It's not the end of the world

It was the leap year day that the pandemic first hit me personally. I was about to travel overseas for work. I dropped the kid for a sleepover. She called to say bye while I was at the pharmacy to buy malaria tablets, mosquito repellent, and hand sanitizers — standard fare for a visit to the tropics — when I received the text asking me to get in touch with my team leader immediately. Before I could get to it, the team leader called — mission aborted, they are pulling everyone out from field, stay tuned for next steps.

Okay, that sounds much cooler than it is. Although not a single sentence above is untrue, it’s perhaps not the whole truth. At that time, I had been a government functionary in a Anglophone middle power for nearly two decades. That ‘mission’ —yes, this is the term they use —was with an international organisation, doing the kind of work that would be professionally far more satisfying than anything I usually did at my day job. Of course, missions of that nature, and working for an outfit like that, would also mean having to leave the comfortable life of a developed country suburb. I had chosen the seemingly comfortable, even as I chafed at the mundanity of the daily grind of the life of a pencil pushing bureaucrat.

Things moved rapidly in the following couple of weeks at my day job. The agency I worked for at that time was headed by someone who used to be a nurse, specialising in mental health, in a previous life. Under him, the agency took staff wellbeing seriously, and provided all out support for remote work. Being a single dad with parenting responsibilities in the evenings and weekends meant I had little of the difficulties that so many others faced in juggling multiple priorities.

Life got into a routine very quickly. Morning ride to get coffee. Then a series of video conferences and emails, which easily filled up the day. Then the afternoon ride with the kid. The end of the world it definitely wasn’t here. But there were evenings when it was hard to ignore the fact that the world was not what it used to be, and may well never be! 

And what better way to survive those evenings than to immerse oneself into a book or a movie about life after the end of the world?

Richard Matheson’s I am Legend is about living in a world of the undead — a post-pandemic world where most of humanity is dead, except the survivors who appear to have become vampires. Will Smith played Robert Neville, the protagonist, in the most recent movie adaptation, Charlton Heston having played the role decades earlier. The Smith version has been rightly criticised for mangling the ending (spoiler alert for everything that follows).

In both the book and the movie, our hero seeks to learn more about the vampires, scientifically. For this purpose, as well as for survival, he has to prey upon the undead. The book-hero is a MacGyveresque 20th century American man who is handy with tools and has an understanding of basic sciences. Through library research and experiments, he deduces the nature of the pandemic that ended his world. In the process, however, he becomes a ghastly spectre to the mutant survivors, causing further death and suffering among those who were trying to create a new society.

This inversion of roles was too cerebral for Hollywood, who preferred the hero to die in the hands of a zombie horde (who inexplicably developed Spiderman-like ability to crawl buildings) while saving a vial of blood that might help find a cure. The third act collapse denied Smith a chance to cement his place among the acting legends, but his portrayal of a lonely man going through his daily routines in the first parts of the movie is sublime. 

Sublime and poignant too are Matheson’s paragraphs about Neville’s journey through depression and alcoholism when the world had almost ended. Neville pulls himself out of the miasma through a daily routine of tasks, chores, and daily achievments. One doesn’t read apocalyptic science fiction for mental health help, but one can do worse than this small novel.

Journey through a depressed post-apocalyptic land is pretty much all of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. A slim and sparse novel, reasonably faithfully depicted on screen in a 2009 movie, this is a story of a father and son who are walking through a barren, ash-covered land where not even a flower seems to grow. They have a gun, with one bullet left, and the father has taught the boy to use it on himself lest he be taken by the ‘bad guys’. And the bad guys here aren’t mutant survivors of a pandemic — they are hordes of cannibals.

A harrowing read and watch, with an achingly beautifully depressing ending where the father has made sure that the son has survived and will carry the fire.

We had watched this 12 years ago, the evening before the kid was born.

The 2020 lockdowns in my little weren’t really all that bad in the scheme of things. Schools opened in a few months. Desi communities restarted social activities soon thereafter. By the end of the year, life appeared to have been almost normal.

In comparison, the Delta lockdown of 2021 seemed much harder.

I say seemed, because life had changed significantly for me between the two lockdowns to make a direct comparison difficult. The first lockdown provided remote work opportunities with not just my direct employer, but also the international organisation with whom the cancelled mission was. It turned out that I could work remotely with teams spread around several continents and time zones. Yes, it played havoc with sleep, and snacking had become a problem. But the trade off had been well worth it.

By the time the delta variant hit us, I had joined the so-called Great Resignation, pursuing further studies, working as a freelancer, backed up by the security provided by the housing boom.

The truth is, the pandemic has been good for me!

