Not death enough- GINGERLY YOURS | When a caregiver succumbs to Covid-19, reactions from people only reinforce class prejudices

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Chandrima S. Bhattacharya   |  TT  |  14.05.21: Two weeks ago, we lost a beloved member of the family to Covid-19. She was Mangala Bag, my mother’s attendant. She had cared for my mother, who is very ill, and all of us, deeply. She was only 55.

When she fell ill, we first tried to treat her at home. When that was not enough, we hospitalized her. Two days later, after what seemed to be an improvement, she suddenly passed away.

I am overtaken by grief, rage and guilt. She was a part of almost every household activity, which she need not have been, and she and I would often share the gas oven, cooking together, and as some of us know, what rises from stirring the pots together is a kind of intimacy that makes every conversation, every conspiracy, possible. It is a woman thing. Double double, toil and trouble. But I am a plain cook; Mangala was a magician.

She brought to my mother’s care the same exuberance and imagination with which she cooked. She would conjure up people for Ma, who lives between memory and stark forgetfulness and is always waiting for visitors, who, when they are real, do not turn up. Mangala turned Ma’s virtual visitors into flesh. It made Ma very happy.

 I am full of rage because Mangala’s Covid test could not be done earlier, the test results did not arrive earlier, the ambulance did not arrive earlier, the hospitalization did not happen earlier. I am relentlessly recreating the events that led to her death and scrutinizing every detail, and castigating myself as to what I could have done better. She did not get the care that she gave so generously and deserved for herself.

I still do not know what happened in the two days she was admitted in the hospital. I could not get in touch with her ward and I only heard twice from the hospital — once when Mangala called to say that she was feeling better, but was very weak and could hardly eat, and the next day, when a man called to say she was dead.

I have not felt comforted for a moment since, except by a few things. One is the dignity and calm with which Mangala’s family has accepted the news of her death. She had come to work for us from a village in Uluberia, Howrah. She was her family’s highest earner. I also felt our grief and terror recede a little when friends and other family members gathered around us.

I was moved most when strangers, or almost-strangers, reached out to me. I feel that they are strangers no more. I also know that some close friends of mine are there around me, in silence. They just want to let me be. 

Then why is it that I feel so angry when some others get in touch with me? It is something in their tone — the tone that makes us pronounce the names of people who work for us in a certain way, as if in italics — or just what they say.  

I was getting anxious phone calls from a person who always makes anxious phone calls about nothing. When I finally took her call, and she learnt about Mangala’s death, she just said she was relieved that we did not have Covid-19. A close friend who called me two days after the death asked me what was wrong with my voice. Was I okay? I had to remind her that Mangala had died.

Another close friend asked about Mangala’s husband. Why could not he come and work for us, he asked. It did not occur to the friend that Mangala’s husband may not want to work as a servant. He works for a residential school.

The poor are interchangeable, even when they are husband and wife.

The smell of death spreads, from social media, from our own circles. I am by now also used to people asking me who it was that died and just responding with an “oh” or “oh okay” to my reply. End of conversation. Mangala’s is not death enough. A curtain drops.

This curtain, which divides the classes, seems even more final than death.