“The things you did that haunt you the most…they were the things that you weren’t ordered to do.”

– Clint Eastwood’s character, Korean War vet Walt Kowalski, in “Gran Torino”

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Before I start, let’s watch this clip from the 1989 Oliver Stone film, ‘Born on the 4th of July’. The movie is a true account, based on the life of paraplegic Vietnam vet, Ron Kovic, skilfully played by Tom Cruise…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhZ3H18ynTA

In the clip, Kovic is being given a hero’s welcome in his hometown after return from a tour of duty in Vietnam. Asked to say a few words, Kovic begins warming to his speech, waxing eloquent about how America is doing the right thing in Vietnam and will surely win the war in the end.

As he gets to the part about his experiences in the war, a baby in the crowd of spectators begins bawling loudly and Kovic’s voice falters. The voices of crying Vietnamese kids blanket his consciousness and he is overwhelmed by the sheer untruth in the rosy picture he just presented. The stark sounds of Nam, the thaka thaka thaka beat of a Huey’s turbo-shaft engine, come back and swamp him. Kovic just sits there on his wheelchair, trying to form the words but can’t.

Ron Kovic’s sudden meltdown from simply hearing a baby cry was a reaction known as ‘intrusive recall’, an anxiety disorder which in those days hadn’t yet been recognized as an injury that needed treatment.

Ron Kovic had what we now know as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), a psychological scarring that is characterized by anxiety, panic attacks, nightmares and horrific flashbacks, all of these arising from witnessing unspeakable events.

Fighting the scourge of PTSD is the other war on terror.

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Here’s another classic example of PTSD……

“…Back there I could fly a gunship, I could drive a tank, I was in charge. Back here I can’t even hold a job parking cars, man! I had all these guys back there, my buddies. Out here there’s nothing, man, no buddies. Where is everybody?

Remember Joey Danforth? He was always talking about Vegas and he was always talking about this big fuckin’ red ’58 Chevy convertible. ‘We are gonna cruise till the tires fall off, man’, he’d say.

Then we were in this bar in Saigon and this kid comes up, this little kid carrying a shoe-shine box. And he says “Shine, please, shine!” I said no. But he kept askin’ and Joey said “Yeah, okay.” And I went to get a couple of beers. The box was wired and the kid opened up the box, fucking blew his body all over the place. And Danforth, he’s layin’ there, screaming. There’s pieces of him all over me and I’m tryin’ to pull him off, you know, my friend, he’s all over me, man! The guy’s fuckin’ insides keep comin’ out and I keep tryin’ ta hold him together! He’s repeatin’ over and over, “I wanna go home, Johnny!” He keeps calling my name! “I wanna go home, Johnny! I wanna drive my Chevy!” And I’m lookin’ at him and I’m thinkin’, “With what? I can’t find your fuckin’ legs!”

— John J Rambo, Green Beret, in the 1982 film ‘First Blood’

The above may be fiction, but it is a very close representation of the senseless mayhem that is war. Combat veterans always say that it is hard to make civilians understand what they have been through. The following account is of a real Vietnam Vet, taken from a 1971 issue of Time Magazine that I chanced upon….

“The noise, the confusion, the suddenness of the shelling, the deadly invisible snipers, the dank heat, the incessant rain, the terror and with it the desire to stay put even though that could cost me my life. The nearest cover is a large rocky outcrop about a hundred meters’ straight sprint from where we are.

There’s pin-drop silence but we know they are there, behind those trees to the left with their heavy machine guns, waiting. I turn to look at the guy closest to me inside the hollow. Its the Captain. The Captain I looked up to on the parade ground is cowering down there, a flesh wound somewhere on his left arm soaking his tunic through.

The Captain is just a kid out of West Point and he has defecated in his pants. I can tell, because in the close quarters of the ditch, the stench of his filth is intense. He is just sittin’ in there, trying to form words but he can’t get them out. I nudge him impatiently and he lets out a hoarse whisper,” I want to see my Mommy. I want my Mommy…”

I remove his army-issue Colt from his holster and put it to his head and order him to pull himself together and issue the command….“

Close your eyes and try to imagine what it must have been like for the GI who wrote this account. You’ll find it hard if you have been a civilian all your life. Most would look at the captain who had simply snapped, with derision.

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Fast forward to now……

340kms northeast of Moscow is a town of 250,000 called Kostroma. In the early morning hours of the 5th November, 2022, a Russian Army soldier named Stanislav Ionkin walked into the packed downtown Poligon Café and set fire to it with a flare gun. In total, 15 died in the blaze which required 50 firefighters and seven hours to put out and still razed the café to the ground.

Ionkin had been wounded near Mariupol, Ukraine and shipped back a week prior. In the first police interview right after the incident, Ionkin seemed disoriented and couldn’t quite put a finger on why he did what he did, except to say…. “I was looking for enemies. No one understands, so I wanted to go somewhere, kill someone”.

Stanislav Ionkin was diagnosed with a different kind of PTSD, one that comes from guilt, known as “Moral Injury”. Usually associated with combat veterans who had been engaged in unprovoked acts of aggression, moral injury is the damage to an individual’s moral conscience and values. Guilt, shame, contempt and rage at the society at large, are common emotions that a person with moral injury deals with.

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I have an American colleague, Stan, whose late father had been a navigator in B-24 Liberators during the Second World War. He flew over forty sorties and bailed out twice over German territory. The first time, it was very close to the Swiss border and he managed to slip across to freedom and find his way back to his squadron in Malta.

His second jump was in December, 1944. His squadron was on a bombing run over Ulm, an industrial town deep inside Germany that had several large lorry manufacturing plants, belonging to the auto major, Deutz. These factories were believed to be churning out armored personnel carriers for the Wehrmacht.

It was December 1944 and Stan’s dad’s squadron had been told that the Luftwaffe had been completely wiped out and therefore the bombers were flying that night without fighter escort. The planes were carrying 2-ton ‘blockbuster’ bombs that were meant to churn up the air and cause turbulence over the city’s boulevards. The blockbusters would be followed by white phosphorus and thermite incendiary bombs that would then set the rushing air on fire, incinerating everything.

A pair of Messerschmitt-109s suddenly appeared out of nowhere and tore into the lumbering B-24s with their 20mm cannons. The plane that Stan’s dad was in took multiple hits. Both right engines and the complete right wing were chewed up and the fuselage and tail section ripped to shreds. They were going down.

As the big plane tipped its nose for the downward spiral, Stan’s father jumped directly over the city. He suffered a cracked ankle as he hit a stretch of ground that was covered with jagged rocks, right next to a street that was paved with asphalt. It was a grotesque sight straight from hell.

The asphalt had melted and was boiling in the heat of the white phosphorus. Flames were licking up from the bubbling black tar. Here and there, people were stuck in the tar. They were on their hands and knees, trying to extricate themselves. They were stark naked, their clothes having been blown off their bodies by the blast of the firestorm.

Stan’s Dad was immediately spotted and captured and he spent the remaining months of the war as a POW inside a nearby prison camp run by hardened SS-Totenkopfen. Tortured and deliberately starved, he lost 60lbs in the six months that he was incarcerated there. By the time he was liberated at the end of the war, he was barely alive.

Despite being brutalized in the prison camp and witnessing horrifying scenes of death and destruction for five long years, the Stan’s dad survived, regained his health, settled down to a solid family life, went on to build a successful business and finally passed on peacefully in his sleep at the ripe old age of 94, last summer. He had never shown any signs whatsoever of post traumatic stress.

Why does one man succumb to PTSD while another is able to shrug off the horror and move on?

Let me take this a bit further. If one were to compare the horrors of the Second World War with the Vietnam War, there is no question that the WWII was far more horrific. Yet, the surviving Allied military personnel of the Second World War appeared to have weathered it more ably, since we never heard of a rush of PTSD cases among WWII veterans.

I posed this to Stan and he said his father and his buddies saw WWII as a “just war”, one that America had entered reluctantly, only because its allies needed it’s support. The American GIs knew who the enemy was. They knew what they were fighting for and they were proud of that noble goal. The war galvanized and united America and when it was over, it paved the road to unprecendented prosperity and power.

In comparison, the Vietnam War was very different. At the height of the Vietrnam War(1967), the US Secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara commissioned a top-secret study that would cover the entire history of American involvement in Indochina, right from the end of WWII. Maybe he wanted to record it for posterity.

The resulting 47-volume document, now famous as “The Pentagon Papers” described in vivid detail an infamous 1964 plan to create NSA-doctored radar images that were made to look like North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacking a US Navy destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin. The goal was to conjure up the justification to launch military attacks inside North Vietnam, a sovereign nation that had never done the US any harm.

That NSA subterfuge is now infamous as the Gulf of Tonkin incident. It started the Vietnam War.

Deceit doesn’t remain under wraps for long and by 1971, The Pentagon Papers was being serialized and published chapter and verse by the New York Times and the Washington Post. (Check out the 2017 Steven Spielberg movie “The Post” which is centered on the Pentagon Papers).

The exposé left Americans feeling cheated. GIs returned home defeated, riddled with guilt, from the realization that they had been directly involved in the killings of thousands of innocent civilians in a sovereign nation half a world away, one they had no business being in.

When they returned home from Vietnam, veterans were universally reviled. Shouts of “Baby killer!!” followed them wherever they went. Homeless shelters turned olive green, with men in tattered uniforms, wracked by additions. The following excerpt of a 1982 Don Hill song encapsulates the agony that the veterans faced. It is the theme song from the Sylvester Stallone movie, “Rambo – First Blood”……

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Iraq took the Vietnam deceit one step further. Not only did the US participate in a subterfuge designed to fool the world about a non-existent threat, but it showed America to be capable of harboring leaders who might otherwise have been prosecuted and even convicted as war criminals, had they been from another nation, if the existing international treaties on war crimes were allowed to be applied.

In terms of the number of diagnosed cases of PTSD, the 2003 Iraq war has even larger numbers which, according to a study, is expected to cost the US exchequer billions to treat over the next two decades.

If weapons of mass destruction had indeed been found in Iraq and if Saddam Hussein was found to be really in bed with Osama Bin Laden, would there have been less PTSD cases among Iraq war veterans, since the 2003 invasion could then be termed a just war?

I don’t know, to be honest.

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“Be the little guy. That way, they don’t see you comin’.”

“Judges, lawyers and congressmen have a license to steal. We don’t need one.”

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to better, but when there is nothing left to steal”

– FBI wiretap transcripts of Don Carlo Gambino, giving sagely advice to a newly ‘made’ rookie mafioso at his initiation ceremony.

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Do you play Scrabble? If you play it with family and friends casually, that’s okay, but if you play competition, it pays to be aware of some two and three letter ‘hook’ words that you never knew existed. These are words that hook the letters in your tray onto a string on the board, sometimes leading to a big score. In a competition, it is those little words that decide if you’ll win or you’ll lose.

