Corona Karma: Our ‘vaccine’

Window Seat

The shiny white bus was standing in the Bengaluru depot, and I got in with my little strolley bag, avoiding the gleaming steel handles either side as if they had electric current in them. Masked-me glanced at the bus driver in a mask; I walked to my seat and stood, pushing the curtains away was a task.

It was close to 10.30 pm on the sleeper bus that would transport me overnight to a scenic town in Coorg. I opened the curtains, pushed the luggage and my shoes below the seat, sat back, poured some holy sanitiser from the handbag onto my palms and surveyed the scene around me. The bus did look sanitised, and just as they had said on the website while booking, the customary water bottle and the blanket weren’t given. Good, I had my own sheets, but the mask? Should I wear it even while I slept? Oh, but my hands could still touch the rexin on the wall in sleep. And what if I touch my face and nose after that?

The bus conductor called out from the other side of the curtain: “Yochane maad bedi (don’t worry),” he said, smiling as I put my face out, and he sat down on a seat opposite mine verifying my passenger details. “Really?” I smiled back at him, asking in Kannada, “What if corona is my co-passenger?”

Nagaraj, the tall, strapping man with distinct South Kanara features and accent, said without looking up from his phone, “Do you know that I have not taken a single day’s leave, apart from my weekly off, from the day Modi said lockdown? Buses were not running, but I have been on duty every day, going up and down, meeting people, eating at so many places, taking currency notes in this same hand from god-knows-who-all. I should have got corona-girona by now, no? Look madam, we coastal people have a saying, Baaradu bappadu, bandadhu tappadhu. (If it is not to come, it won’t. If it is to come, it won’t fail to.)”

It is a uniquely Indian theory -- Karma is worn as kavacha, armour, against the puny virus that continues to lash out worldwide, has pushed the mighty US into yet another lockdown, and continues to torment Italy and France with the next spike in cases. In the next three days, everywhere I went around the town of Madikeri and Bhagamandala, where the Cauvery takes her birth, the mask was, of course, there on people’s faces. So what if it wasn’t covering the mouth? We are Indians, we take it on the chin.

The resort I stayed in had all the protocols in place, too: no taking aarti of us guests on arrival, no red tika on our foreheads. Payments were all touch-free.

Auto-driver Sharief, who ferried us (oh, yes, the spouse was there, too) those three days with a lot of love and gentle chatter, carried his mask...safe in his pocket. Just in case the police show up and ask. “But they also understand that it’s okay, they act strict to show to their officers.” He then let me in on his own grand analysis of the Covid-19 saga. “Idhella government scamu. Even if it is only cold and cough, they shout corona, and push people into hospitals. You also see how chilly the weather is here? Did people not cough or have breathing trouble last year?”

Friends who know of my wanderings into rural and tier-2 India ask, is it safe to travel? Well, it is just as safe or unsafe as your head and heart tell you it is. This is not to say that we should be careless or in denial about the virus. It is to say, we have to decide how much of the fear of the virus we will allow to get in our way. To me, it is to begin ‘normalising’ our lives in little ways. It is to be okay with living with the worry of, “what if it happens?” To let go and deal with it when it happens.