And yet, every now and then, there are reminders that things are different, perhaps forever.

No. Not the news from the world outside of this bubble of prosperity and stability, which has always been gloomier than this cocooned haven, pandemic or not. I talk about masks, RAT tests, QR codes. I talk about the malls that can still be hauntingly empty every now and then.

The kid started middle school last week, and turned 12 yesterday. The day was spent in isolation as he came in close contact with someone infected. He has had one jab of Pfizer, has no symptopms, and has tested negative. He lives in one of the most vaccinated places on the planet. He will go back to school next week.

He is very fortunate. As am I.

The pandemic hasn’t been apocalyptic, not just in our little town but even in the worst affected parts of the world.

But the pandemic or not, the world ends every day for someone somewhere who loses a job, or when a relationship ends, or a parent passes, or perhaps even worse, when a child dies. When the world ends, we often lapse into bouts of depression and alcoholism, suppressing memories, fighting the demons and zombies of our minds.  

Yes, of course, we need to kick the darkness till it bleeds daylight. We must continue, carrying the light. And so on.

It’s just that some of us are more fortunate than others when it comes to doing so.

Fortunate? Lucky, to put it bluntly.

Luck, in the sense that life has played out for us in particular ways that we have no control over. Some of us might be hardwired in a way that makes us more or less susceptible or resilient to depression, anxiety, or other issues. Indeed, some of us might be hardwired in a way that makes us more or less susceptible or resilient to the virus! Regardless of that biological predisposition, anyone born in my little city is likely to be better off than anyone else born anywhere else in the world.

And how much of our location is solely in our own control?

This is not to deny individual agency, nor the importance of hard work, nor meritocracy as a bedrock principle for organising society. Of course, those are vital, for an individual as well as the community and the polity.

But what the pandemic underscores is that much of life is beyond our control, that opportunities can arise in adversity, but also a seemingly good life can end abruptly.

That is, contra Maggie Thatcher, there is such a thing as society, and it matters.

What kind of a society can be created after the end of the world? 

That is the central question of The 100. And the answer in this relatively low-budget TV show is provided by the actions of a hundred juvenile delinquents who are sent back to a post-apocalyptic earth after growing up in a space station. The series has run a few seasons too many, and even at its best the production value was questionable and the acting mediocre. But thorny, vexing questions of moral and political philosophy were raised repeatedly in the earlier seasons, and the answers presented were hardly predictable Hollywood tropes.

Plus, the show has to be commended for resisting the oldest of tropes — ‘shipping’ between the male and female protagonists.

The dystopias conjured in The 100 echo those of the Mad Max series and David Brin’s Postman. The last one is also a Kevin Costner turkey — that is, along with Waterworld, there are two Costner movies that should be rebooted by HBO or Disney! 

But are these dystopias of fire and fury where might is right and order is maintained through ritualistic violence that often ends in death the only way the world might be recreated after it ends?

Maybe initially after the apocalypse it might be so. But after a few centuries, the world would be more stable, ordered around faith and institutional religion, just as Europe was after the fall of Rome — that was the cyclical interpretation of history in Walter M Miller Jr’s science fiction classic A Canticle for Leibowitz, which is a clear inspiration for Robert Harris’s The Second Sleep. 

The story is set 800 years after the end of the world of the ancients. The Church teaches that ancients were struck down by God for their hubris, the ultimate sign of which is an apple with a side eaten. Study of the ancients is forbidden. A priest dies in questionable circumstances. There are pale echoes of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose in the description of this medieval society. And the discovery that the Church is very much aware of the truth, and is suppressing it for the ‘greater good’, almost makes one echo Heston’s howl at the end of the original The Planet of the Apes.

What about the apocalypses of more personal kind and scale, that may strike us randomly? Faced with a loss, sufferings may be eased by routines and regimens. Order can help with putting the life back together. But repression probably won’t help with acceptance and recovery.

Meanwhile, it’s important to remember that life hasn’t endowed us with equal ability to cope with a loss.

I had been a card carrying neoliberal for a quarter century, recommending liberalising, deregulating, privatising, so that the relative prices could adjust and capital and labour flow to their most productive use. I had been sceptical of efforts towards a more egalitarian society, as such efforts more often than not leave everyone worse off.

I still hold much of those views. But the pandemic has taught me to be humble about the role of luck in human affairs, and thus the need for a more empathetic society.

May the legacy of pandemic be humility and empathy.  

Parts of this piece was first published in the Dhaka Tribune, while other parts were contributed to an effort by Sitara’s Story — a non-profit charitable organisation working with women of culturally and liguistically diverse communities in Australia.