Why I am not scared of quarantine   

                                               Or

 ‘Forty Days of Solitude’ with due apologies to Marquez

There was a time when I dreaded the novel ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ (for the uninitiated, it is an all time classic, set in magic realism, by the Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez).It was a sort of judging a book by its cover. Rather, by its title. I kept it at my arm’s length presuming it the soliloquy or stream-of-consciousness of an intellectual in isolation! I mean I was under the impression that it was a Camus-Kafka-Sartre stuff whereas it is not! Around a hundred pages through the gripping magnum opus by the brainy as well the legendary master story teller, it dawned on me what a moron I had been avoiding it all that while. Coming to the situation we are in today, most seem to have nurtured the same sort of misconceptions about quarantine (pronounced as kwo-ruhn-teen).

It is not about Corona (or Covid-19) alone. What terrorizes us is the triple whammy it comes with. It is the trident that hits you where it hurts most. First quarantine then the disease and finally the sham of a funeral we would hate to watch given a chance post our demise. Corona is the grandpa of all maladies! It follows the victim to the grave with the stigma of an indecent funeral or better, the lack of it, which the victim would never know anyway! 

Quarantine originated from the word quarantena meaning 40 days! The word, rooted in the 14^th-15^th century Venetian language (a native language spoken in and around Venice in Rome as the centre), means the period during which the ships were required to be kept at bay, literally, only where after the passengers and the crew were allowed to reach the shore. The 40 days social distancing was in vogue to thwart the Black Death, the plague. Plague was to the earth those days what Corona is today.

In India ever since the outbreak of Covid-19 we have been hearing about the infected escaping quarantine. In one incident, an infected man committed suicide fearing quarantine! That is why I referred to the novel as a starter. It is all about our perception. The more you perceive quarantine as an ordeal, a torture or a misery the more you suffer.

“Those things that hurt, instruct.”-Benjamin Franklin  

 One is quarantined when one’s movements are restricted to prevent the spreading of a disease one is inflicted with. Is it as simple as that? No! Take this. According to Lancet quarantine has its own psychological effects.

“Most reviewed studies (Review of the psychological impact of quarantine using three electronic databases, done by Lancet) reported negative psychological effects including post-traumatic stress symptoms, confusion, and anger. Stressors included longer quarantine duration, infection fears, frustration, boredom, inadequate supplies, inadequate information, financial loss, and stigma. Some researchers have suggested long-lasting effects. In situations where quarantine is deemed necessary, officials should quarantine individuals for no longer than required, provide clear rationale for quarantine and information about protocols, and ensure sufficient supplies are provided” https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30460-8/fulltext.  

Remember, we were all quarantined for over nine months even before we were born. In my case, I was the fourth one my mom shared her womb with. Only that we are all not aware of the agony or ecstasy of that period of quarantine!

I was one of the less privileged to undergo quarantine once again in around nine years following the first one. I was inflicted with Osteomyelitis ( ‘Word’, would you please stop underlining it? It is there in google, you dude!). A rare form of   infection, it somewhat corrodes a part of the infected bone. That’s what I remember doctors explaining it as those days. I was operated upon twice and hospitalized twice thanks to its recurrence. First it confronted me with an excruciating pain that turned into my companion for one month since our family physician was at a loss diagnosing its cause. Then the operation I braced up for so valiantly followed by a couple of days’ hospitalization in a special ward post surgery. That’s when I was partially immunized for life against any chronic pain. And realized how every bout of pain makes you feel as lonely!

Of course there was someone to share the ward with me every night without fail. Nevertheless being away from parents and family is certainly a first lesson in quarantine for a kid of nine years.

Not all know that some of the ever green classics the bard wrote were actually born in quarantine! William Shakespeare wrote ‘King Lear’, ‘Macbeth’ and ‘Antony & Cleopatra’ when in quarantine during the Bubonic Plague pandemic in London in 1606. To borrow from Dickens, ‘the worst of times’ was ‘the best of times’, at least for Shakespeare and so was for ‘all the world (that’s) a stage’ that benefitted from his magnum opuses. The dark period was indeed an enlightening one for him.   

And it was none other than Isaac Newton who followed suit the bard a few decades later in 1665. Newton in his twenties was a student at Cambridge University when it cancelled classes in a way to teach a lesson or two to the behemoth of a pandemic in its final avatar. Retreated into his native 60 miles away, he continued his studies there. Leave alone internet, with two more centuries to go for the invention of even radio, all that he had had as a learning app was his own grey matter! Probably he was seated beside a window peeping through which could gaze at that legendary apple tree in the yonder. It would have taken an apple to defy gravity to bang his head! Apple or no thus was born early calculus, theories in optics and above all the theory of gravity from one of the most fertile brains then in isolation! Maybe the historians, reluctant to give credit to the invisible evil that was plague, for the ground-breaking theories the genius came up with, chose apple instead as a soft and sweet source. And it worked! Today apple needs no other brand ambassador!