(Did you know that ‘ed’ is a word? I bet you didn’t. No, it doesn’t stand for ‘Erectile Dysfunction’. It means ‘specialized’.)

If a human could be likened to a scrabble hook word, then there was once such a man in America, far more powerful than any President. For a while in the 1940s through the 1970s, he ruled America as the head of a vast criminal enterprise larger than America’s largest business enterprises.

If I may draw a parallel, this man managed his affairs in some ways similar to the Roman Emperor, Claudius, quietly, away from the spotlight. Historians say that Claudius was the most consequential of the Julio-Claudian emperors and so was this man. He was from the same part of the world as Claudius, only he was born 1800 years later, in a dirt poor household in Palermo, Sicily. In 1919, unable to get work, he stole away in a freighter to the US, aged 17.

Meet Don Carlo Gambino (1902-1976).

Like Claudius, Gambino too went on to become an emperor in his own right. Only, in his case it was not a country, but a tightly-knit, murderous fraternity. The members of the fraternity didn’t just call him an emperor, but as a sign of respect and fear that he generated, Carlo Gambino was known as the Capo di tutti Capi (boss of all bosses), the most powerful American mobster in history.

And the most respected. Carlo Gambino gained the trust and confidence of his peers and this borne out by the fact that he was one of just a handful of mafia bosses who managed to die a natural death, of old age.

A diminutive man with beedy eyes, a large nose and a mild, pleasant and deferential demeanor, Gambino was anything but imposing in stature. He never made his orders sound like demands. He issued them as requests that were deferential in tone. A compatriot of his, Joe Bonnano, one of the powerful heads of the five New York crime families of the 50s, once called Gambino a ‘squirrel of a man’. Maybe he did have the looks of a squirrel but he was anything but that. In fact Don Carlo Gambino had what he exhorted his men to acquire – the heart of a lion, speed of a cheetah, cunning of a fox and venom of a viper.

To rise through the vicious world of the mafioso right around the time organized crime was coming of age in America and be able to reach the very pinnacle, keeping at bay and earning the respect of the legends of the time – Lucky Luciano, Albert Anastasia, Vito Genovese, Joe Colombo, Frank Costello and Meyer Lansky – needed a special kind of nerve and only Don Carlo had it in him.

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Gambino had the rare ability to see two moves ahead and act without hesitation when he saw an advantage. His mantra was……’when you want to get at the other guy, first make him believe you are giving in to what he wants’. When the ambitious Vito Genovese tried to grab territory that belonged to him, Gambino laid a trap for him. He knew that Genovese was heavily involved in drug trafficking, an activity that was still in a nascent stage and frowned upon by the mafia bosses of the day. He also knew that three other bosses – Frank Costello, Meyer Lansky, and Lucky Luciano – hated Genovese.

Gambino saw an opportunity. He roped the other three in and put together a lucrative drug deal that was too good for Genovese to pass up. Then Gambino paid a Puerto Rican drug dealer $100,000 to rat on Genovese to the FBI. The dealer was small fry and could not possibly have had access to mafia bosses. Besides, his testimony should have been struck down as hearsay. But the FBI wanted Genovese so bad that they swallowed the Puerto Rican’s account as authentic and managed to win a conviction. Genovese was put away for 20 years, eventually dying of a heart attack while still incarcerated.

In the film “The Godfather”, Michael Corleone says to his lover, Kay Adams, “My father is no different than any other powerful man. He’s like a President or a Senator, any man who feels responsible for others, his friends, his family, his people…” That would aptly describe how Carlo Gambino saw himself. It was a sentiment that played large in his psyche – that he was the savior. The author, Mario Puzo, created Don Vito Corleone, the character of the Godfather, from a melange of real life mobsters but the most striking resemblance is to Carlo Gambino.

While the other New York mafia bosses would lead ostentatious lives – owning palatial mansions, flashy limos and strings of mistresses, Don Carlo was a singularly unpretentious man who was content living in a modest 2-storey brick house in Brooklyn that he shared with his wife of 40 years, the only difference being that the house was at the end of a heavily guarded cul-de-sac with a single entrance and exit, surrounded on all sides by thick reinforced concrete and guarded round the clock by armed patrols with orders to shoot at sight. All the other buildings inside the cul-de-sac were occupied by trusted family members, his underboss and his capos. You would need a battalion of M1A2 Abrams to breach that security.

Find a similarity with “The Godfather”? I bet you do. Don Vito Corleone and Don Carlo Gambino are like mirror images of each other.

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At the height of his reign as Capo di Tutti Capi, Carlo Gambino is said to have amassed a fortune that was worth upwards of $50 billion. His underboss, Aniello Dellacroce, once quoted Gambino exclaiming exultantly,” Well, what do you know, we are bigger than US Steel!” (The line was later used by the character, Hyman Roth, in the Francis Ford Coppola hit The Godfather- Part II).

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Gambino could bear a grudge too, as was evident by the Scialo killing…….

A feared soldier of the Colombo crime family, Dominick Scialo, was once at a restaurant when he spotted Carlo Gambino and began to harass and insult him in front of others. Gambino kept his cool and did not say a word.

Scialo was not touched, not a hair on his head bent. Instead, some time later, he was grabbed as he was entering a Colombo family social club, driven to Brooklyn and gently set down inside an open space that had a flat concrete surface, enclosed by vertical wooden slats that stood upright.

It was the foundation of a high-rise under construction and as Scialo stood there trussed up like a chicken, concrete was poured over him. Gambino is reported to have stood over the guy and watched. Then, while his head was still clear, the gooey concrete now lapping against his chin, Gambino stooped and placed a cigarette between his gasping lips and said,” Here, have a drag. It will calm you down.”

Concrete shrinks as it hardens and sets. A human body placed inside concrete when it is still wet, would be crushed by the contraction caused by the drying, shrinking concrete. After Scialo’s execution, leaving victims untouched and alive inside setting concrete became the disposal mode of choice for the American mob.

(If you are walking by a construction site in Queens and you see the concrete churning on its own, inside the setting molds and you happen to hear wails and moans, like “Glub..glub… help..”, chances are good that the mixer operator is from Sicily.)

In 1969, Gambino became the ‘Chairman of the Board’ of what became known as the National Crime Syndicate or simply “The Commission”. And then in the early morning hours of Oct 15, 1976, he died of cardiac arrest at his home. The excitement of watching the New York Yankees winning the previous evening had gotten to him.

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Don Carlo Gambino lay in state inside a Brooklyn church for two days, so that thousands of ‘the faithful’ could come to pay their respects to the little, soft-spoken man. At the time of his death, the Gambino crime family was raking in $40-50 billion a year.

Don Carlo left his mark even at his own funeral. A number of unmarked cars stood on the opposite curb with FBI agents inside, filming the people going in and out. The FBI agents waited, shivering in the chill of the fresh October rain, unable to even get out to relieve themselves.

That’s when members of the Gambino crime family brought trays of lemonade and sandwiches to them and afterwards invited them in, to use the outhouse toilet at the back of the garden. Don Carlo had always reminded his men that the “FBI are doing their jobs, feeding their families, seeing their kids through school, just as we are…”

 

“No one climbs mountains for scientific reasons” – Sir Edmund Hillary

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Far to the north of Pakistan is a small hill deep inside the Karakoram Range which forms a natural barrier between Pakistan and China. The hill has a monument on it, an earthen mound with a cross and a thin tin plate nailed to it, with a name embossed by hand on it, possibly with the point of an ice pick – “Art Gilkey(USA), RIP, Aug 10, 1953, Avalanche”.

In the seven decades since, that hill has become home to hundreds of such monuments and the reason for that is the mountain standing next to the hill, a behemoth that seems to pierce through the clouds and reach right into the heavens. The makeshift monuments are a grim reminder of what it is like, to challenge the behemoth, which has over the years gained quite a few monikers – the ‘mountaineers’ mountain’, the ‘killer mountain’, the ‘mountain with no name’ and ‘Godwin-Austen’.

Officially the mountain is known as K2, though I like the name that is the most apt, one given by the alpinist who first attempted to climb it – The Savage. The leader of that failed summit assault, an American theoretical physicist named George Bell, later said, “It’s a savage mountain that will try to kill you”.

You don’t conquer the Savage. She simply decides to tolerate you and if you don’t promise to make your stay a short one, she makes you a permanent house guest. The Savage is a testament – to bravery and futility, ambition and failure, to fatal attraction for a beast like none other.

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No one knows why K2 didn’t get a decent name on official record. It was designated Karakoram-2(K2) by one T.G.Montgomery of the Geological Survey of India around 1856, when he was logging peaks in the Karakorum Range as K1, K2, K3 and so on. The second mountain in his list happened to be K2 and old Monty simply left it at that.

K2 has other names that accord it a certain degree of respectability. The Chinese call it Qogir Feng , meaning ”magestic mountain”. Likewise the Tajiks, the Tibetans and the Pakistanis have their own names, all expressing awe – Dapsang, Chogori, Lamba Pahar and so forth. But to the world at large, it remains simply K2. A much lesser peak – situated 32kms from the K2 – the Masherbrum, which is a puny 7821 metres by comparison, has been logged as the K1, as if to deny the Qogir it’s rightful place at the top of the Karakoram peaks.

It is easy to understand why the K2 is so feared by alpinists who make the trip from distant lands to attempt to conquer it. They almost never make it on the first attempt. In fact they consider themselves lucky if they are alive after even a failed attempt.

Straddling the border between Pakistan and China, the 8611-metre behemoth is the mountain where one in every four climbers has died, attempting either to scale the near vertical faces or descending from them. Only those who are trained rock and ice climbers rolled in one, can successfully scale it. If you are trying to break trail at 20000 ft on the K2 and you are the one fixing the ropes, the terrain over which you are moving is hard rock and ice, steep – with a 60° slant that is so smooth, that a sudden gust may simply flick you off the face in an instant.

At 28250ft, the K2 is just 750 ft lower than the world’s tallest peak, the distant Chomolungma, better known as Mount Everest. Although it is second highest, K2 is actually a longer climb than Everest, if measured base-to-peak, not sea level to peak. It has a far larger base-to-peak height, which means that you have to climb more. The Everest may be taller, but it’s base – the base camp from which attempts to the summit begin, is already at 17600ft. In comparison, the K2’s base camp height is only 16400ft. The K2 climb is therefore 1200ft longer. That 1200 ft means two hours more at the Death Zone, a term that alpinists use for heights above 8000 metres.

Easy to sketch for even a six year old, because of its near perfect Euclidian isoceles shape, K2 belongs to an exclusive club known as the ’14 sisters’, the 14 tallest mountains in the world, all situated on the Himalayan Ranges and all above 8000 meters (26000ft).

