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Essay: Pandemonium and the pandemic!
In a follow-up to her earlier piece on being stranded during lockdown in Casablanca, Devanshi Mody writes about the Vande Bharat flight home, and the shock of return
I ventured into Morocco with my 72-year-old mother and got stranded for three months. “Stranded,” with its negative connotations, isn’t perhaps quite the right word. I elaborated on the exhilarating emotional and philosophical dimensions of confinement in Casablanca: The Covid Chronicles. The stringently-enforced lockdown regulations and the discipline with which they were upheld (well, mostly) there were exemplary. Casablanca was the “ideal” lockdown destination. But my mother clamoured for Mumbai. She wrote to the Prime Minister, and the Indian Embassy in Rabat contrived a repatriation flight.
Flashback
Embassy staff preside over the evacuation flight on 05 June, equipping passengers with hygiene kits, a surprisingly generous food pack and rigorous guidelines. With decorum 99 passengers board the Ethiopian Airlines Casablanca-Delhi charter.
Flight takes off. People sleep. The outsourced travel agency organising the charter, woefully unreliable, mentioned food wouldn’t be available on the seven hour flight from Casablanca to Addis Ababa (the refuelling stop). But suddenly, passengers are surprised out of slumber with breakfast. Chaos descends.
Breakfast unveils two chichi jars of foie gras (Paris-catered). People balk, open dabbas, goading, “Khalo, khalo, ghar ka banaiya hua hein,” as a sinuosity of abrasive odours trails food passed around and tucked into communally as if this were some tribal feast. Post-festivities, ablutions and what not are performed in lavatories, left inundated, reeking, grotesque.
Flight takes off from Addis Ababa. The very wonderful Mukesh Shamnani, the outsourced travel agency’s Business Director, ever obliging, had procured wine at my behest as we understood alcohol wouldn’t be served in-flight. Security prohibited the bottle on board. Lamentation over the wine is unnecessary as a drinks trolley rolls out laden with wine and beer. Obstreperous elements assail the liquor, smuggled vigorously into bags, before attacking in-flight service stations. An air hostess wails, “This flight has turned into an open bar!” Alcohol is siphoned away as the crew looks on aghast.
The embassy will castigate the travel agency for the spirits dispensed but the crew rightly says passengers paid for it. At a stupendous US$1910/person I should have expected champagne, that too Cristal Rosé. The agency would’ve done well to have arranged it -- then, I mightn’t have observed that this charter, the priciest Vande Bharat flight, and ridiculously so, is ferrying several agency staff. Is a certain travel agency cashing in on a “distress situation” to repatriate their staff on our tab?
The thought preoccupies me as there’s no in-flight entertainment. Ah, but who needs films when you have live action with Bollywood-style dialogue. One passenger hollers to another, “Woh laptopwallah apne aap ko bohot smart samajta hai. Dilli uttarne do, mai usko dekhlunga.” Laptopwallah retorts, “Tu kya mujhe dekhenga, uske pahele mai tujhe dekhlunga.” Not to be outdone another group, masks down, put up Indian flags trumpeting, “Bharat Mata ki Jai!” I am perplexed as to how such irresponsible, imbecilic behaviour, during a grim pandemic, passes for patriotism.
Flouting every embassy directive, as people gallop across isles without masks, amidst vociferations and rumbustious merrymaking, some boor insistently approaches my mother. The stewardess, alarmed, protests mum is a senior citizen, mustn’t be accosted. Mum, not thrilled, reminds Boor of social distancing. Boor remarks blithely, “Corona hua to kya hua? 15 din aspatal jayenge, phir ghar jayenge...”
This seems the pervasive attitude.
In bewilderment, exasperated, Ethiopian Airlines crew, whose emphatic announcements to follow Embassy instructions have been ignored, aver they have operated many charters for other nationalities but conduct aboard this flight carrying Indians is astonishing. Anarchy, it is suggested, is a peculiarly Indian phenomenon.
The shenanigans continue on our onward Delhi-Mumbai flight (the Government kindly sanctions my mother’s plea for home quarantine in Mumbai). If passengers bolted to board the domestic flight, on landing, despite stipulations that passengers be seated until invited to deplane, people stampede to disembark first, clog isles, obstinately disrespecting those of us ahead, blatantly pooh-poohing social-distancing. Until the air hostess REFUSES to open the door if passengers don’t return to their seats!
Home quarantine ends. We emerge for mum’s check-ups. And are confronted with the farce that’s Mumbai’s Covid combat. So accustomed are we to civilised, systematic Casablanca where we’d queue on demarcations 2m apart to enter any establishment (with restricted numbers permitted), we’re scandalised to now find ourselves flung out the way as hordes rush into the clinic and clump in a constricted space like bees clustered on a honey pot. We protest at the monumental disregard for social distancing: clinic staff dismiss my mother’s concerns as the ravings of a “too-hyper patient.”
