Ishrat Syed and Kalpana Swaminathan, known in literary circles for their collaborative writings under the name Kalpish Ratna, are both surgeons and writers. Their new book ‘Room 000: Narratives of the Bombay plague’ (Pan Macmillan publishers) takes readers to 1896, when Mumbai (then Bombay) was in the grip of bubonic plague.
What made the authors revisit a phase that’s been nearly forgotten? “That phase has never actually disappeared; we have forgotten it. Kalpana and I have been writing for about 30 years now and we’ve always tried to cover this lacuna in our understanding of ourselves. Because we are surgeons, we bring in unique perspectives from the medical field,” says Syed, who was in Hyderabad to launch his book at Akshara.
Syed remembers when he first saw a plaque, in the pharmacology department of Grand Medical College, commemorating Waldemar Haffkine who developed the first vaccine against bubonic plague. The plaque mentions that he prepared the vaccine that saved so many lives, in room no. 000. Syed was 17, a medical student, when he first saw that plaque. “I’ve always wanted to be a surgeon. But I was also a voracious reader and somewhere, there was a thought that ‘room no.000’ would make for a title of a book,” he recalls.
Years later, he remembered the plaque and more particularly, room no.000, while Kalpana, he says, remembered ‘mankind’ being misspelt as ‘manekind’ on the plaque, white a whitener erasing the ‘e’. “The vaccine saved many lives of us, Indians, but we didn’t feel the need to change the spelling on that plaque,” he says.
Both Syed and Kalpana Swaminathan felt the bubonic plague chapter in Bombay’s history could hold lessons for present and future. “If only we could look at the lessons from that phase, we would be better equipped to handle epidemics today. We are standing at the threshold of newer epidemic diseases but as clueless as people back then,” he says. The 1890s, in which the book is set, was the pre-antibiotic era. “People didn’t have antibiotics to tide them over a temporary crisis or temporarily over a crisis. Now, we feel we can control epidemics with antibiotics but the microbes strike back with virulent, drug-resistance strains. People in the 1890s didn’t have medicines, but the doctors then made copious notes,” he says.
Syed and Kalpana dug through notes pertaining to that era for four years. The research took them to different places where they pored over thousands of pages — state archives, National Archives of India in Delhi, Indian Plague Commission reports, Wellcome library in London, Hebrew library in Jerusalem and the Center for Jewish History in New York. What they read enlightened them. Syed isn’t sure if historians of future would learn much from medical records of today. Doctors do keep case histories, we argue. Syed explains, “Most records now are pro-forma, are not detailed enough. Every age has its peculiar triumphs and problems. We went through detailed accounts of the bubonic plague in Bombay.” The intention of writing this book, says Syed, is more than chronicling a chapter of history. There are lessons to learn from it.
Bombay has been the muse for the authors, even in their previous works like ‘Uncertain Life and Sure Death’, for instance.
“The city is a microcosm that represents India and human conditions. The problems of urbanisation that we see here hold true for many other cities in India and in the world. Overcrowding, indiscriminate construction, extreme poverty, the affluent class and vanishing middleclass can be found in other urban spaces too,” he says.
Through the research for the book, the authors found how Indian doctors were rarely remembered. “It’s a great injustice because these doctors went and met patients, bicycled before sunrise to go and collect samples. Doctors then couldn’t afford motorcars. In fact, a paragraph in this book tells how Dr. Acacio Viegas (who first detected the bubonic plague in 1896) felt he was riding on air, thanks to the new rubber tubes in the cycle. In British era, Indian doctors were mostly assistants to British doctors. If Indian doctors researched and found something, it had to be validated by the British,” he says.
The book, in a way, presents the social history of the time. “We can’t pigeonhole art, science or medicine. Everything is interlinked.” ‘Room 000’ took years to research and write, but in the meantime, Syed and Kalpana found other interesting stories that needed to be told. ‘Quarantine Papers’, a fictional work they authored two years ago, was also set in the same period as ‘Room 000’. “The ‘Quarantine Papers’ begins on 6 December, 1992, and has a parallel narrative of a story that occurred 100 years ago during the plague epidemic. Present-day narrative was of the plague of communalism as against the medical emergency faced 100 years ago,” says Syed.
Syed divides his time between US and Mumbai while Kalpana is in Mumbai. Ask him how they collaborate in writing, often considered a lonely journey, and he quips, “It is lonely; but we could be lonely together.” He describes how Kalpana and he, friends since medical college days, are in sync with each other’s thoughts. “There are times when she begins a sentence and I complete it and vice versa.”
