Skip to main content

Navigating Family

One of my very close relatives is hospitalized with Covid and I only learned about this by accident. No one in the immediate family knows about it. I told my parents and advised them not to pass it around because I was not supposed to know. The whole situation left me completely bewildered. Why such a wall of silence and secrecy. A cousin in Mumbai claimed she had all the symptoms and suffered for weeks but it was not Covid - just a flu.

When in doubt about how my relatives back home operate, I always check in with my childhood best friend P. He always has the answers. According to P, there is social stigma attached to this and if the conditions get dire then the person becomes untouchable. If they end up dead, the last rites could become a non-trivial issue. So for all those reasons, anyone how gets infected tries to keep it confidential. I had a very hard time believing P so I looked around to see if there was any corroboration to his claims. 

There have been multiple instances reported in various states of India where individuals have not reported their history of foreign travel or symptoms of COVID-19 due to the fear of facing social boycott and discrimination, leading to low testing and high mortality rates. According to public health experts, the social stigma associated with being diagnosed is creating a fear among the public and is acting as a deterrent to the effective management of the disease, particularly in the urban setup.

The stigmatization is taking a heavy toll on the mental health of the frontline workers as well as those who are recovering or have survived the disease. Media has reported the influence of isolation and discrimination on suicides in India.24 Experiencing isolation and stigma from social boycotting and religious discrimination can increase the risk of loneliness and self-harm.

The idea that a person could become a pariah because they got infected was hard to fathom but it felt both sad and scary. 

"I had mild symptoms and recovered at home. But our neighbours who are doctors and engineers and teachers asked us to shut our windows, not come out in the balcony. Neighbours tell us we are high-risk even after recovery. They have made us pariahs,"

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Changing Pace

This blog has been a big part of my life for the last five years. Besides giving me the opportunity to connect with a number of interesting people and share my thoughts and ideas with them, it has been a form of daily meditation for me. No matter what the day threw my way, I made a very deliberate effort to find a little quiet time to write.The process of thinking about what to write and then the act of writing itself worked as an antidote to aggravations big and small. Five and half years ago, when I started Heartcrossings both my personal and professional lives left a lot to be desired for. The only real happiness I had was in being J's mother. While that was often enough to make me forget what I did not have, I sorely needed a third place to call my own and shape in the likeness of my dreams. This blog has been where there were no limits or constraints and that was absolutely exhilarating - it is the reason I have been able to nurture it for as long and as much as I have. A lot ...
25 comments
Read more