Borrowing from Charles Dickens, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…” All this may be said of our present times some day from hence. Currently, all abstract attention of most of us is engaged in predicting the possible trajectory of the ongoing pandemic. However, once upon a time, my first date with a disease scare was of a different description and related to the visit of a medical team to our school. Vaccination against smallpox it was to be.
Had my father, the school principal, told me in advance about this activity, it would have definitely resulted in poor attendance in the school. Many students had tried to run away and were dragged back. Painful anticipation had found some of them wet their pajamas. In his zeal to lead by example, my father goaded me to be the first volunteer to get the jab. It was painful, and a little traumatic too! Back home. mother served halwa for a reward. Another time a health team had arrived to inject us against tuberculosis.
We had heard of the 14 dreaded injections for a dog bite, but not of vaccines for polio and so on. We were aware of a disease leading to a shrivelled leg; pockmarked faces were not an uncommon sight and spoke of a date with smallpox. Phrases like universal immunisation happened much later. Disease and life just kept on happening then.
A hard-working “have-not” of our village who was engaged as a farm help by a landlord started losing weight and one day when he coughed up blood, he was put in a separate hut near the animal shed with only meals to make for his recovery to normal health. It never happened. I do remember how my father-in-law sometimes spoke of his elder sister who in her isolation was not allowed to be seen by him for fear of catching the contagion. Much later, I learnt about what legendary writers like Jane Austin called “consumption” and of which poet Shelley wrote of as “colour of death”. Many years ago, I myself swallowed medicines for six months on an empty stomach and thanked my stars for the better times I lived in.
Our village was unjust and unfair to a man who was made to live on the fringe and not allowed to enter the village and mainstream life because he was suffering from a disease that in medical school I studied as leprosy.
Recently, when a resident doctor at our medical school turned negative for COVID-19, he received a red carpet welcome. On the first day of his isolation, I had spoken to him, given a pep talk and had painted a very rosy picture. He had agreed but his tone had betrayed him. The next 10 days, he lived alone in the dark of the nights with no one for company, except some random lizard, perhaps.
A great humane act I am privy to was the voluntary turning up of a young lady, a nursing officer, as also of a technician to assist in the colonoscopy of a COVID-19 positive patient, though not rostered to be on duty that day. Pure sacrifice and commitment!
Having lived the ordeal of taking medicines even before bed tea for six months, I ponder about the depredations of the present pandemic and then recall many a joke forwarded on social media. Most of such jokes are just crass humour, but these never fail to divert our attention from the intimidating figures that roll out by the hour in the media. It is hoped that a vaccine may soon be available, when I plan to arrange the first doses for my nonagenarian parents who had once helped me with my first vaccination.
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