Smell the coronavirus

Reports indicate that the loss of smell and taste is an early indicator of an COVID-19 infection.  We take our nose and tongue and everything else for granted, until we find out that there is something wrong.  Such is life!

The poem "Smell of things to come" now comes across as an eerie omen about the novel coronavirus.  It is a poem by Vijay Nambisan, my old childhood friend and school-mate.

In his memory, and with April being poetry month, here is Vijay's poem:

Smell of Things to Come

By Vijay Nambisan

A nose is a nose is a nose. Who knows
Those fibres of smell better than I? The scent
Of a book that grows on me, of a rose
Withered by fondling, of newsprint, of drink
Untasted but soon to be consumed, of course
I know them all and know too the gross
Odours of unwashed flesh, of dirt
Shed or retained by skin, and I know almost
The scent of love, because sometimes it flows
Between breast and breast, and my nose
Has nestled there.
     When blows the wind above
My senses, I have smelled the clouds grow
Against the sky. One scent remains to know,
The last breath I shall ever take as I.

Vijay's photo in the 1971 annual school magazine.

The bougainvillea of life and death

Those were the simpler days of childhood innocence.

I woke up every morning looking forward to going to school, and to spending time with my friends.  It was a twenty-minute walk to the school, before the years of riding the bicycle.

One school day, perhaps in the fifth standard it was, I was walking back home with my best friend back then.  We started arguing about the spelling of a word.  The name of a flower.  Bougainvillea.  The argument was about whether or not there was an "e" in the word.

Soon, we traded the few "bad words" we knew.  When that colorful language was not enough, our arms started swinging.

Before I knew it, my shirt pocket was ripped and I had a tear that was beyond repair.  My school uniform shirt.  We stopped our fight right then and there.  We knew we were in deep trouble with our parents.

The rest of the walk was in silence.  When we reached the roundtana, we went our separate ways.

I reached home and explained to my mother how I ended up with a huge hole in my school shirt.

And then I rushed to check with the dictionary.

He was correct.

Of course he was, as I had suspected was the case all through the argument and the fist-fight.

As if that fight was the cause, which it was not, we slowly drifted apart as we got older and became teenagers.  I visited with him a couple of times during our undergraduate years, before he withdrew from college in order to follow his true love of writing.

After a long gap, I met with him, and his parents, about six years ago.  We laughed about the infamous bougainvillea incident.

Today, there was an email from my brother:

Not sure if u heard the news
If not sorry to let u know

My old childhood friend, Vijay Nambisan, has died.

Vijay now joins two other wonderful childhood friends--Manibaba and Rangayya.

Vijay was remarakbly gifted and talented.  He was one of the very few that I have known in life who were exceptional in the analytical and the creative.  He was truly one of a kind.  I wish we hadn't drifted apart.  But that is what life is--we grow into our own personalities, and we live our own lives.

I picked up from my bookshelf the book that I got from him as a gift more than forty years ago.  His friendship, and the fight over the spelling of bougainvillea, were even better gifts of life.

More than a million affected by massive floods

Even as we are on the Hurricane Gustav watch, India's northern state of Bihar is reeling from massive floods. Well, Nepal too.
AFP reports that "More than 400,000 people have been evacuated in an operation involving local authorities, emergency workers and the army, disaster management ... Another 800,000 people have made their own way out and sought shelter in overcrowded relief centres set up by the government or in concrete buildings and temples, officials in Bihar said, but at least one million remain stranded."

Bihar has been a tragic story for decades. It is probably the least developed state, with the highest level of corruption and violence. A classmate of mine, Vijay Nambisan, wrote a book on Bihar a few years ago. A columnist quotes Vijay: Probably one of the best intros to Bihar could be the book by Vijay Nambisan, Bihar. "No one who has seen the Ganga plain after the monsoon and the annual flood, who has seen what it produces despite more than 2,000 years of intensive cultivation, can think that the state of Bihar is a poor one. The soil is incredibly fertile: Poke in a seed and it sprouts," writes the author.
Cut to the tale of Pushpa, thin, dark and short-statured who tells Vijay's wife, Kavery, "Why should I worry about that? I will be dead by 40."
Vijay comments: "It seemed incredible that a woman in her mid-20s, in the year of grace one thousand nine hundred ninety-seven, in a democratic republic which purports to guarantee the welfare of all its citizens, could make such a statement. The most horrible thing about it, of course, was that it was true."