small gestures, nothing effusive; the small box of paal khoa  pressed into my hand as I was leaving; coming home to freshly made fried diamond pakodams.

                                                                                                                          

When I was young, she lived in my uncle’s house. I visited weekly, on Saturday, and she would attempt to teach me the Veena. I was an indifferent student, but she tried her best. She lived in our house in first in Tiruvanmiyur and then, in Alwarpet for many years, and the image of her every morning, playing the Veena in the swami room, humming along, even as her fingers grew stiff, Nuggy watching from the doorway (he wasn’t allowed to enter), sticks with me.

She was very fond of Nuggy, of all my uncle’s dogs, and of animals in general. She’d feed the squirrels and the birds with the leftovers every day. She was often the one to feed Nuggy too, tearing up the chappatti’s into small bits, rolling the rice into little balls, because he was such a spoilt brat of a dog. And if he rebelled, she’d call one of us, to coax him into eating.

When my sister was young, I remember her reading the Narnia books out to her. It didn’t occur to me until many years later, that she too might like reading for its own sake (just like I did), when I saw her reading Jane Austen. Generations, its seems, are not really that far apart.

She had other hobbies as well, crochet, cross-stitch. I don’t know if anything remains in the house of any of the pieces that she did.

 Most of my life, she was active, healthy. She would walk (and sometimes I would go with her, from our house to the bus stand. She’d walk from my uncle’s house to her sister’s place. It was only when she visited me in the US, some years ago, that I realized that age had slowly caught up with her.

We’d gone to Washington D.C. for July 4^th, and walked down to the park to watch the fireworks. She’d leaned on my arm all the way there and back, and for the first time, I realized that age was catching up to her. I wish I’d been a better host that time. I remember not being able to take much time off, searching frantically for some misplaced souvenir, being short and snappish, when we came back from Niagara. The trinket didn’t really matter at all. I wish I’d realized that then.

She and her sister were very close, all the way through to the end. When I was young, I would visit Anamma’s house every weekend; see her and maama; they would reminisce for a while before Appa came. I would pluck pink flowers from the vine in the garden. Kumar Maama would give me stamps. Anamma would give me kalkand when we left. When Anamma grew old, when she could barely recognize anyone else, she always still knew her sister.

Going back for the ceremonies, there is a small absence (she was not a large person), though of course, thoughts of her are more present than ever before. Still, it is jarring as I consciously realize, that I will never again ask where she is (when I go to see her), how she is (over the phone). There is really nothing that I would have said that needed to be said, if I saw her again. Still, I wish I had seen her one more time, spoken to her once more. But once more would never be enough. It will have to be enough.