If given a choice of mountains to die on, alpinists prefer K2 over the others and there’s a reason for that choice. On the other peaks, an accidental fall can be short – maybe you’ll come to rest on a crag or a ridge a few hundred meters below, crushed but still breathing. Death will be slow. That won’t happen on the K2, where your ultimate ride is going to be a long and painless drop – all the way down to the Qogir Glacier. You’ll of course be dead long before you hit a serac on the inching glacier, having choked to death from the icy wind rushing past at terminal velocity.

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The only way to reach K2 from the west is to catch a flight to Pakistan’s capital city, Islamabad, hire a 4X4 and drive to a tiny picturesque town called Askoli, from where almost all the summit attempts on the 20000ft plus peaks of the Karakoram are launched.

There is an alternative route that could take a lot less time – a 1-hour flight to a town called Skardu and from there, a drive to Askoli, but flight schedules get cancelled at short notice pretty regularly due to bad weather.

So let’s assume you chose the drive. You will have to be careful not to blunder into Indian territory since it’s close. You’ll actually be driving in an arc, skirting the Line of Control with India in order to get to Askoli.

At some point you’ll get on the Karakoram Highway, the only paved road that leads through the Karakoram Range into China. A technological marvel, the 1500km long highway is the highest paved highway in the world , with spectacular bridges spanning deep gorges and long tunnels.

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After a while you’ll get off the highway, take a right and head for Askoli, where you‘ll stay the night at a lodge and then, at first light, you’ll begin your trek to Base Camp. The drive took you three days in total and now the trek will take you 10 more days and it will be the trek of a lifetime.

Around the 7th day of your trek, you are on the Baltoro Glacier. The mule trains and porters ahead of you are picking their way through this treacherous ice field of cracks and crevasses and creating a trail for you to follow. Over here a shattered kneecap or ankle, from tripping over all those loose boulders and you’ll forget the jaw-dropping scenic beauty, while the helicopter airlift and hospitalization will set you back $30000.

As you inch forward, large walls of ice that weigh thousands of tons, called seracs, loom above you. Seracs are what cause avalanches, when they gain more weight through snowfall than they can bear, ultimately breaking loose, to tumble down the mountainsides like a thousand freight trains all at once, obliterating everything in their path.

As you pick your way through the rocky floor of the Baltoro, around you are mountains, not just any mountains, but tall peaks rising thousands of metres, mountains that are tall enough to have their own names – Paiyu Peak, Great Trango Tower, Cathedral Towers, Muztagh Tower, Mitre Peak, Sia Kangri. Among them, towering even higher are some 8000Plus metre peaks – Broad Peak, Gasherbrum-II and Gasherbrum-IV, the 12th, 13th and 17th highest mountains in the world.

And if you look beyond, across the glacier to the left, you’ll see K2 in the distance, towering over everything else.

As the shadows lengthen at the end of the 7th day, you are at Concordia, a chaotic, boulder strewn field that is at the confluence of three glaciers that flow around the base of K2 – the Baltoro Glacier, the Abruzzi and the Godwin-Austen(a.k.a Qogir). It is a breathtaking 360° panorama not witnessed anywhere else in the world. The locals call it “The Throne Room of the Gods”.

You spend the night at the “Throne” and begin your scramble forward on the 8th day. Another stopover further ahead and on the 10th evening, you are at the Base Camp. You are breathing a little harder. It is 16400ft above sea level here. But you made it. It has been a half of a mini Himalayan expedition.

The Base Camp is nothing more than a bunch of tents belonging to the various expeditions, a few toilet tents and a couple of medical tents, with a doctor specializing in high altitude medicine. The Base Camp doctor is usually a member of an ongoing expedition, present there on a strictly voluntary basis, his expenses paid for by his service.

The most popular tour package among macho thrill seekers round the world is the 4-week K2 Base Camp package. For $30000, they’ll take you up to the Base Camp, acclimatize you on the way, with many overnight acclimatization stopovers and then let you spend a few nights at Base Camp. You’ll hobnob with experienced alpinists getting ready to make their fifth or sixth summit attempts, take autographs and then the guides will bring you down.

If you are lucky you won’t get HAPE during the time you are at the Base Camp. HAPE – High Altitude Pulmonary Edema, is an affliction that fills the lungs with fluid and asphyxiates to death, fatal unless given immediate medical care in the form of a pressurized, hermetically sealed oxygen tent. (HAPE can happen at altitudes above 8000ft, which is well below the Base Camp height).

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Picture this……….

You have crossed over, up into the Death Zone. At that altitude, rescue has never been successfully attempted. You know you have to either make it out of there on your own steam or perish and remain, perfectly mummified in the cold for the next five thousand years.

But you are Gerlind Kaltenbrunner, an accomplished alpinist, in fact one of the best in the game. A few years back you conquered that peak over there to the south, Broad Peak, one of the ’14 sisters’. Cruel, but not as deadly as K2. Nothing, not even Everest, is as deadly as K2.

You have done it all and come out unscathed. This is your seventh attempt at K2 and by God you’ll get her if that’s the last thing you ever do.

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It’s your turn and you are breaking trail. You are around 15 metres above and to the left of the others in your team of three. You started at 2:30am local time And it’s now nine in the morning and you are in the Death Zone. The sun is up, its a clear day, the horizon a turquoise blue and the wind – the deadly wind – is almost non-existent. The wind seems to have lost interest in you and you are thankful for that.

But you know that the weather on the Savage can turn swiftly on a dime. It’s the reason why this is your seventh summit attempt. High up on K2, there are no long stretches of good weather. Your visibility can get to zero very quickly and in the white out, you won’t see rocks falling from above, large boulders that can crack your skull or dislocate your shoulder or simply flick you off your perch like a backhanded swipe from an angry giant. Being injured anywhere on a Himalayan peak can be a death sentence but you are climbing K2, where any small injury that hampers movement is certain death.

The snow under your boots is frozen so solid that driving your front pointed crampons in requires real effort and you can slip from the recoil. A -60° windchill and even a 40kmph wind can easily pick you off the slope if you’re not tethered adequately, but this morning the windchill is only -30° and the wind just a breeze. The incline is approximately 60° and it is a straight, uninterrupted 20000 ft drop from the narrow ice ledge over which you are inching forward.

To lessen the weight, your team is climbing without oxygen and tents. You have packed bivouacs which are special lightweight sleeping bags that you can breathe through without accumulating moisture. At that altitude you wouldn’t want moisture.

You stop to drive a piton and an ice screw into the ice a few inches above your head, feeling your left crampon slowly sink into the hard snow under foot. The snow closes around the sharp spikes of your crampon tightly. Meanwhile, you snake your rope in through the eye of the piton you just drove in and snag it to your waist. You tug the rope to let the others know you’re secure. The Pakistani guide, Mohammed Arif Khan, tugs back in acknowledgement.

You begin to lift your left boot to inch forward. It won’t budge. The crampon is set solid in the ice. You wriggle your foot a bit and give it a second tug and there’s a clear ‘snap!’ as the crampon comes loose and remains in the snow when your boot lifts up.

All your weight is on your right foot now. You take a deep breath, steady yourself and move your chin down to take a look. The crampon is set into the ice and there’s no way you can bend down to prise it loose. Even if you did, it’d be impossible to slip it on again. You turn your torso slightly to look down at the others.

The Pakistani has noted your situation and probably understood what has happened. With four previous summit attempts on the K2 and six of the fourteen sisters under his belt, he knows you are doomed. He gestures to the third member of the team, Jaegar, to halt.

That’s when you feel the snow beneath your right boot begin to give. You desperately try to grapple around in that narrow space trying to locate even a tiny hand-hold, but the ice face is too slippery and smooth. The ledge beneath suddenly disappears and you plunge. You fall 20ft before the slack is taken and the rope is taught, straining at the piton you just installed. The wind is now picking up and blowing snow off the rock face and right into your eyes as you swing free, 20620ft above the Quogir glacier.

You’re no sissy. You survey the ice face as you continue swinging, trying not to dwell on the possibility that that piton you drove in may not take your weight for too long. A little over six metres to the left and above, you see a niche around four feet wide and as deep. It’s on the far side of the others but you have no other option. You start widening the swing of the rope, feeling it abrade against the rough surface and soon you are swinging in 60 degree arcs. Your next swing brings you close enough for you to grip the ledge of the cornice and you pull yourself up into the niche. You push yourself as far back into the little dugout space as possible and are relieved not to feel the pinpricks of the blowing snow anymore.

Sometime during the afternoon, you peek over the edge of the niche. Far below, the base is obscured by a thick layer of clouds, like cushions strewn haphazardly around. You peer to the right. The Pakistani and Jaegar are out of your field of vision. They did right. They moved on, since there was absolutely no possibility of success of any rescue attempt. A helicopter extraction from a near vertical ice face in the Death Zone is unheard of and has never been attempted. The niche is virtually inaccessible to climbing, the faces on either side nearly vertical and solid ice.

You know your time is up. Your eyes stray to the luminous dial of your watch. It’s getting to 2pm. By the time the dial reaches that position in twelve hours, you will be dead.

During the afternoon another expedition passes within 50 meters of your shelter, so close you can see their faces. You watch and weakly wave as the trail breaking lead trains his glasses at you and waves back. He has obviously been notified about you over the satellite radio. The expedition moves on and disappears from your line of vision after a while. You don’t hold it against them. There is simply no way that they could come to your aid, so inaccessible is your perch.

Above the Death Zone, there is a certain code of conduct that trained alpinists strictly adhere to – if a fellow climber contracts HAPE or is injured and incapable of moving ahead, you don’t waste time and effort trying to save him. You leave him and you try to survive yourself. This code of conduct may seem cruel and outside the norms of civilized behaviour, but the Death Zone decides what is civilized behaviour and what isn’t.

Besides, you remind yourself, this is the life you chose. It was you who decided that a life on the edge was what you wanted. You are at that edge and the game is finally up. It has been a wild ride while it lasted and your lips form a smile at that thought.

Before the sun has dipped over the the 24100 ft Skil Brum to the west, two more expeditions pass you by. They too spend a brief while peering at you. You smile back a drunken lightheaded smile. You have become something of a spectacle. You try to wave back at them but your hands can’t seem to be able to move up from where they are, on your lap. Strangely, you don’t feel the cold anymore.

When exhausted and oxygen-deprived alpinists realize they are at a point of no return, they get into a dreamlike state of complete apathy. The urge to stay put becomes overpowering, even though it is fatal to remain still. Even time seems to stand still.

You are now approaching that dreamlike, light-headed stupor. The sky is now a clearer, a deeper, darker blue. The wind has stalled. To your left, on the ice face, the trail along which you had seen the three expeditions pass you by, is no longer visible, having been overtaken by the lengthening shadows from adjoining peaks. Idly, you wonder how many made it to the top.

