It is some seven months since the pandemic began to lock up my life in unforeseen ways. One was living in a lockdown to begin with, and in the following months, one learnt to live with a physical fear of pathogens, with a social void because of the physical absence of friends, with the steady sound of ambulance sirens and statistics about death and with the news of livelihoods and lives being lost on a scale unprecedented in independent India.
It is not that I had not heard of a pandemic before 2020 but till now, my awareness of it had been largely academic. As someone interested in questions of history and memory, I knew about the paradox of the last pandemic, the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed some 50 million people but was a disease event that came to be described by medical historians as “forgotten” because it did not become part of our conscious culture until its centenary two years ago.
In fact, that pandemic was usually seen as part of a larger story, with the problems that were a consequence of it remaining the focus of attention, rather than the deadly influenza itself.
That is certainly true about how the flu...
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