Virus is from the Sanskrit vis . a, meaning “poison,” but bears no relation to visa, meaning “papers that have been seen” in Latin. In 2006, I am pregnant with my first child and we attend a performance of “Krishna’s Mouth,” an interpretation of a story from the Bhagavata Purana at the Guelph Contemporary Dance Festival. I have never read the Bhagavata Purana. But I do know, from my Hindi, that purana means “old.” I learn that it is not a scripture, but a Smriti, meaning “that which is remembered.” It is authorless and transmitted mostly orally, like the polio virus that entered my father through his mouth when he was young. Baby Krishna eats dirt from the garden. When his mother reaches to remove it, she sees the whole universe in Krishna’s mouth. A billion invisible viruses. What do I know of Krishna? His image on a tiny gold frame my mother gives me when I first become pregnant. I must place it on my nightstand. I must stare at it every night, so that my baby will be made in his image, she says.
In my dreams the night of October 13, 2014, poetry is used to help stop the spread of the Ebola virus. It involves the discovery of a strategic placement of quotation marks.
There are two sounds that will haunt me when they are gone: my mother’s bangles, and my father’s limp.
A virus is measured in one-billionth-of-a-metre units. The odds of winning some lotteries are this much.
The polio virus has the shape of an icosahedral, which looks like a sphere, but in fact is a shape made from equilateral triangles. Like a soccer ball, which I cannot recall my father ever kicking. Or any ball.
Some viruses have envelopes. Some letters are best left unopened. Now my mother is on the phone telling me to get my flu shot.
I know more about the polio virus than I do about my grandfathers. No matter how hard we try, we cannot eradicate the former. Viruses pre-date the last universal common ancestor. In 95 per cent of all polio cases, there are no symptoms at all. The word for this is asymptomatic. The word for what happens to my father is asymmetry. You can understand why I might confuse the two.
My mother’s sister sees a stranger at a shop trying to sell her kitchen pot in exchange for some rice. It is the 1950s in Dehradun, shortly after Partition. Times are tough for everyone. “Give me your pot!” my mother’s sister shouts at the old woman. She takes the pot home, fills it with rice without telling anyone in her family, and gives it back to the woman. What does this have to do with viruses? Ask the old woman and she will have the answer. Or ask my mother, who gifts me my grandmother’s wedding housewares on the occasion of my own wedding.
Icosahedral is also the shape of the virus that causes the common cold. My father limps to the drugstore to buy some Children’s Tylenol in the middle of winter. We all say, Be careful, don’t fall!
I learn about viruses in second year, in a course called Molecular Biology. The class size is one thousand students. Nine hundred of them want to be doctors. I sit beside a new stranger every Tuesday and Thursday, somewhere in the middle of the terraced lecture hall. I cannot see the features of the instructor. He uses overhead transparencies. One thing I do remember is the way he draws the viruses and other microscopic creatures that are magnified. First a giant blue hexagon. Then he changes markers and draws the nucleic acid genome in a spiral line, in red.
All the facts in natural history taken by themselves have no value, but are barren, like a single sex. But marry it to human history, and it is full of life. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Second-generation malware can infect a system and go undetected for months. From marketing material of anti-viral software: “The success of some recent malware attacks has made headlines, crippled corporations, robbed shareholders, and damaged the credit of thousands of consumers…. This advanced malware is capable of mutating in situ like a biological virus.”
The brand of my mother’s first bicycle was Bharat. My brother is named Bharat. But my mother did not name him, my grandmother did.
Language is a virus from outer space. (William Burroughs)
Dad says after Einstein read the Bhagavad Gita he claimed there is no other book worth reading.
I look up “virus” in the dictionary and it says it is “countable and uncountable.” Then I look up “countable and uncountable.” Some nouns that can be countable or uncountable: advice, information, food, money, evidence.
Objects I have stolen: green glass birds from a neighbour, a Hard Rock Café menu from London, England, multicoloured beaded necklace from a roommate, poetry book from a writer, plaid blanket from a bar. Object I tried to gift: when one of my students in Guelph was in the emergency department for a psychotic breakdown, I visited her as often as I could. I brought her a purple orchid, but it was taken away at the door by the staff. It was the plastic placeholder to hold the gift card, which they considered too sharp. “Anything that could be used to harm themselves,” they said. The only thing I could give her was the poetry book in my purse, which they also searched. It was entitled Light, and it was black and white all over.
In 2018, I watch the film Dhool Ka Phool (flower made from dirt), the 1959 Bollywood film my father mentioned he saw in Delhi, on YouTube. I make two screen shots of scenes I want to come back to, scenes to watch again and again trying to find my father’s point of view. In the first, the illegitimate baby boy has been abandoned in the forest by his mother and is being protected by a cobra, when a man comes and rescues him. The man says, “Oh look! He who must nurture the child has left him to die, and he who must kill the child has left him to live. What a wonderful world.” In the second scene, a man is asking a woman to marry him. He says he believes love is a game, is a deceit, so he wants to marry before he falls in love.
I read stories of others who fled Haripur to end up in Dehradun (the same starting and ending points) and they are so different from my mother’s.