The Spanish flu killed around a 100 million people worldwide. Yet its visible impact on popular culture has been minimal. Psychologist James Wertsch, while researching how a society forms a collective memory, had said that, “The virus is just not an ideal character for an ideal narrative.” He went on to boldly predict, in mid-2020 as COVID-19 raged, that “In a matter of a few years, we might forget this.”
The changeless days of the lockdown fostered a kind of amnesia, resistant to the grip of memory. Basically, people forget. The brain forms event boundaries. Pandemic becomes endemic. We move on.
Journalist Raj Kamal Jha’s novel The Patient in Bed Number 12, set during the second wave, marks the beginning of the post-pandemic era, at least in letters. Nothing marks the end of a phenomenon than stories being written about it. Turning the pages of Jha’s latest is like finding a long-forgotten stash of face masks and hand sanitizers; here, schools are still in “hybrid mode”, those with “comorbidities” are at risk, and there is talk about a time that will come “after the curve has flattened”.
The story begins in the ICU ward of a corporate hospital. Jha evokes the lexical architecture of this anteroom to death, with its sepsis, saline drips, pleural effusions, and nasogastric tubing. The unnamed narrator, who is a professor of Sanskrit, is estranged from his only daughter, as she has married a Muslim man. At death’s doorstep, he now hopes for a reconciliation, and is desperately waiting for her.
Dose of life
The head nurse, Sister Shiny, tells him that “you won’t last long if you just lie here sleeping, staring at the ceiling or the floor”. And the only way is that every day, “you need a moment of a life being lived to the full” which is “your daily pill”. This is the conceit of the novel, and so, in “the city beyond the bridge… maybe some will get to see an old man from the hospital flying above, looking for a story”.
Despite the immobile narrator, we dip into other people’s lives through a series of interconnected chapters, whose connections are not apparent at first. The characters could be a security guard in the mall next door or a woman whose marriage is breaking down or an out-of-work photographer. There are also surreal flashes, for instance, the “raat ka karkhana” where child labourers toil to “fill glass jars with night which will be shipped across the world. The Prime Minister makes a cameo as “Our Great Doctor” who glides like a ghost every night through the ward, his beard is “a cloud leaving a trail of raindrops” on the floor to “rummage in their minds” and snip out thoughts that “pose a threat to the nation”.
Jha stuffs the proceedings with all the horrors of this age; there are references to the Akhlaq case, to love jihad, mob lynchings, fake news on WhatsApp. Unfortunately, such a sprawling attempt to capture “Modi’s India”, while well-intentioned, starves the narrative of oxygen.
The Patient in Bed Number 12
Raj Kamal Jha
Hamish Hamilton
₹599
The reviewer is a freelance journalist and graphic novelist.