Since the entire world is screaming today in agony over the Covid-19, the iconic painting ‘The Scream’ by Edvard Munch gains some relevance.  In 1919, Edvard Much, the Norwegian paintist, was not just quarantined but contracted the very disease, the Spanish Flu pandemic, a horror that could rival Covid-19 of our times. Yet he not only did outlive the curse but also outshone in the adversary with his master strokes to make a selfie (self portrait) with the Spanish…err Spanish Flu!  

Thomas Nashe a contemporary of Shakespeare too took the bull by the horns to make the most of the situation. In 1592 as the bubonic plague took the better of the denizens’ lives in London, the famous playwright took to penning down how he endured the pandemic from his hideout in the countryside, in his play ‘Summer’s Last Will and Testament’.

The bubonic plague in 1348 offered Giovanni Boccaccio on a platter ample food for thought writers need to pour it out artfully! A couple of tragedies that is! The pandemic took toll of his father and stepmother. Heart-broken and hiding out in the countryside he wrote ‘Decameron’ a collection of novellas.

Think of Nelson Mandela. It was not even quarantine. Twenty seven years, the precious ones of his life were wasted away in solitary confinement. The only change if any was shifting from one prison to another, there times. And Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru, ‘Discovered’ India in 1946 in captivity at Ahmadnagar Fort in Maharashtra. As he takes you on a tour de force across India and its heritage, ancient history, philosophy, art and other treasures in his ‘Discovery of India’, you feel India (or better the world) would have gained much more from him, had he given up politics long ago and took to writing instead! Moreover, had it not been for imprisonment he never would have had the time to immerse himself in so vast a subject as this one. Adolf Hitler was no different. He began writing his autobiographical manifesto ‘Mein Kampf’ while he was imprisoned. So was the prodigal child, thirteen year old Anne Frank whose unfinished diary engraved her name as a literary luminary in the firmament of writers. Interestingly, it was to escape the clutches of brutal Nazi regime Hitler headed, that Anne Frank and her family was in isolation in the annex of her father’s office building in Holland and that’s when she resorted to writing her diary. Just like her diary her life too ended abruptly thanks to the ruthlessness of Nazis who ensured that the ‘one-diary-wonder’ of all times ended up in a concentration camp. Both Hitler and Anne were on the same page as writers in isolation yet poles apart in their orientations, ambitions, attitudes and values.     

 That being the case with others would a master story teller belonging to our times lag behind when imprisoned? For Jeffery Archer famed for his best sellers ‘Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less’, ‘Kane & Abel’ etc prison was a god-send from where he wrote ‘A Prison Diary’ that is a series of three books of his diaries. Incidentally he was sentenced to jail, convicted on charges of perjury and preventing the course of justice. All in all the trait of turning the tide and making the most of a situation seems to be more contagious than the pandemic for the fraternity of the geniuses and legends. 

Coming to quarantine again, several first person narratives are now available online as well as offline across all media. Most of them recount their experiences not as agonizing as we expect them to be. The account of a doctor and his wife during the current Covid 19 outbreak reported in Deccan Herald is a case point. https://www.deccanherald.com/city/top-bengaluru-stories/coronavirus-bengaluru-doctor-wife-laud-hospital-quarantine-experience-821020.html The experience narrated by Dr. Niteesh Bhardwaj and his wife Inchara sounds incredibly un-Indian to say the least! Everything cannot go as smoothly as in this case, with no hiccups, not in India at least. But then we also have such similar experiences recounted by Monami Biswas in Kolkata who was offered a laptop (which she declined anyway)    provided with newspapers, mobile and what else! (‘Vijaya Karnataka’, Kannada Daily, Bangalore Edition dated 04 April 2020). I don’t think the experience of India’s first Covid19 patient in Thrissur, Kerala would have been any different.

Quarantine is no incarceration for the sin of being close to a victim of some contagion or for that matter, contracting the contagion itself. It is necessary for a greater common good. For the safety of quarantined, his close family, inner circle and society as a whole. And for the worldly wise it may prove a blessing in disguise. I am aware that alluding quarantine to indulging in the mesmerizing mesh of a narrative like ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ is imagination overstretched. Yet, if I have succeeded in dispelling a shred of unfounded fear about quarantine in the minds of some of my readers with my humble attempt here, I would feel justified in doing such a comparison and feel content in doing justice to my role as a Covid Warrior, a small one at that, as a writer.