Immune to it all, in the slum

Jug Suraiya

Jug Suraiya

IN the midst of the global spread of the dreaded coronavirus, which has already claimed thousands of lives the world over, two residents of a typical slum in India — with its open drains full of untreated sewage, its heaps of festering garbage, its stray dogs and cows, its scurrying rats, cockroaches, and other vermin — discuss the situation, and congratulate themselves how lucky they are compared with people living in other countries.

1st slum dweller: Those poor people in Italy and Iran, China and South Korea, and Japan, and the UK, and the US, and France, and Spain, I really feel sorry for them.

2nd slum dweller: So do I. I’m so thankful that you and I weren’t born in any of those unfortunate places, but were born here instead.

1st slum dweller: Yeah. We should thank our lucky stars that we were born here, unlike those pampered people who were born in countries where they have things like hygiene, and garbage removal, and sanitation, and health care, all of which undermine the body’s ability to deal with any nasty bug or illness doing the rounds.

2nd slum dweller: Yup. Here our systems are much better equipped right from birth to stave off anything which would lay low people living anywhere else.

1st slum dweller: You’re so right. We probably have the strongest immune systems in the world, thanks to the environment in which we live. They say we have the highest air pollution levels in the world, and our lungs have learnt to cope with it.

2nd slum dweller: Then there’s all the adulterated food, full of toxic chemicals and other things, which we have no option but to eat, and which are constitutions have had to get used to.

1st slum dweller: Then there are the uncollected heaps of garbage lying around everywhere, everything crawling with all kinds of disease-causing germs, and bacteria, and God alone knows what, we’ve built up immunity to all those as well.

2nd slum dweller: We’ve had no option but to build up our immunity to just about anything you care to name, and a heck of a lot of things you don’t want to care to name, because they’re so horrible. Because if we hadn’t developed our immunity to it all and fallen sick, we might have had to go to a hospital or seek other medical help.

1st slum dweller: Both of which are practically non-existent.

2nd slum dweller: Which, come to think of it, is probably just as well. From all reports, our hospitals are so filthy and ill-maintained that if you get yourself admitted to one, you’ll probably end up being even sicker than you were before.

1st slum dweller: The result being that most of us have, over time, developed such immunity to all manner of disease, illness, infection, you name it, that instead of our being scared of viruses and suchlike bugaboos, viruses and bugaboos are probably scared of us.

2nd slum dweller: For all of which we have one lot of people to give thanks to our successive sarkars over the past 73 years which, through their benign neglect, have left us no choice but to make ourselves immune to everything — with the sole exception of those who’ve ruled us all this while…