You stare out into the void. The view makes you catch your breath. Over to your right, around 10kms as the crow flies, seeming so near that you could reach out and touch it, is another one of the fourteen sisters, the 26100 ft Broad Peak. You note a wisp of what looks like smoke from a chimney but is in fact snow being blown off the peak by 100 kmph winds.

You remember losing Kurt on Broad Peak last August. Over the years you have lost many partners on the thirteen sisters that you have summited. This was to be your fourteenth and last. You think of the Vienna University position you wanted to take after this. And the Vienna University history scholar you’d spent last winter with. Ralf was right now waiting anxiously at the lodge at Askoli for word from your team leader. Maybe he already knows by now, thanks again to satellite phones.

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It is dark now, still clear, the wind velocity almost zero, the entire vista bathed in diffused moonlight reflecting off the snows. You are a headstrong woman and you will choose even the way you die. You stretch and start moving on your belly toward the edge, the lip of the niche. Your head clears the edge and you stare into the void below. The view is obscured by the cloud tops at 15000 feet. You swing your legs over the edge of the niche and pause for a moment as you hang.

At that moment everything suddenly clears, as if a veil has lifted. You clearly hear the voice. You are fourteen and it’s your father, Hans Gunther and he’s looking down at you, his face calm and composed, while you hang precariously from the lip of that recess a thousand metres from the base of the Eiger.

“It’s OK, Gerlinde, I have you. You can let go now….. Geree, let go.. Now”

You crane your neck one last time to look down at the cloud tops far below. In real life, Hans had been above you but now he is a tiny dot down there but you can make out his broad smile. You let go.

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You don’t come to rest a 100 metres below in a crag, a gulley or an out crop and writhe in pain for hours before you die. There are no crags or outcrops on this baby. You sail through the rarefied air, swiftly attaining terminal velocity. You keep descending at a steady 200kmph, until you hit a ridge at 7000ft, bounce off it and come to rest on the Qogir Glacier, a full 20000ft below where you lost your crampon.

In all, the fall has taken approximately two minutes, give or take, not enough time to see your past flash by, the -30° windchill ensuring that you’re dead long before you hit the glacier and disappear into one of it’s many crevasses.

High above the inching Qogir, sudden streaks of lightning blaze through the dusk and it starts snowing, the wind picking up speed until the snow is gusting horizontally. In minutes, the world has turned into a wall of thick white, as if a funeral shroud has come down and wrapped everything under it, including you.

The Savage is celebrating. The Savage doesn’t like you. And by the time the night is done, the Savage won’t leave any traces.

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ps:

The above is fiction, but Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner is a real alpinist, the only woman to have scaled all ‘14 sisters’ without supplemental oxygen. The last peak she summited was K2, in 2011.

Only K2 took her seven attempts before she finally made it.

A month or so after Shanta passed on, in May of 1969, I began going out with the Culvers for breakfast every morning at the Tim Hortons, the one down by the ESSO pump, on Sherbrooke West and Grand.

I’m referring to Irv and Sally Culver, retirees like me, living on the same floor, down the corridor, by the fire escape.

At first they felt I was lonesome and needed company and that’s why they invited me to join them at Tim Horton’s for turkey bacon sandwiches one morning, early July 1969. They must have liked the experience because they insisted on having me around everyday thereafter. I felt comfortable with them and came to enjoy those outings.

I remember the morning of July 20th, 1969. Irv, Sally and I were talking animatedly about the moon landing the day before. The live broadcast had been phenomenal. In fact I am sure that everyone else in the cafe was wrapped up in it too.

“Did you watch Neil Armstrong’s little speech? One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind?” That was Irv.

“Of course. Very apt, wasn’t it?” My interest perked up.

“Sally says Armstrong actually said ‘one small step for a man’ but I clearly remember him saying ‘one small step for man’.  Sally rolled her eyes at that and I couldn’t help thinking how lovely she still looked, even at 52.

“Interesting, how an article can twist the whole meaning of a sentence. Did you know him, Irv? Neil Armstrong?”

Almost all his working life, Irv Culver had been at Lockheed’s Skunk Works, as a part of the team that developed what would come to be known as the SR-71 Blackbird. In later years, the Skunk Works developed such legendary flying machines like the freakily angular F117 Nighthawk, the F22 Raptor and the F35 Lightning.

At the mention of Neil Armstrong, Irv perked up, “Not personally, but I’d seen Armstrong a few times over the years. The first time was when he was visiting the Skunk Works, this must have been around 1962, maybe ‘63.  He was a member of the ‘new nine’ group of astronauts, invited to take a look at the new YF-12A prototype, the fore-runner of the SR-71 Blackbird. We had tested out the TEB igniter on the JP-7 fuel inside the lab and were going to have a test flight that day.  Things were pretty antsy around the huge shed. JP-7 burns only at elevated temperatures and is therefore quite safe to have lying around, but TEB ignites on contact with air. And without TEB injected into it, JP-7 wasn’t going to light up.”

Sally and I exchanged glances and smiled. Irv was in his elements and unstoppable now, “While the others in the group of astronauts spoke only with our Chief Engineer, Kelly Johnson, Armstrong made it a point to go around, stopping by every member of the Skunk Works team and even the Pratt and Whitney guys working on the J-58 power plant. He listened attentively to each one of us. My last glimpse was of him shaking hands with a contractor’s man who was holding a ladder while another changed a light bulb.”

I was primed by now and bristling with questions. “Wait, don’t move, I’m going to get us some more coffee and you’re going to tell me more.” I hurried back holding three mugs and I was firing away as I placed them on the table,” How did the Skunk Works get that name?”

“Well, when we started, back in ’43, it was in a converted circus tent as there was no other space within the Lockheed facility. And we happened to be right next to a plant producing manure, its odor permeating our tent. When my phone rang one day, I jokingly said,” Skunk Works inside man, Culver speaking.” The name caught on right away. Since then, the term “skunk works” has been widely used to describe a group, within an organization, given a high degree of autonomy and unhampered by bureaucracy, tasked with working on advanced or secret projects.”

Irv and Sally had an engagement that day and had to leave and so my curiosity had to wait till the next breakfast.

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A year slipped by, 365 blissful days of walks, breakfasts and stimulating conversation with the Culvers. Shanta would have loved these two.

I reckon it was around that time that Irv began fading away. Gradually. Right before our eyes. It began with him not being able to locate the car keys. Another time, he got lost coming back from the pharmacy and someone saw him wandering listlessly around and called 911 and a cop arrived and drove him home.

Alzheimer’s crept up on Irvin Culver steadily for the next nine years. Until one particularly frigid December night in 1980, when he quietly died in his sleep at the Montreal General. Of course, one doesn’t die of Alzheimer’s. One just fades away. Irv actually succumbed to colon cancer. Sally had always pestered him to eat more greens but he never listened. Anyway, for Sally, Irv’s passing was more like the grand finale of a painful nine year long goodbye.

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After Irv, Sally and I would see each other at least once every day. We would accompany one another to our doctors’ appointments. I had a painful knee condition that got aggravated in the cold. Sally was trying to keep her cholesterol and BP down. I had no living relatives in Canada and Sally’s only daughter, Cora, lived somewhere on the west coast.  Therefore, for the most part, we had just each other. While we couldn’t bring ourselves to enter the Tim Hortons again, we had our daily walks down Sherbrooke.

Some days we took the pedestrian path up to the Westmount Library where we sat for an hour catching our breath and browsing through the journals. I loved the National Geographic and I loved watching Sally peer through her bifocals into the People Magazine or Vanity Fair.

Sometimes we ambled west, toward the Montreal West train station. We’d flop down on the benches by the tracks and watch the ebb and flow of the commuters. Once in a while, a long distance freight train thundered by. We’d sit a while and then make our way back, stopping at the Pharmaprix, right across from our apartment block, to pick up a prescription or maybe a toilet paper roll or something.

We would then trudge back. To our separate little worlds. 

I don’t know when it first happened but it gradually seemed natural that we held hands as we walked.

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I don’t remember too good these days but I think it was the Christmas Eve of 1985. Cora had written that she wouldn’t be able to make it, so for Sally and me, it was like any other day. Except for the daily Christmas carol bombardment on TV and radio. She didn’t want to go for the mass at St Joseph’s this time. Said she was tired. We went for a walk, a shorter one, up Cavendish and back. As I said before, my knees didn’t like the Canadian winter. Sally too had grown gaunt, with all her food restrictions. So, while the whole city seemed to explode in merriment, we were back, waiting, while the elevator took us up to the 14th floor.

The ritual thereafter began predictably. Like hundreds of other evenings. Me, giving Sally a quick peck on the cheek at her door and walking down the length of the hallway to my apartment. And her, waiting till I reached my doorstep and giving me a tiny wave. Only this time, she wouldn’t let go of my hand. She slid her arms through mine and pressed up against me. “Don’t go…stay….please.” Her voice was a whisper.

Afterward, we lay in the dark, our faces inches away, lazily giving each other tiny kisses all over. My head felt heavy, like all this was a dream.

The Christmas eve excitement was ramping up outside our tiny oasis as we lay back and listened to the sounds coming from the corridor outside. Squeals of delight, hurrying footsteps, the pitter patter of kids running ahead, to catch the elevator. Across from us, a mother was shutting her front door with,” Nicholas, did you remember to take your mittens?” A door opened somewhere and sudden slurred shouts of welcome erupted and then muted as it slammed shut.

When I turned to look at Sally, she was asleep, a smile still playing on her lips, like some supernova remnant. “Goodnight, darling,” I whispered and held her close till I drifted off.

Sally moved in with me the next day, Christmas Day and surrendered her lease within a month. It seemed like the most natural thing to do.

We might follow the Canada geese next fall. If my knees can take it.

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Ps:

The above was narrated to me many summers past, by an American – Indian couple, Shankar Ghosh and his second wife, Sally Culver. I had come to know them through Shankar’s son, Prabir, who was my colleague at Pratt and Whitney.

I took the liberty to make it sound like it was Shankar Ghosh speaking instead of them both. Sally’s telling felt so vivid that I guess I wanted to put myself in Shankar’s place and view it as him. What can I say? I am a complicated man.

Both, Shankar and Sally are no more, having succumbed to Covid in 2020.

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“Trust Allah, but tie your camel.” – ancient Arab proverb

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When a Bedouin, visiting Prophet Mohammad at Medina, left his camel untethered outside the mosque, the Prophet noticed and asked him why he didn’t tie the animal. The Bedouin replied that he had placed his trust on Allah and therefore it was not necessary to secure the animal.

Mohammad famously replied,” Trust Allah, but tether your camel.”

Interesting quote. It is not an either-or……it’s not either you trust Allah or you tie your camel, which implies that if you tie your camel, you don’t really trust Allah enough.

It is a diplomatic do-it-anyway statement.

