The Un- delectable Chutney

For some time I haven’t been able to catch up on my beauty sleep. And not because my husband is having an affair or my children have lost their appetite or my dog is shedding too much hair. It is because of a totally novel reason. It seems that the world has suddenly unearthed a whole new concept of a ‘weapon of mass destruction’. And if rumours are to be believed, this time it is not just a case of crying wolf.

According to the grapevine, this silent killer, which surfaced from a neighbouring country, has been on the road for the past six months. Some swear it could be the outcome of their biological programme gone awry. And some would even like to believe that it is Nature’s own way of population control. The red alert in our country sounded, when ‘masks’ and ‘quarantines’ and ‘viruses’ finally replaced redundant words like ‘Bush’ and ‘Saddam’ and ‘War’.

When I first read about ‘SARS’, I thought it was just an acronym for a ‘South Asian Republic something’. Apparently it was not! I was severely reprimanded by many for being so acutely ignorant of a respiratory syndrome that was bent upon suffocating the lungs of the earth.

Unlike the domineering serial killer called ‘Saas something something’, that invades the Indian homes every night at ten-thirty, poised with a mental knife, challenging the intelligence of the bored and the beautiful, this ‘SARS’, pronounced with a gentle rolling of the tongue, is a different form of a slayer. You do not have to be a doctor to diagnose its symptoms. It is a chutney- of the usual and the familiar. A little of the flu, a pinch of pneumonia and a dash of the common cold, all packed into one human blender. The cause may sound simple but the consequence is not. In fact it can be considered deadly since it is bound to cause alarm, if and when it decides to go rife.

The good news however is that every one who has been infected had been done so abroad. Therefore, if you are willing to remain within the confines of your own desi realm, your chances are just about nil. The bad news is that ‘abroad’ and ‘flights’ are no longer foreign words. And as long as curious tourists and exotic NRI’s keep pouring in, the apprehensions and misapprehensions of many, will continue to spread like wildfire. The nightmare continues when we wake up to the fact of how limited our awareness to deal with any form of malady is. Not to mention the relatively poor infrastructure of our medical department.

Then again there is good news. It seems that since no deaths have been reported in India, it is assumed that the virus that has travelled here could be of a less virulent strain. Or it could be that a disease that wrecks mayhem in one part of the world may not be a cause for alarm in another geographical location. Either that or the grim and amusing fact that right since birth, we are bared to such a glut of germs and bacteria that our sturdy immune system is simply fighting off the virus effortlessly. Inadvertently (and luckily), we Indians are already quite well equipped with AIDS- an Acquired Inbuilt Defense System of our own.

To further continue with the bad news. A few cases have been reported about officials being threatened, emotionally blackmailed or bribed into letting loose those who were tested positive. Considering the IQ of the Indians, which by the way is relatively high compared to others, it surprises me how their intelligence does not allow them any room for speculation. And since the EQ is measured as even higher, to emotionally squirm their way out from any form of confinement will not prove a difficult task either. But considering the BQ level- something that I call the ‘Bribable Quotient’ and that which is rated as the highest in our native brains, I shudder to even think of the possible hands being greased to try and ‘unquarantine’ the diseased.

As a rule Man is a social animal. He hates solitary confinement. And if God forbid, the epidemic ever breaks out, this deadly chutney of diseases, which has the power to cause havoc like nothing before, would then leave everyone with a very bitter taste in the mouth. And it wont be long before every human will walk around like an alien in his own territory- with a mask on his face, touching nothing, smelling nothing and living on nothing but tenterhooks.

In any case, our food habits (which are fairly okay), local perceptions (not much, really), awareness levels (zilch), immunity (plenty) and the local drugs (the Siddha and Ayurveda), all play a vital role in warding off this killer disease.

So get ready to fend off this deadly chutney with another concoction of your own- preferably a grandma’s recipe of all the Indian spices and exotic herbs you can think of. Perhaps an amalgam of tulsi, ginger and honey or a mixture of neem, garlic and methi, or a fusion of haldi, laung and misri, or any and everything that you can lay your hand on. But more than anything else, please don’t post an invisible ‘Beware’ sign on every sneeze, every cough and every gasp that you come across. It’s enough to just ‘Be Aware’.

Nargis Natarajan.