COVID Karma

COVID 19 is a terrible pandemic that continues to cause immense suffering around the world.  While its origins may be in China, it respects no boundary, race, gender, age or culture. Its coming has been credited to humanity’s abuse of Mother Nature, prophesies of soothsayers, the Chinese palate, conspiracy theories, and God’s brahmastra against Trump’s tweets, amongst others. But I have a contrarian theory, which has to do with Karma.  Not just generic Karma of humanity getting its comeuppance, but very specific Karma targeted at the 50% of the 1%-- in other words, yours truly and millions of middle-class Indian men who still don’t know the difference between detergent and disinfectant.

A baby boy in India (and many other countries, to be fair) is widely considered as the greatest gift that God can give to the family.  It proves that the X chromosome is alive and well in the family’s DNA, enabling the father to strut around as the carrier of potent testosterone.  It elevates the daughter-in-law’s status in her bridal home, for a “job well done”. It gives serious bragging rights to the grandparents, who can now replace their daily “Good Morning” spam messages on Whatsapp with cute baby pics of their grandson sleeping, crying and sleeping some more, thereby ensuring that socially- deprived individuals have something to look forward to in this era of physical distancing. It ensures that the family name will not disappear in the mists of time. In this milieu is born an innocent child, unaware of the importance his birth signifies, of the privileges that will be his to enjoy, and of the status that he will get accustomed to, purely on the basis of fickle Fate’s favour. 

So as the baby boy grows, he realizes that he is indeed special.  Not for him to see the inner workings of the family’s fulcrum, also known as the kitchen.  He is conditioned to think of it as Hades’ own, a place of heat, smoke and fire, where sweaty bodies participate in a macabre ritual of cut, peel, boil and fry. The output is, of course, worthy of many Michelin stars, for his to partake first while the doting family members ensure that he is well fed.  For it is critical to ensure that the bearer and future spreader of the family gene is “healthy”, a wonderful euphemism meant to imply that Hippocrates is his personal physician, while happily failing to acknowledge that the child is in fact obese. Post prandial, it is not for him to help clear the table, for Grandma or Grandpa could fall seriously ill at the sight of such forced labour, unseen since the time of the Pharaohs. Nor for him to understand how clean clothes magically adorn his shelves daily. No, the sight of laundry being pulverized by a manic mother can send many an innocent straight to the shrink. And what of taking out the trash—it would be anathema to many an Indian parent to see their pride and joy’s hands tainted with banana peels and egg shells. To paraphrase Gurudev, “into that heaven of freedom does the male child awake”.

Given this epidemiology (a term we are all now intimately familiar with) of the Indian boy, please sympathise with his predicament in these troubled times.  Now a father himself, he has a family to take care of.  Which starts with ensuring that the floors are clean, hitherto the domain of the “bai”, whom the lady of the house would gladly choose to spend the rest of her life with had a choice to be made between servant and spouse. In her absence, it falls to he, who has never been taught the difference between a jhadu and a pocha, let alone ever having to wield either, to figure out which one is for wet cleaning and which for dry. And to make friends with the dishwasher and the washing machine, with their cute little lights inviting him to come closer, only to switch from green to red if the wrong button is pressed. And while he will never be trusted to be left alone in the kitchen, he is expected to be as Jeeves was for Bertie, available yet unseen, anticipating Mrs. Wooster’s needs and completing all tasks given without room for any complaint.  Is it not Karma, then, that is the cause of what’s happening these days? Is it not God’s way of ensuring that gender equality is not only a politically correct phrase, but something that parents must practice from the time their kids are born, where each one has the same share of household responsibilities irrespective of sex?  Of ensuring that physical labour is not something to be derided but deified, where cooking and cleaning are not treated as menial tasks, but acknowledged as the foundation of the family’s real fortune, their health? Of ensuring that the middle class understands how its privilege is thanks to many others, who work much harder for far less? And finally for the man of the house, to get up, pick up the mop and start cleaning the floors, with the awakening that his Karma has finally arrived, courtesy COVID.