Missing Grandma: What can’t be cured must be endured  

Grandma would usually assess a problem we took to her, give it a serious thought and give us an excellent practical solution nine times out of ten! But we truly dreaded that one time out of ten she would shake her head slightly, take a deep breath, then let out a sigh and say, “What can’t be cured must be endured!” She must’ve been just about 10 years old, in a small, happy village in District Kapurthala of undivided Punjab, when the dreaded Spanish Flu of 1918-19 hit our country.

Her village and her district had contributed numerous young men to the British Army fighting World War I in the trenches of Europe. Many of these young men laid down their lives in alien lands and never returned. The stoic Punjabis must’ve accepted these deaths in a matterof-fact manner. Soldiers do perish in battles and wars. And more young men must’ve queued up outside Recruiting Offices in Amritsar and Lahore to join the Army and contribute their might to the ‘British War Effort’.

But Spanish Flu? That must’ve shaken up the country, its citizens and even the cheerful stoic Punjabis. Ten-year old Grandma must’ve had her ears full of discussions among the adults in her house about this firangi virus brought by returning soldiers from their trenches across the seven seas in Europe. It must’ve been her first real exposure to the philosophical ‘What can’t be cured must be endured!” After all, the country lost more than 18 million to this treacherous virus over two years!

Grandma also was witness to continuing deaths due to bubonic plague that came to India from China in 1896 but stuttered on for many years. She grew older, got married to Grandpa- a railway official, left her village in Kapurthala and travelled with him all over Sind, raising their children and running the home in her efficient and practical manner. She saw the Second World War and yet another spate of deaths of Indian Jawans of British Army.

What affected her even more deeply was the partition of India. She then lived in ‘railway quarters’ at Sukker Railway Station in Sind, and was busy raising her four young children. Stories of ‘Taqseem’ or ‘Division’, and its aftermath of an orgy of violence and unprecedented bloodshed, brutal deaths of dear friends and close relatives, both Hindus-Sikhs and Muslims, would reach her regularly as hers was a ‘Railway Family’ living close to a Railway Station.

She always learnt her lessons well, from these sad stories of death and devastation. She was amazingly disciplined and thorough when it came to maintaining hygiene of her house and kitchen, and the sanitation of her Mohalla, her Colony or her village. She could take on even people her senior, no gender spared, when it came to enforcing common sense measures, to maintain cleanliness and prevent disease.

An orthodox Brahmin woman- strictly vegetarian and obsessed with cleanliness, she wouldn’t touch food or water till she had bathed and prayed at the local temple. She would not allow shoes anywhere near her kitchen, and would not serve us our meals till we had washed our hands and feet to her complete satisfaction, and then seated ourselves on the short wooden stools just outside her kitchen.

And she would give us small lectures on the importance of hygiene in preventing ‘germs’ from spreading disease. I remember how she once screamed at my aunt when she found her blowing into the milk pot before pouring milk into cups. ‘Germs’ was her favorite word.

She would tell us how Spanish Flu spared no onenot the Colonel nor Jawan, not the rich nor the poor, not the Lord nor the servant, not the jailor nor his prisoners, and not the Indians nor the fairskinned Europeans.

She lived and embellished 89 summers with her inimitable wisdom. And enforced her kind of discipline on all around her, sternly and firmly. She taught us how to make friends and would personally welcome and host them, irrespective whether they were Hindu, Muslim, Sikh or any other religion. And they all had to comply with her diktats on personal hygiene as well as her rules governing entry into her house. If they obeyed, she would happily sing with them and even dance with them. If they tried to cut corners or showed any rebellion, she was equally capable of turning them out of the house and mentioning in dispatches their misdemeanours to their parents!

How I wish Grandma was around today! Coronavirus would’ve cornered all her attention. She would’ve devoured every bit of news of the pandemic. She would’ve read, re-read and internalized all the instructions on how to prevent infection with this deadly ‘germ’. And she would’ve tightly tied her sari’s pallu around her slender waist and launched herself into improving the hygiene of our house and the sanitation of our mohalla.

She would’ve spared no neighbour, maid or passer-by in talking about the importance of staying at home, washing hands, observing lockdowns and of course, praying for the wellbeing of the world. And her acid tongue would have made no allowance for anyone. After all, she would say, “What can’t be cured must be endured!”

(Lt Gen (Dr) U K Sharma, AVSM (Retd) is Director Nephrology and Renal Transplantation, Paras Hospitals, Gurgaon)