On the face of it, Mohammed’s advice is very empowering. It exhorts us to look at our situation dispassionately and take the necessary steps to address it. But don’t his words actually caution us against relying too heavily on faith? To me they seem like they do.

You and I have a certain level of intelligence, an ability to reason and make sense and we must utilize it. We are responsible for our own destiny. It is our ass on the line. Hard science tells us today, in the face of the viral endemics, to vaccinate. That same science warns women to end pregnancies when they have stricken foetuses in them.

Science has repeatedly issued upgrades to help us live healthy lives.

But organized religion is the only thing that has never issued any upgrades. It still peddles the same old “as you sow, so you reap” crap, which it has been hustling for the last three millennia, during which time history has proved exactly the opposite – that you don’t reap as you sow and that many have reaped without bothering to sow at all.

The world has seen plagues galore, since the beginning of recorded history. If there is one singular fact that we have learnt from them it is that religion has not, cannot and will not save us from them. But that goes against a fundamental tenet in all religions – that there is an all-powerful God (Or Gods) who can make anything happen and stop anything from happening.

Thankfully, the human race has never actually waited for divine interventions. We have found out the hard way that we are on our own and thanks to our ingenuity, we have survived. The fundamentalist kooks and their dumb believers might say, “but it was God who gave us the ingenuity to develop ways out of every jam. He encouraged us to find our own solutions to our problems”.

So here we have a mind-fuck of a lifetime. Our God is all-powerful, can get anything done, prevent any catastrophe from befalling us………. but he won’t. He’ll let us solve our own problems while he sits up there and just watches. Innocents, believers and little babies who aren’t old enough to develop the means to decide what defines a virtuous life, they will all die horrible deaths, painful sores covering their bodies, high fever turning them delirious. But God will just stare back, he’ll do a Marlon Brando in “Apocalypse now”.

That Bedouin at Medina had the right to feel confident he could leave his camel untied. His own religion had taught him that if he had been virtuous, it was okay to leave everything up to God and everything meant literally everything, even a fucking camel on the loose. But then here was God’s sales rep – his prophet, telling the Bedouin, “ummm, nyet, buddy. That’s not a good idea. You had better be safe than sorry. Just tie the bleeping camel up.”

Within the mafia there is an unwritten contract between the Capo and his crew – that if they do strictly as they are told to do, the Capo will have their backs. It is a covenant that is set firmly in stone and the single most important reason why the organized crime gangs like the N’Drangheta remain a deadly force. It is why a made wise guy can put a bullet into anyone’s head in broad daylight and still get away with it. He is invincible as long as he has that covenant.

A man of faith must expect a similar covenant with God, no? Why is it unreasonable for him to believe that if he remains virtuous, God will protect him and his family from misery, prevent robbers from stealing his camel? Is it too much to ask of God to hold up his end of the bargain? Alas, history shows it is. History tells us that when needed most, God has been the “absentee landlord”.

It’s all very simple actually. There never has been any “my virtue for your protection” quid-pro-quo covenant with God. It was our desperation to cling to beliefs.

When the Roman Empire was at the height of it’s power (250AD), an ebola-like plague ravaged it, killing over 5000 a day, causing crippling manpower shortages, severely weakening Rome’s defenses, nearly bringing the empire to it’s knees. It is known as the “Plague of Cyprian”, after the guy who wrote a treatise on it. Over a period of 14 long years, the virus spread all across the Italian peninsula and into the adjacent regions of Gaul, Hispania and Sicilia, ending up killing 27 million. It took the life of even the Emperor at the time, Hostilian.

The Plague of Cyprian had a consequence – Romans believed the plague to be a “lack of performance“ by their existing pagan deities. Hadn’t they prayed to them constantly, offered sacrifices in their honour? And yet..??? It was not long before Romans began to see the hollowness of their pagan beliefs.

Waiting in the wings for over two centuries was a new, yet untested alternative – one that preached a single, omnipotent God of all things, who had the power to heal the worst of plagues – Christianity.

The conversion to and rise of Christianity in Rome is commonly credited solely to Constantine the Great, whose reign began in 306AD. The actual fact is that by the time he came to power, fifty years had passed since the Plague of Cyprian. Fifty years of excruciatingly painful recovery from a pandemic. Fifty years of looking for alternatives. In Christianity, the Romans found that alternative.

The Roman citizens actually mistook herd immunity for a saviour religion!! Constantine merely made it official.

Unfortunately, the Christianity upgrade from paganism remains a “Beta” version till this day. There have been 20 major plagues since the one in Rome and they have killed a billion people so far. Religious adherence could not prevent them.

Christianity has managed to cling on, but there have been hiccups. When the 14th Century “Black Death” killed 100 million in Europe, Christians felt they weren’t getting the bang for their buck and Catholicism splintered, giving way to Protestant Reformism.

Today Christianity stands further divided into scores of different denominations – Lutherans, Protestants, Eastern Orthodox, Pentacostals, Baptists, Anglicans, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Coptics and on and on and on. I haven’t forgotten the largest, most viciously evil, most corrupt denomination of them all – Catholicism.

The christianity practiced today is unrecognizable from the one Jesus Christ envisaged. Just like the Islam of today – the prophet Mohammad would have great difficulty recognizing it.

There is no question that pandemics (and other natural disasters) shake people’s faith in religion. The fastest growing new religion today is actually – No Religion. As secularism grows, the influence of atheism and agnosticism is expanding. Driven by growing apathy and disenchantment, churches all over the western world are going bankrupt.

Extreme fundamentalists like Mennonites and Amish and their faith are succumbing to the relentless onslaught of technology and vanishing. In North America, the religiously unaffiliated (atheists and agnostics) now form over 30% of the population, while across the Atlantic, one in two Europeans think religion is senseless and irrelevant.

I look at pandemics not so much as the scourge of humanity but much more as nails in the coffin of organized religion.

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Okay, so pandemics affect religious belief, but does religion influence the way we look at pandemics? Are you kidding me? Of course it does.

The concept of a higher power that controls everything began to crystallize around 11000 BC in a little settlement called Jericho, in present day Israel. Since then as more settlements grew, humanity acquired a new travelling companion that has stayed with us ever since – pandemics. Viral infectious diseases have regularly wiped out two-thirds of a population.

With the growth of settlements came self-appointed holy men and belief systems, some of which advocated staying put and just sitting out the scourge, while others said run, head for the open spaces.

And then came Christianity and Jesus Christ’s reputation as a healer. His followers listened rapt as Jesus said, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Love your neighbour as yourself. Greater love has no man than this, that he should lay down his life for others.”

Jesus healed a number of ailments, such as blindness, leprosy, lameness and demonic possession. He didn’t (or maybe couldn’t) heal plagues or any sort of viral infection. It is a known fact that viruses do not survive extreme heat and the Levant being an exceedingly hot and dry region for most of the year, maybe the opportunity simply didn’t arise for Jesus to try his hand at curing viral infections.

Be that as it may, Christianity encouraged tending to the sick and risking death as that was a sure path to heaven. When the 1527 bubonic plague hit, Martin Luther – the father of Protestant Reformism – refused calls to flee the city and stayed back to minister to the sick. Martin Luther articulated the Christian response to pandemics clearly. He proclaimed that “the plague has turned the sick into crucifixes, on which we must be prepared to impale ourselves and die…” As a consequence, his daughter Elizabeth fell victim to the plague.

Christianity’s brother religions, Islam and Judaism however didn’t buy into all that altruism. They simply said,”Hey it’s all God’s will. We can do jack-shit about it. Only God can handle pandemics, so let God take care of the scourge. We should just sit tight, remain faithful and finger our prayer beads.”

If that Bedouin in Medina had come to me instead of Mohammed, I would have told him, “Tether your camel, you dumb fuck!”

Achilles slays Penthesilea, the Queen of the Amazons and regrets it immediately (Plaster by Bertel Thorvaldsen, 1837)

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At the fag end of the Trojan War the desperate Trojans, facing defeat, recruited a mercenary army of Amazons – ravishingly beautiful and at the same time brawny muscular big-breasted women, trained in hand-to-hand combat. The Amazons were the Wagner Group of the 13th Century BC. Only, they were female and beautiful.

Big-breasted, geeze, why wasn’t I born in 13th century BC Greece?

Palaephatus, a 4th Century BC compiler of Greek mythology, thought that the Amazons were actually men mistaken for women by their enemies because they wore clothing which reached their feet, shaved their beards and tied up their hair in headbands.

Of course, you and I know that the Amazons were broads. Legend has it that they made love to a man only once, because he died right after, his richard squashed under crushing vaginal muscle control, which must have been like the pressures that the “Trieste” felt at the Challenger Deep. If you were an Amazonian man in those days, you had a hard choice to make – you either had the mother of all orgasms that was immediately followed by your penis being squeezed into a neutron star-like twiddledeedum and death or you could choose to skip sex, played a game of tennis and remained alive.

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When the Trojans decided to call in the Amazons in their war against the Achaeans(a.k.a the ancient Greeks), it was a matter of time before Penthesilea – the Queen of the Amazons was facing off against the Greeks’ silver bullet hero, Achilles. If Penthesilea had had the right intelligence briefing, she’d have known that Achilles had been given the boon of invincibility by Zeus and he could never get whacked by anyone.

Unless. Unless the guy knew about Achilles’s heel, which unfortunately Penthesilea didn’t. No one had told her about it. Long story short, Achilles slew her. Oh yeah, in ancient Greece you didn’t kill anyone, you slew them.

When Achilles removed the helmet and chest plate from the corpse and saw what was underneath (especially under the chest plate) he immediately regretted killing her. Some historians say Plutarch wrote that Achilles muttered under his breath, “My oh my! Hey, Patroclus, get a load of those knockers!” 

According to Homer, Achilles was bowled over by Penthesilea’s beauty and fell head over heels in love with her – her corpse, that is. He begged his mother, Zeus’s favorite sea nymph Thetis, to bring Penthesilea back to life.

Thetis could bring Penthesilea back to life if she wanted to. Zeus had given her magical powers in exchange for oral sex morning noon and night. But to Achilles’ dismay, Thetis made excuses and begged off. Knowing Zeus’s roving eyes, she didn’t want competition.

In case you come across a differing version of the story of Penthesilea and Achilles, ignore it. This is the official one. Oh yeah.

Whatever the truth about the Amazons, there have been exceedingly strong women through the ages who have kicked ass. There have been many, some good and some scheming, but they all had some things in common – they knew exactly what men wanted.

Like the Roman Empress, Aggripina the Younger, for instance. Aggripina would stop at nothing in order to see her son, Nero, crowned emperor and that included poisoning her own hubby, the incumbent Emperor Claudius. In overwhelmingly patriarchal India, the Rani (Queen) Lakshmibai of princely Indian state of Jhansi, led her fighters against the British during the 1857 rebellion. They say, she knew each of the thousands of soldiers she commanded personally by name and made them feel special. 400 years prior, Jeanne d’Arc did exactly that. She infused tremendous morale into a rag tag French army and kicked English badunkadonk to hell and back. (It didn’t end well for her though. She got burnt at the stake but we’ll leave that story for another time).