At the supermarket, notices prescribe that people stand 2m apart, but the very security employed to ensure social distancing bunch customers together. One girl’s lips are almost sucking my shoulder. I recoil, demanding social-distancing. Girl immediately calls someone and reports, “Koi pagal social distancing ka lecture phadrahi hai.” Furious, I rejoin, “Stupid woman.” She counters, “Same to you” and proceeds with great glee to relay telephonically her feats of eloquence…
If in Casablanca my evening walks were into emptiness, in Nariman Point I bore through a human wall as thick as the Great Wall is long. People assemble in fat clods, confabulating, irritatingly taking selfies, masks down, spitting dangerously around, jumping onto the seaside parapet, although banned. Mumbai Police, asked if this is the Covid etiquette, snort, “Maza karne do.” Never mind the pandemic… Forget yoga, you learn breath control holding your breath as you traverse swards of maskless masses. Casablanca Police unsparingly fined locals out without authorisation/masks, which impressed. But Mumbai’s spectacular mismanagement awes. Crowds boil, mostly bearing masks, like some ornamentation, on chins, necks, head, around wrists whilst cops (oft maskless) are in deep congress amongst themselves, posing for photos or just twiddling their thumbs. Police snap out of apathy only to evacuate people, as per regulations, by 7 pm, I suspect so they can go home themselves. Only to have an elderly lady rock up announcing she will walk at 7 pm, she doesn’t give a toss about regulations!
As cases inflect, my mother exhorts against walking in Nariman Point. I hazard the land side. There, youngsters constellate around sandwich/bhel wallahs or stand around puffing fat billows of smoke ensnaring passers-by, throwing caution and Corona, literally, to the wind. Further, on a slim thoroughfare, a posse of teenagers blaze their designer wear, graze their posh poodles. They obstruct my way but don’t budge. I remind them that they are violating social-distancing requirements. They roll their eyes. I ask if they own this passage. They remain defiantly entrenched. That’s the “educated elite.”
Since the land side is no better I resume walks on the sea face where, as of now, people bear birthday cakes, conduct celebrations, lounge around and picnic so dirty plates come flying at you like frisbees in the boisterous monsoon winds. Some, no doubt, inspired by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, offer you Love in the Time of Corona as they stand steadfast in the middle of the walkway, lips tightly locked, as if petrified, in a Cupid-can-conquer-Covid moment (a very looooooooong one).
Less amusing is when I see a strapping big fellow on a pounding jog, breathing heavily, without a mask, of course, and I swerve exaggeratedly aside in reprobation - only to have him come up and exhale viciously on me. People feel it is their right not to wear a mask and you have no right to pointedly move away from them.
If in Casablanca red streaks on pavements indicated demarcations 2m apart to stand on when queuing for entry anywhere, the red smears on streets in Mumbai are of spat out paan. And this right after the government has strictly proscribed spitting.
On 30 June, the PM, with folded hands, entreats the nation, yet again, to strictly observe health regulations. Two hours later, in our building in Nariman Point (famous one where Ram Jethmalani lived), I encounter an infamous housemaid (one extracted from dubious environs, rammed past security and installed in the building) without a mask, yet again. When I impress the PM’s dicta and ask that she move two metres away from me, she charges wielding a heavy metallic contraption, growling, “Hato samnese!” The PM says he isn’t above the law. But maids seem a law unto themselves. Admirable though Modi’s “Made in India” initiative is little did I imagine it would mutate into a “Maid in India” mutiny. When residents wander about without masks why should maids be enjoined to wear masks, she asks. Why indeed? Besides, residents fudge dates of their offspring’s return from abroad when the brat is spotted prowling about breaching quarantine.
And so everyone transgresses, Mumbaikars slip out of town and circulate videos of their infractions, cases rise, lockdowns extend, the economy spirals.
As the situation plummets, if the PM wishes to extend the poor dole he might consider fining miscreants, as in Casablanca or lately in Australia, where certain states impose a fine of $200 on those out without masks. This way Modi could sustain a whole year’s grant.
Every morning I woke in Casablanca to flurried WhatsApps from India excoriating the government. As Minister of External Affairs, S Jaishankar told Rahul Gandhi, “Let us get the facts straight.” This country has a federal system. Individual states are responsible for implementing regulations. And individuals are responsible for respecting them.
I am not an Indian citizen. When we moved to India in 2011 I never received responses to my countless calls, mails, letters to the Home Ministry then. One mail to the PMO from Casablanca two months ago fetched lightening-quick responses. Something has changed at the Centre. But for real change individuals must change.
Swayed by the Government’s suave repatriation operation, I’d contemplated taking Indian citizenship. But the Indian citizen’s savage disdain for authority, discipline and others dismays.
Anarchy isn’t just a peculiarly Indian phenomenon: it’s a wilful lifestyle choice. So pandemonium and the pandemic will perpetuate. As a friend in Chennai quipped, “Everyone wants to partake of this happening Covid party in town!”
After reading physics, French and philosophy at Oxford, Devanshi Mody gadded about the globe until her parents wearied of funding her errancy. And so, she stumbled quite fortuitously into travel writing.
