A Pandemic Novel

Since a couple of years I have been drawn to titles by Indian writers originally in English and also those translated into English, especially those writers I haven’t heard about before and also little known names. I have novels by Uma Vasudev, Nergis Dalal, Mayah Balse, Leena Dhingra, Veena Nagpal and such writers not much discussed anywhere. To avoid taking a nap in the afternoon during the lockdown I am reading books by these writers most of which are around two hundred pages and therefore short enough to complete in a couple of hours.

But there is a novel that I am able, with great difficulty at that, to read only a few pages a day. It is ‘Trapped’ by Narendrapal Singh, originally in Punjabi. I had found it sometime last year I reckon and had bought it after seeing it with the same seller for a few months. I did not want to buy it for some reason other than the illustration on the cover. I thought I would be missing a great book so I bought it.

On the cover of’Trapped’ it says it has won the Sahitya Akademi award and also was banned in Punjab for obscenity. It won the Sahitya Akademi alright though I do not find anything in the novel deserving of that award. Then there’s no obscenity either. But what got me interested was that in the novel about a Punjabi guy trapped in the airport at New York while waiting for his American girl friend, there’s a pandemic that sweeps around the world at the same time. It is called ‘Hemi Parisec’ and though it was not fatal the symptoms were that the left side of the person was paralysed, the person experienced blackouts. But it caused enough alarm for the US and the USSR to get worried about it, especially the President of the US, and not surprisingly it is in India that the cure for it is found.

It is a bizarre cure, and two doctors in Ratlam in Madhya Pradesh discover it. Apparently, people in areas on either side of the Tropic of Cancer are not affected by it, and only such area in India is free of Hemi Parisec. It seems that the banyan trees are somehow related to the cure of this virus. The Swedish Academy hands out two Special Nobel Prizes for these two doctors! It is an outlandish story and I am yet to finish the novel.
More about it after I am done with the novel.