“He has blamed everything on corona,” the old boatman said. “But who is corona? Corona is the mother. Corona does not trouble anyone…” It ...
“He has blamed everything on corona,” the old boatman said. “But who is corona? Corona is the mother. Corona does not trouble anyone…”
It took me half a minute to understand the short, bald man, his thin legs sticking out under an oversized shirt, his eyes translucent with cataract, was using the Hindi word for compassion, karuna, for the coronavirus. “Maa ko aakshep laga ke sab band kiya hai,” he said. A compassionate mother has been unfairly blamed for the lockdown.
It was the prime minister who was actually responsible for people’s suffering, the old man rambled on, without naming him. “Poore desh ko per diya hai,” he said. “He has squeezed the whole country.”
There was a sudden and sharp interjection. “Aiye,” a voice growled from behind. “Come here.”
“You keep quiet,” the old man shot back. “Let me speak. It doesn’t matter if she is recording.”
The voice that had tried to intervene was the boatman’s son who was toiling over a half-constructed boat on the ghats of river Ganga in the city of Banaras, part of the Varanasi parliamentary constituency of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on a slightly rainy morning in the first week of June. He was wary of his father speaking up against the prime...