Now burnt this into your soul…….

History has shown that women are far more capable of strong resilience under adversity than men. Research by the Harvard Business Review has concluded that women are perceived by their managers — particularly their male managers — to be more effective than men in virtually every functional area of work. They are more adept at multi-tasking and constantly exhibit initiative and nerve. They are eager to professionally develop themselves and are more firmly focused on results, while displaying high integrity and honesty. The HBR study found women to be more effective in 84% of the competencies that employers treasure the most in their managers.

If one goes by the number of years – perhaps ever since walls came up in 11000BC around the first human settlement on the northern coast of the Dead Sea at a tiny hamlet that would later be known as Jericho – yes, ever since then, gender inequality has been the longest running human rights issue ever.

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In 1960s, the American cigarette maker, Phillip Morris, launched a cigarette with a single target market – women. Unlike regular cigarettes, the new product, “Virginia Slims“, were slender and longer, making them look and feel feminine and elegant.

In those days cigarette ads were legal and so the launch was accompanied by a prize-winning ad campaign that had the tagline – “You’ve a come a long way, baby”. The copy was cheeky, aimed to portray the modern woman as being emancipated and no less than men.

Here is a collection of those ads. Take a minute to read the funny captions on the photos, they are hilarious………

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This one speaks the loudest – it portrays a stylish black woman in a freaky Afro top and bell bottoms, looking like she doesn’t give a damn. It is the only one that does not have any funny accompanying caption. The presence of a carefree black woman in the 1960s is the point.

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In the real world, gender equality remains a distant mirage even today. The percentage of women in senior leadership roles in business is still very low. In spite of the fact that women make better leaders, only around 5% of Fortune 500 CEOs are women.

Maybe I should have named this post “You still have a long way, Baby”.

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“In all things that you see breathing the breath of life, either courage or craft or speed has from the beginning of it’s existence protected and preserved each particular race. But those to whom nature has granted none of these qualities, so that they could neither live by their own means nor perform for us any usefull service in return for which they could be safe under our protection, they lie exposed untill nature brings them to extinction”

– Lucretius(99-55BC), in De Rerum Natura (“On the nature of things”), 1900 years prior to Charles Darwin’s natural selection

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It is 1598 and a boat from a large sailing ship beaches itself on a deserted island in the Indian Ocean, that we know today as Mauritius. Sailors jump out, wade ashore and begin exploring the surroundings. As they cut through the undergrowth, they see something they haven’t seen before – a huge ugly blunt-beaked bird, standing a metre tall, with brown feathers. The bird seems docile, as if it is domesticated. Having never come face to face with a predator, it makes no attempt to flee, seeming completely unafraid of the visitors.

They name the bird the “Dodo”.

Mauritius is soon transformed by the men from the ship. Over the next two years, more ships arrive and soon there’s no place for the dodo to go. The men slaughter the dodos indiscriminately for their meat and the animals they had brought with them (the dogs and the rats that had stowed away in their crates), they eat the dodos’ eggs. In less than a century, the entire species disappears. The last dodo was sighted in 1688.

At the time no one believed that the dodo could be absolutely wiped out as a species. The word “extinction” hadn’t yet appeared in the world’s lexicons. Why would God create an animal, some thought, only to let it die out?

It took another 150 years for the dodo to be officially declared “extinct”.

Today we know a lot more about what drives animals to extinction. We have also become aware of the pressures that have started to bear down on our own species and it’s fragile longevity.

Yet, we think of ourselves as invincible, too smart to go the way of the dodo.

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It is the summer of 1918. Phillis Brown, the daughter of a British army officer, lives in an upscale neighbourhood in the heart of London. When the First World War broke out four years ago, she joined the Volunteer Aid Detachment, where she still works as a nurse, taking care of wounded soldiers returning from the Western Front in France.

In the autumn of 1918, the howitzers finally fall silent across Europe and Londoners begin to pick up the pieces and get on with their lives. Phillis hears pre-school children in her neighbourhood singing a strange new nursery rhyme. When I was a kid growing up in India, I was made to sing the same song, quite unaware of what the words really meant…

Ring-a ring o-Rosies, pocket full of posies

A-tishoo!! A-tishoo!!

And we all fall down

I had a bird and it’s name was Enza

I opened the window

And in flew Enza!

As the war is drawing to an end, Phillis notices more and more of the returning soldiers having severe breathing problems. No one has a clue as to what the disease is but whatever it is, its deadly. Some of the soldiers have a dark purple flush spreading all over their bodies. Their lungs are filled with a kind of sticky pus and they gasp and wheeze as they try to breathe, their eyes filled with the kind of terror one feels when one is unable to understand what is happening to him.

The soldiers die in the hundreds, their screams caught inside their choked throats. After that those who come to visit them – their relatives and friends – they begin dying and their friends and relatives and theirs and theirs. Phillis realizes that this a mysterious infection of some kind, which starts with a head cold.

The winter of 1918 is now around the corner when one day Phillis catches a chill, followed by high fever and a dry cough. In order not to infect her family, she moves out and begins living in a nearby boarding house. Two days later aged just 20, one chill evening a week from Christmas, Phillis Brown breathes her last.

It is estimated that 50-100 million people died in the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic that is now known as the “Spanish flu”. More people died of this disease than all the fatalities from the two World Wars combined.

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The COVID-19 pandemic – a common flu with a tweaked DNA that triggers acute respiratory distress syndrome or asphyxiation – makes one wonder about coming close to extinction. You are infected by just being in the same room as an infected person who is simply breathing normally. COVID-19 does not need someone to cough or sneeze next to you.

The virus, a microscopic parasite that has the ability to survive outside a host body for 3-4 days, deposits itself in the cells that line your throat and lungs and turns them into mini corona virus factories that churn out even more viruses that infect more cells, all the while disguising itself as a normal microbe, one of the many harmless microbes that already live inside you.

Soon your body is hijacked and you don’t even know it. That’s just the incubation period, when there are no symptoms, not even a sore throat or a cough. All around you people are beginning to wear masks so they don’t carry or receive the infection.

If you are an American, of course you are imbued with a typically American sense of faux bravado, a carry-forward of the American exceptionalism that we see today. “Lets go about our lives normally, let’s not let the virus dictate how we live,” you’ll say. Visiting a nightclub is your birthright and no one can take that away from you, not even a virus. “Didn’t we go about leading normal lives the very day after 9/11? That way, the terrorists didn’t win and so will it be with this pesky virus. Isn’t our’s the greatest country in the world?” you’ll say and you will go out on a date.

But the virus is not a terrorist. It has no ideology, no emotion, no passion and no devotion to any belief. The virus does not have the ability to think. It has a single-minded goal – to find a host and replicate, to keep it’s host alive so it can live in it and multiply.

By the time you leave the establishment that evening, you will have infected 35 other people, including the girl you brought along.

5 days into the onset of the infection, your immune system has finally begun to fight the virus. You start getting the chills of fever, perhaps aching muscles, a sore throat and dry coughs too. You begin to lose your sense of taste and smell. Your immune system is now beginning to overreact. It is causing inflammation inside vital organs within your body, filling tiny sacs that hold oxygen in your lungs with water, in much the same manner as HAPE (High Altitude Pulmonary Edema) afflicts alpine climbers. On X-rays, your lungs begin to exhibit dark patches – a sign that pneumonia is setting in. You try to take deep breaths in order to breathe in some air but you only wheeze. Your chest feels like it is in a vice grip.

At this point, if there is no emergency room doctor to insert a tube down your throat and connect you to a ventilator you will see a gaunt man in a cape holding a long scythe hovering near your hospital bed, waiting to snip the thread that connects your soul to your body. If he has his middle finger raised as in the image above, you are history.

When there are millions like you across the world, it is a pandemic and that’s what happened in 2020

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The good news – so far, natural cataclysms have never wiped us out as a species, although a super-volcano in Indonesia 76000 years ago almost did. The eruption, known as the ”Toba Event”, ejected volcanic ash into the Earth’s upper atmosphere, creating a 1000-year long cooling cycle that left only a few thousand human survivors in the whole world.

Pandemics too are natural disasters that have the ability to wipe us out as a species but somehow we have managed to survive those as well.

During the beginning of the Dark Ages, 540-542AD, the “Plague of Justinian” decimated the population of the region in and around the Byzantine Empire, around the same time that an Icelandic volcano erupted, blanketing the earth’s atmosphere with ash and bringing on a decades long winter. While the plague remained active for two centuries and took 100 million lives in Europe, the sudden cold caused by the volcanic eruption decimated crops the world over, triggering famines and taking another 100 million lives.

800 years on, around 1350AD, we had the bubonic plague known as the Black Death or Pestilence, in Eurasia,. Within just three years, a third of the world’s population (200 million) had perished.

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But just because we’ve never been completely wiped out in the past, doesn’t mean we won’t be in the future. The threat of new potentially deadlier existential threats have appeared over the horizon. Climate change, drug-resistant viruses, nuclear war, large asteroid impact, out-of-control artificial intelligence, super volcanos, coronal mass ejections (solar flares) – these are very real threats of the modern age that could wipe us all out completely.

Historical record shows that once every thousand years, an event has occurred that has wiped out a sizeable percentage of the human population. Occasionally a mammoth cataclysm like the super-volcano in Toba has brought us a hair-breadth from extinction.

Dr Simon Beard, a researcher at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk in Cambridge, thinks of himself as an optimist, but in his work he spends most of his time trying to figure out how the world might end. He says that an existential threat does not necessarily mean every last human being will die out. It could instead be something that destroys civilization as we know it. Humanity may just make it but we could be reduced to a handful, surviving at the subsistence level of hunter-gatherers who roamed Africa 100,000 years ago.

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The two above mentioned plague pandemics started at European ports, carried in by merchant ships that had stowaway rats which had plague-infected fleas. In the case of the COVID-19, Chinese scientists suspect the source to be pangolins, a species of ant-eater that is highly sought-after in China for it’s meat and scales.

If only the Chinese would stop eating crazy shit like cockroaches and snakes and dogs and pangolins, maybe the world would be a safer place. SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) was caused by the Chinese eating civets that in turn had transported the virus from horseshoe bats to humans. Goddammit, who eats civets? We gift our women with jackets lined with civet fur but we have to wait till the Chinese have eaten them first.

If one were to follow the thousand-year thumb rule then it is now time for the next big one. Will it be another infinitely more infectious COVID-19 style virus? Could the thousand km diameter super magma chamber boiling and frothing beneath the Yellowstone National Park explode, its éjecta ushering in a millenium long winter? Or will it be 99942 Apophis, the half-kilometre thick near earth asteroid that is very likely to impact the Earth in 2029?

