In the start, there was lamentation.
Like any New Yorker in lockdown who isn’t risking his/her life on the frontline, I mourned the cancellation of my low-stakes IRL life– screenings and networking occasions, delighted hours and combination food courts. Whether it’s at the neighborhood dive or the pet dog park, “outdoors life” in New York is life itself.
However as the COVID-19 lockdown crawls into its eighth week, I can’t assist however be surprised at how easy it is for someone like me — a first-generation Indian-American woman— to spend substantial stretches of time gotten rid of from the general public sphere. And now, for better or worse, I feel unusually geared up to manage 3 to 5 months of specifically virtual interactions, six feet of separation in public and a programmatically monastic bearing worldwide. There is something uniquely quarantine-ready about my childhood that I finally have the possibility to reckon with..
Like many Indian immigrants of their generation, they ‘d had a set up marital relationship, and after my dad was able to protect a postdoc in Montreal, they traded their pleasant verandahs for months-long snow cover. While this is real, my childhood household in America was not positioned as a remarkable area contra other castes, however as a fortress versus ourselves.
There is something uniquely quarantine-ready about my childhood that I lastly have the possibility to consider.
In turn, I was raised in a home with a really particular set of guidelines that saw cleanliness as routine and our bodies as strolling pathogen, possibly discharging contaminated beads with every accidental salivation. Saliva is a sticky compound in Hinduism. It represents impurity because it’s both a physical and dietary residue: a rotten mixed drink of food particles, acids and mucous. In a religious beliefs that hinges on pollution (of the body, the mind or the spirit), saliva is kryptonite. And like any religious practice that’s affected by IRL logistics, one can picture the basic houses of ancient and medieval Hindus, teeming with extended household, where errant saliva could be the difference in between life and death..
For this reason, orthodox Brahmins, like my mom, keep separate cooking utensils to demarcate those vessels the group will be serv
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