Gifts From India

Our friend Jackie was staying with her mother in the city of her youth in Kolkata, India when the pandemic hit. She’s been a teacher and department chair at a university in Minnesota for many years and was on sabbatical doing research in her home country. There simply was no way to get back.

Our conversations with her every Sunday morning via WhatsApp became another of the rituals we assigned personal meaning to that helped us through the pandemic. Inventing rituals that had personal meaning became so important to us during that time because the established public rituals required by religion and civics were such abject failures. In both India and the United States, religious and political leaders goaded the public to risk killing themselves and others in order to appear “normal.” Our weekly conversations allowed us all to maintain contact with other sane people.

Jackie continued to teach online for the university, conducting her classes in the wee hours of Kolkata time. She was able to provide an extra layer of caring and protection for her elderly mother. As the vaccines became available early in 2021, India exploded with Covid-19 thanks to religious festivals and political campaigns that turned into super-spreader events. Even attempting to get vaccinated was extremely risky because it involved standing in long lines at a hospital with hundreds of people.

I have no doubt that had Trump been reelected the United States would have been just like India. Trump and the prime minister of India, Narendra Modi, are two peas in a pod and Trump would have withheld vaccine from “Democrat states” just like Modi doled it out to his preferred groups and withheld it from others.

A family friend was able to get Jackie’s mother vaccinated in a safe setting but Jackie was not able to since she is now a U.S. citizen and lacked a form she needed. Her safety was on our minds constantly.

As the Delta variant burned hotter across the globe during the summer of 2021, it looked less and less likely that we would see her any time soon. Travel was still restricted from India for non-citizens and who knew how long it would be before it closed altogether?

Then on August 5th, we got a message from her that she had booked a flight and was coming the next week. Not vaccinated.

We held our breath.

The Air India flight crew from Kolkata to Mumbai inspired confidence and all passengers were required to wear masks and face shields. Jackie brought seven different changes of masks that she would wear throughout the 27 hours of flight time to Minnesota.

We picked her up at the Minneapolis airport at 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, August 14th. We all wore masks on the car ride back to her house where she showered immediately and then got her first round of vaccine in the early afternoon. A tear welled up in me as she walked back to get the jab. It had been a long haul but it ended in success.

The anti-mask, anti-vaccine people are complete idiots. They’ve made a false idol out of Infantile Selfishness and profess that to be their One True God.

Jackie actually knew Mother Teresa in Kolkata in the 1980s. Mother Teresa’s God is very different than Donald Trump’s.

As a gift, Jackie brought us a masala dabba for storing spices and a bamboo mortar and pestle for grinding them. Our greatest gift was knowing that she was going to be safe.