Will there be an end game and if so, what’s it going to be?

 

When he died, in December 2016, Marine combat pilot, war hero, astronaut and US Senator, Col John Glenn had been married 68 years, to his childhood sweetheart. He credited Annie for being the very reason for his success in life.

The story of John and Annie Glenn is the very well spring of inspiration.

John first met Annie when they were neighbors and their moms would put the two five-year olds together in a large basket swing in the backyard and they would spend the afternoons giggling and screaming.

As Annie grew, she was found to have a severe stutter in her speech, so bad that she couldn’t even utter certain words without going into a long stutter. That led her to be shunned and bullied in school – until John took charge of her ‘security’. After that, she was never bothered again.

Glenn remained true to Annie through seven decades and sometime during this very long honeymoon, Annie was able to conquer her stutter through therapy and perseverance.

In 1982, a reporter for The Boston Globe asked Glen, who was then considering running for the 1984 US Presidential elections, whether marrying someone with such a severe stutter ever made him reconsider his presidential bid.

“That never really made any difference,” he replied,” we grew up together with her stutter and I knew the person she was and I loved the person she was and that was that.”

John Glenn passed on in December 2016. For me, it is okay to have never ever met a man like John Glenn but still feel a sense of loss at another little bit of good, chipped away and lost inside the maelstrom of survival. Annie Glenn passed away in May 2020, her death caused by complications from a severe Covid-19 infection. She was 100.

There must be so many ways to show your love for each other. Little simple ways, like this one I read about the Glenns somewhere…..

John and Annie liked to play a secret game between themselves. Whenever, as a combat pilot in the fifties, Glenn went on a mission, he would turn at the front door of their little cottage at the air base and give Annie a quick peck on the cheek and say with faux curtness,” I’m going down to the corner store for some gum. You want any? Yours is pineapple, isn’t it?”

“No, silly,” Annie would smile,”Jill Travers at middle school liked pineapple. Mine is orange. And don’t be too long. There’s shepherd’s pie for dinner….”

The same conversation played out on a clear blue February morning in 1962, when Glenn stood at the door of the astronauts’ bus and she touched the visor of his helmet.

This time she strained to hold back her tears as she said, “Don’t be too long….”

“I know. There’s shepherd’s pie for supper,” he finished with a grin.

She watched him board the Mercury-Atlas rocket that stood with vapor steaming from it a mile away, ready to fly him into the unknown.

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A Pakistani-Canadian colleague had just returned after a month in Karachi, settling his father’s affairs after his funeral. He was the only offspring and his mother had predeceased her husband of 60 years the previous spring. We were at the lunch table at work, when I said to him, “Your father, what kind of a father was he?”

He thought for a moment and said,” I never got to know him actually. He was always so busy running his restaurant chain, while my mother brought me up. One thing I do remember though and it was when I was in college. Late evenings, I would be upstairs in my room, books and notes spread around me, trying to cram as much as I could, for a test. When Abbu arrived home, it would be late and my mother would be asleep in bed in their ground-floor bedroom, the first door to the right from the front door.”

Here my colleague’s eyes got misty and he cleared his throat as he carried on, “At the sound of the front door opening, I would go over to the landing, in time to see him stoop to remove his shoes. He would give me a little wave and tip-toe over to the bedroom door which was always left ajar so there would be some circulation in the steamy heat. He would stand still for a long while, looking in, staring at my mother’s still form and then he would turn to me and ask in a whisper, “Has she eaten?”

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It is hard to put in words the transcendental emotion, the sublime feel of couples who have been married 40,50,60 years. My wife and I have been together 28 years. Almost all long-married folks agree that it is tough making marriages work, but that in the end they choose to stay together because of an almost indescribable connection that has been formed over the years by myriads of little things that they feel about each other.

Its the little words they say to each other that matter.

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She was cute, I’ll hand you that.

Slightly built, she sat at the edge of the bed, her hands clasped on her lap, like they had nowhere to go. She slipped her ghunghat (veil) off, reached up and carefully undid the pins holding up her slightly messed up hair. It cascaded down in curls, over her shoulders.

Her gaze went back toward the floor, unsure of what she must do next. The bed covers were strewn with rose petals but she seemed oblivious to them.

For the moment, she was trying not to pass out, under all that bridal finery and the oppressive heat. Slim jhumkas (traditional Hindu ear rings) peeked out from under the curls. She had on, the bridal ‘mangal sutra’ that I’d tied round her neck an hour or so back, at the ceremony – a yellow braided string, coated with turmeric, with a tiny gold pendant, flanked on either side by black beads.

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I recalled the wedding. The mangal sutra had been handed to me open ended, with knots on both ends, so the beads wouldn’t escape. As I had slipped my fingers behind her neck to tie the two ends together, she repeated after the priest, in a soft but distinct whisper, “You are the reason of my existence. With this thread around my neck, I shall pray that may you live long.”

As her lips formed the words, for a brief moment, she lifted her eyes to search into mine, “Who are you, Robindranath Dey?” they seemed to enquire.

The 3-day ceremony was now over and here I was, my butt on the opposite edge of the bed, still in my sherwani, kurta and churidar, the air conditioning hardly able to drive away my discomfort at the May humidity. Goddamn, why the heck does May have to be the auspicious month for Hindu marriages? Wish I had my bermuda shorts on.

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Bermuda shorts reminded me of the last time I wore them, the Saturday before I left for India. It was at the ball game, NY State vs Ohio. Vicky Tannenbaum had come along and as she sat next, her left arm loosely draped over my bare thigh, her hand had snuck further in, unnoticed. While 10000 guys cheered the NYS team on, she’d suddenly dug her nails in playfully.

“Ouch, watch it, will you? I only have two of those” I’d shouted out, with pain mixed with sudden pleasure. She’d giggled, nuzzling her red head against my chest.

“Take me to your dorm, Robby” she’d whispered into my ear. Back in my room, we’d torn at each other for the rest of the day. That night had been our last together and Vicky knew it. It didn’t bother her even a bit. She was attractive, on her way through med school with a straight-A average. Her parents had an already well established medical practice which she would simply walk into, after she got her MD. And she was cute as a button. There were lots of other fish in her pond.

When we were finally done, she lay across my chest, her red curls tickling my nose and me on my back. And as she slowly wrapped her legs round my thigh and lazily rocked herself back and forth, her wetness rubbing up against me, she mused, “You’re off to be married, to a Bengali country girl in a saree and my Dad will probably like to see me wed one of those orthodox toads in a Yarmulke, with those payots hanging from either side of his head. Well, I’ll teach Mr. Yarmulke a thing or two about putting those two side locks where they tickle,” she’d giggled.

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And now once again back in the present, the thought of Vicky started up a stirring within, as I found myself facing that almirah with mirrored doors, by the wall. From where I sat, perched on the opposite edge of the bed, I could see my bride in the mirror clearly, facing away, at an angle.

Her anchal (the end of the saree that’s slung over the left shoulder) had fallen and lay like a wreath round her, on the bed. She had a ‘nath’ (nose ring) on one nostril and a bala (wrist band) on each soft hand. They looked like they’d been handed down, from her mother . Her hair was still flecked with all that sprinkly, shiny stuff they chuck at you in a wedding. Her feet were beautiful. Pink, bordered by ‘alta’, a vermillion dye that Hindu women have on, after marriage. Pretty toes, some with rings on them, peeped through her slippers. Payals, probably of imitation silver, transformed her ankles into the loveliest I’d seen. Yellowish-brown mehndi lines adorned both feet as well as her hands.

Don’t know how long we just sat there, facing away from each other, on either side of the bed but it was she who broke the ice first. She brought her gaze up to me, “Shunoon, ei biye ki aapnar moter birudhdhey hoyeche?” (Did this marriage happen without your acquiescence?)

I straightened and walked to the barred window that looked out on Hazra Rd. An ice-cream vendor was pushing his cart down the sun baked lane, his head covered by a wet gamcha (wash cloth made from a thin cotton fabric), knarled feet in torn flip-flops. “Kwaliteee!” he cried plaintively.

I turned back toward her and lifted my eyes to hers’, in a slow and excruciatingly painful effort. “No,” I replied and I quickly turned back to stare out the window. The ice-cream vendor was gone, but I could still hear his cries faintly in the distance, “Kwaliteee!” By now a bunch of stray mongrel dogs had decided to give him harmony. Every time he cried out, they barked and bayed at him, shuffling a few paces behind.

Just a minute had passed, when I felt her soft hands on my shoulders. She’d risen and come round the bed, to stand by my side, a little behind, away from the window. I shivered at her touch. I didn’t turn but continued to stare blindly at the scorching pavement below.

“Then why don’t you speak with me?” she reached up and held my cheeks in her palms and turned them so I was looking down at her beautiful face, “I left my home, my parents, my sisters and my little brother. And I have made this my home…..” her voice caught and I noticed that those long eyelashes were brimming with tears.

I gently grasped her two wrists and lowered her palms from my cheeks, till her hands were by her side. And I moved away just a bit. Don’t know why, but her touch was electric. I felt safer a couple of inches away. I was more comfortable with English. But she didn’t know a word of it. So Bengali it had to be, “And you? Was this with your approval?”

She nodded, dabbing her eyes with her anchal. “My father’s decision is my decision,” she said simply, “And now, your wish is mine. Forever”. QED- Theorem and corollary, I thought. With that simple statement, she leaned against me, and broke down into silent sobs.

I reached out and pulled her to me, gently holding her fragile body in my arms. After a while her sobbing subsided and I could feel her even breath on my chest, when all of a sudden, she wriggled out of my grasp, saying, “Wait, I’ll show you something.” She went up to the whatnot in the far corner and took out an ornate box made of brass. It was a ‘paaner dibey’, a small container normally used for betel leaves, nuts and zarda (chewing tobacco).

She ran her fingers lightly over the box. “My grandma used it when she was alive. Now, it’s mine.” She opened it carefully. Inside was just one article – a photo. It was me, striking a pose in front of the Lincoln Memorial. The one I’d sent through Baren when he came to India on his match-making expedition. “I spoke with you every day, ever since Barenda left it with us. I said to God, “Dear God, keep him safe”.

She left the box standing on the whatnot and turned, her young breasts squeezed up against my chest. An incredible warmth spread through us like wild fire, as I gently tilted her face up by her chin and said in mock severity, “My wish is yours. hmmmm. Do you have any idea what my first wish is?”

She smiled at that, feeling me harden against the pit of her stomach. With mock helplessness, her breath on my nostrils, she whispered, “No, why don’t you show me?”

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It is 48 years now, since that first magical night. Madhu still has that box. She likes to call it her ‘treasure chest’. It has a few additions in it. Pictures of a young man, his American wife, Betty and daughter, Sona. And a young woman, with her banker husband, Tod and journalist son Michael.

And one more picture, at the very bottom, a photo, frayed with age, of a young man, much slimmer then but still recognizable now, posing in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

Imagine you are a commoner in 800AD England. Hang on, that’s not possible. As per Wikipedia, the Angles, Saxons and Danes unified to form England only around 927AD, so that is still a century away.

So, let’s say you live in a village in the Kingdom of Wessex.

If you are taking a morning walk, you learn to stay away from the sidewalk and you stick to the middle of the road even though a passing horse might kick you in the nuts.

You avoid the sidewalks because folks clear out their ablutions by simply opening a window and chucking the contents of their bedpans out. You wouldn’t want that in your face, would you? It’ll be another 1000 years before they have gotten on to the concept of bathrooms and toilets and sewer systems.

In the absence of soap, you wash with ashes and you do that very rarely. Many of your friends and relatives don’t bathe or wash at all. They simply wait for it ta rain. It’s normal ta own only one set of clothes and wear it all year round. You wash it by leaping into a pond or just by being out in the rain. Children up to 10 run around barefoot and stark naked when the weather is not too cold.

The only motive power is the horse or other pack animal, such as the mule or the donkey and they are expensive. Everything, from the tallest fortress to the finest fabric, is made by hand. Books are copied by hand, at great expense, each edition the toil of one rare literate worker. Raw materials and hand tools are precious assets.

The fields are plowed by hand, sown only once in two or three years, left fallow and unfertilized when not sown. The only fertilizer is manure and not enough for all the land. The crop yield per acre is a third of what it will be in another thousand years, by which time agriculture will be an organized industry. Right now, there is not enough grain to feed the population, so land is precious, even to kill for.

Are you healthier than my kind (ie: folks from the 21st Century)? In general, no, because even underdeveloped places will have better healthcare and disease prevention. But if you wonder if the strongest among you in the Dark Ages is stronger than the strongest man in the 21st Century, your man will win hands down and that’s because of the hard physical labor he is used to. His diet is likely to be unrefined and even raw. Obesity isn’t even a word right now.

The only organized industry sectors that employ workers in numbers are construction, lumber, handicrafts and weaponry. Basic necessities are made at home. Peasants like you spin wool and weave linen. The fabric for clothing is very strong, so strong that one dress can last a lifetime literally and even be handed down after death. Of course, your late grandma’s surcoat might stink but it is not an issue, you are immune to smells.

Small mom-and pop businesses are everywhere – blacksmiths, tinsmiths, potters, carpenters, saddlers, wood and stone sculptors, lacemakers, weavers and cobblers, these are folks with skills that have been handed down through the ages by ancestors. Serfs in these businesses usually do better than the rest.

Living conditions leave a lot to be desired and comfort has declined. You make do without things that in ancient Rome were considered necessary for basic comfort. Beds are a luxury and you sleep on straw, on the ground. The principal item of home furniture is the multipurpose ‘coffer’, which acts as a seat, a bed and a chest for storing household stuff.

When it is time to eat, wooden planks are set on trestles, as makeshift tables. Tableware is practically non-existent and the members of a family eat with their bare hands out of the same wooden bowl, dipping slices of hard, stale bread into the bowl.

Peasants build themselves huts to live in and these burn down from time to time. In the densely packed alleys within town walls, fires are an ever-present menace. However, the huts can be rebuilt in a jiffy, the owner hardly suffering any loss beyond a few clay pots and blankets of skins. Grain stocks are buried underground, in sacks, so they are not destroyed by fires.

There are no drainage systems and a spell of wet weather can turn courtyards and streets into quagmires. With huge quantities of dung from the large number of horses, cattle, lambs and sheep, a town can have an all-pervasive stink of ordure, smoke and damp.

There is yet no such thing as medical science. There is no medication or medical procedures. That’s the great leveller these days. Disease doesn’t give a fuck if you are rich or poor, king, vassal, overseer or serf.

Disease and death are everywhere. There are hundreds of ways you can end up dead, starting from birth. You might simply catch the flu, inhale smoke from the ever burning hearth with no ventilation, contract tuberculosis, venereal disease from dirty richards and pussies, food poisoning from putrid meat. There are no sewers, no method for the removal of human waste. Pasteurization is centuries away and you could ingest well water contaminated with faeces.

The Dark Ages are known for its pandemics. Disease can be brought in by rats from a docked merchant vessel, wipe out millions and last over a century. One, the Justinianic Plague, began 250 years prior and killed a fifth of Europe’s population. There are still affected pockets everywhere in your time, though the acquired herd immunity has almost completely stamped it out by now.

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After dark is when life gets dicey. Remember, there is no established law and order. You try not ta venture out anywhere after the sun sets. The only light is from wax candles, resin torches or tallow that release as much smoke as light. Anything that is used to produce light is very very expensive. You avoid expending your meagre store of illumination by rising and going to bed with the sun.

In the end, what is important these days is manual dexterity and muscular strength. You have ta have strong feet and legs. The only mode of travel for a commoner like you is by foot. For you, a 50, or even 250-mile walk to the next town is du jour, run-of-the mill, like. Distance is of course not measured in miles. It’s in days of travel, like a “3-day walk”.

You’ll take several days to reach your destination but there are inns on the way who will give you room and board if you cut their load of wood for the fire.

There are other units of distance measurement, like the “furlong”, roughly 220yds, the distance an ox can furrow in one go. 40 “poles” make one furlong. The smallest unit of length is a “barleycorn” which is roughly a third of an inch. I bet you guys get together in a tavern, load up fulla ale and joke about some guy’s ’barleycorn-sized” richard.

On your travels, some innkeepers will let you stay just to hear the “tidings”. You’re their only source of news. Writing is the luxury of the few literati and you’re not one of ‘em, so people like you have developed solid memories. You have no intellectual baggage beyond what you carry in your head in the moment. Those innkeepers love it when you offload those memories on them. You can even be a professional story teller, like a walking Wikipedia and boy, then the innkeeper’s plump daughter is yours for the night, like.

The shortage of the tools of daily life has given rise to adaptability. If you are a traveler, you are able ta tell the direction by the stars and the time by the movement of the sun. In your head you carry a calendar that is able to broadly forecast the seasons and the change in weather patterns. You know which plants are medicinal though not yet why.

For what you do not know, the theoretical, you rely on the tales of the elders of your family and their painstakingly acquired experiences of life in general.

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Today, here are the things I value, stuff that I don’t necessarily need ta survive but I still covet ta lead a comfortable life…. A sturdy Toyota Tundra, a lake side property, maybe a chalet in the country, cash to fly me to vacation spots, maybe a small single-engine Cessna 172 to appease my adventurous side.

Now let’s check out what you think of being of value to you….. horses, mules, donkeys, oxen, bulls, sheep and poultry. And a little plot of land ta grow wheat and barley, maybe some hemp and flax. Have these and you will consider yourself contented. Livestock provide you with nearly all your day to day needs. Flayed skins protect you from the cold. Blood is mixed in with clay to make cement. Horns are used for cups, wool for clothes and feathers for quilts and mattresses.

One thing that you don’t have ta pray for is wild game, lotsa wild game. You have that in plenty. Wild life is abundant. The woods are filled with the clamour of birds singing.

This paucity of grain does not cause starvation however, due to the abundance of meat from wild game. Most of England is covered in dense forest, teeming with bear, boar and wild fowl. Herds of deer nonchalantly browse the clearings. Hare, rabbits, partridges, foxes and wolves, they pack the woods with relentless cacophony. Sometimes, the skies darken with dense flocks of migrating geese. You just have ta aim at the general direction. Everyone is a hunter. You go out and hunt what you want for dinner, it’s that simple.

Hunting is not a pastime. It is a serious job of work. The object is your daily nourishment, though you have managed to make it kinda fun, like a sport, with competing teams and their own spotter dogs. Slaughtered boar and stags are brought home in triumph. On the eve of village feasts, your job is to contribute hundreds of quail, partridge, thrushes and ducks. You bring them in a game bag and tip them in a bloody heap on the kitchen floor, completely unaware of the concept of hygiene.

Your home has a perpetual stink of tanning hides, animal blood, mingling with the aroma of roasting meat, further mixed with the odor of earth, smoke, sweat, dogs and faeces.

And bad breath, body odor and the disgusting smell of toe jam. Man, I have no idea how you manage ta live in close proximity to unwashed bodies. How can you even think of having sex with your spouse who hasn’t bathed in a year, Dude?

I have a theory. Maybe you get turned on by body odor, how about that? I know of an African tribe in present day Senegal whose women won’t sleep with their men unless they go at least a fortnight without washing. Ugh!

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Post-Script

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The above was a chat I had with a random Medieval man when I time travelled to 800AD and now it’s time ta get back to the present day.

The dark ages were truly dark but there is a belief among some historians that had there never been a period of stagnation, there would most certainly not have been a Renaissance and an industrial age thereafter. Great creativity and enlightenment always follows pervasive ignorance. And vice versa.

Will MAGA America similarly lead to progressive enlightenment? Chances are slim, but who knows? The Dark Ages were somehow necessary, it is thought, so maybe MAGA America is necessary.

Necessary or not, the Dark Ages were an Eurocentric phenomenon. It was only Europe that stagnated, where folks dumbed down. Outside, the world flourished…..

The Muslim Arabs had an explosion of scientific output. Al-Khwarizmi gave us algebra around 820AD. Avicenna and Jamshīd al-Kāshī made advances in trigonometry, geometry and Arabic numerals. Islamic doctors came close to finding remedies for diseases like smallpox and measles and challenged classical Greek medical theory.

In India, as early as 500AD, mathematicians like Aryabhata and Bhaskara were giving us geometry and trigonometry. Interestingly, Aryabhata was born the same year that the Roman Empire fell to the Goths and triggered the Dark Ages. The move from zero as merely a placeholder by the Mayans and Babylonians – a tool to distinguish larger numbers from smaller ones – to a digit of its own was established in India by Aryabhata and then began being used in calculations by Bramhagupta around 800AD.

But Middle eastern and Indian advancements during Europe’s Dark Ages pale against the brilliance of the Chinese during this period. China’s Tang Dynasty (618-906AD) brought spectacular scientific innovations into the world, beginning with binary code, paper, printing, the compass and gunpowder, to name just a few. Although legend has it that the Mesopotamians first invented the abacus, the first archaeological evidence of a working model similar to one used today, came from 1200AD China.

Alas, the East had not realized that scientific advancement had to be in lock step with advancements in military power. The Dark Ages had cemented Europe as a martial entity that had learned how to fight and conquer, while on the other side of the world enlightenment and peace prevailed. So, while the Europeans learned to colonize, the east remained blissfully trusting.

The pendulum has swung back again. The east is once more on the rise, this time with sufficient military power to make a wannabe conquerer think twice. No East India Company will succeed this time around.

That’s life, isn’t it?