2 ★ FT Weekend 4 April/5 April 2020
Life
see daily in the media come across as
rather gruff but unflappable, and
people do seem to trust them. The
policies of Sweden and the UK were
almost identical at the outset, but the
Swedish epidemiologists stuck to their
guns and calculations when their
British counterparts switched track.
And the Swedish politicians follow
their experts, to a tee.
The Swedish prime minister Stefan
Löfven, social democrat, ex-union
leader, ex-welder, made a speech on TV
to the nation, a rare occurrence in this
country, and came across as rather
Churchillian, with the national flag
behind him and on his lapel, talking
about duty and sacrifice. His approval
rating has almost doubled. At the same
time, much of the political dissent has
died down. There has even been talk
about forming a grand coalition
government — something not seen in
Sweden since the second world war.The late March sun is shining, but the
impression of warmth is deceptive. As I
glance out through the windows of my
writer’s den, the street below looks
pretty much as it always has. Sweden
has not followed its neighbours in
imposing a lockdown, and people are
still moving about, on bikes or on foot.
I can’t see any face masks. There are
fewer customers than usual in the
shops, the restaurants are empty and
the streams of commuters are visibly
thinning out. But it is almost business
as usual. On the face of it.
Uppsala, where I live, is an old
university town north of Stockholm,
the current epicentre of the pandemic
here. TV, radio and the papers discuss
almost nothing but this topic, and
when I talk to other people it’s the
same. A recurring phrase: “We are
heading into the storm.”
That evening, a Wednesday, the
soundscape of the town changes. These
often ebullient streets are more or less
empty, silent. The university’s teaching
facilities have just closed down.Some effects of the pandemic are
obvious, particularly the economic
ones. On Thursday, yet another crisis
package is announced, this time
focusing on small businesses, which are
being wiped out. It is a setback for
globalisation, and yet another recession
will surely lead to a populist surge.
Other effects will be harder to measure.
Will we continue with all these trips
and all these bloody meetings?
I have a number of engagements that
have been called off, but I can certainly
use that time for other things. Like
writing. (As a writer, you are a sort of
semi-recluse anyway, so I find the self-
isolation part a piece of cake.) The
Swedish Academy, of which I am a
member, has been convening on
Thursday afternoons in Stockholm
ever since 1786, but now that is
cancelled as well — quite
unprecedented. We have a meeting of
sorts, via the internet. There are jokes
— “But how will we now get our
traditional schnapps?” and so on — but
it turns out rather well.
On Friday I have lunch at my regular
place, Café Linné close to the Linnaeus
Garden, and chat with the owner,
Yannis. He is getting quite desperate.
The number of customers has
plummeted, and he has been forced to
lay off all his staff. “I can stick it out for
perhaps two months,” he says, “then
I’m going bust.”And yet the regulations here in
Sweden are lenient. Swedes are often
described as the Prussians of
Scandinavia — not least by the Danes —
but now our neighbours are
flabbergasted by us not closing schools,
not cutting back public transport and
not stopping people from meeting.
Perhaps we are a bit flabbergasted as
well. But “expert” is not yet a four-
letter word in this country. The ones wethe generations are much closer, also in
a physical sense, and that has
obviously taken its toll. This
mechanism can be seen here as well.
Earlier this week it was reported that a
disproportionate part of the
coronavirus dead in Stockholm were
elderly Somali immigrants.
A crisis such as this always brings out
the best and the worst in people. On
Sunday there are reports about scams,
thefts of alcohol gel from hospitals, and
people selling face masks at exorbitant
prices. At the same time, a call for help
at the hospitals, issued to people who
have left the profession or who are
studying it, has produced some 5,000
volunteers just in Stockholm, more
than can be employed. What did she
say, the Polish Nobel laureate Wislawa
Szymborska? “We know ourselves only
as far as we’ve been tested.”What is it all about, this seemingly
odd Swedish behaviour? Part of it is
about the old trust that Swedes still
have in the state, for historical reasons,
and the principles that underpin that
state. (There is a rule in the
constitution that forbids ministers
from intervening in cases handled by
their agencies; the heads of state
institutions are ruled by the
government as a whole rather than by
individual ministers. This makes these
institutions difficult to override.)
But some of it probably has to do
with Sweden’s undramatic
contemporary history, by fluke
untouched by wars since the early 19th
century. This experience, or rather lack
thereof, has fostered something that
indeediscomplacency. But that can
only go so far. All the people I talk to
take the coronavirus threat seriously —
an escape into reality, perhaps? It looks
as if the Swedes have discovered a stiff
upper lip they didn’t know they had.
Someone working at a hospital tells me
they have installed refrigerator
containers to be used as makeshift
morgues. By the end of Monday, 146
have died nationwide.
On Tuesday I make contact with an
old friend, and discover that we both
have considered the “Decameron
option” — leaving the plague-ridden
city and holing up in our summer
houses (a move, by the way, that has
just been expressly forbidden in
Norway).
But not for now. We are still bracing
ourselves for “the storm”. But this, too,
shall pass.Peter Englund is a historian and author of
‘The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate
History of the First World War’The more lenient Swedish
restrictions feel like a bit of a gamble,
but only time will tell if they actually
work. We are back with the old adage:
nobody knows what is going to happen,
but afterwards everyone can explain it.I wake on Saturday after an uneasy
dream about my mother. She is elderly
and frail and suffering from dementia,
living in my old home town more than
1,000km from here. A smoker since
her teenage years, she also has lung
cancer. If infected, her chances of
survival are probably slim. I see her far
too seldom, and that has been on my
conscience for quite a while now.
As a rule, elderly people live alone
here, mostly in nursing homes, and not
with their children. But perhaps this
less admirable side of the Swedish
mentality and welfare state now has
some benign unintended
consequences. In both Italy and Spain,Schnapps before the storm
Sweden’s neighbours are
flabbergasted by us not
closing schools, not cuttingback public transport
BloombergThe novelist Alexander McCall
Smith writes powerfully in this
week’s edition of the need for us all
to try to avoid wallowing in the
“sombre side” of life. “We must
continue to be able to smile even
when things are dire — perhaps
especially when things are dire.”
Some readers have contacted me
making the same point. We have
done our best to balance coverage
of this wrenching saga with much-
needed upliftment. I would direct
you in particular to the back page,
where you will find Janan Ganesh
on thebelle époqueof the restaurant,
Joy Lo Dico on Bob Dylan and
McCall Smith’s cat cartoon.
As for coronavirus, the explorer
Erling Kagge seeks to inspire us on
page 4 with lessons from the ice cap
in appreciating silence (I last saw
him for lunch in London a few
weeks ago, a prelapsarian age); on
page 7 our books editors draw on
Pushkin and author Allie Esiri for
counsel on poems in a pandemic;
and on page 11 our arts editor writes
about the cult of Netflix’sTiger King.
I hope you are all keeping well. I
know that for all our efforts some of
you can no longer get hold of a
copy. You can read us online and
via the epaper, which recreates the
look of the paper. You can also
engage online with our writers.
Jancis Robinson, our wine
columnist, will be online on the
homepage of FT.com at noon on
Sunday — unmissable, surely.
Alec Russell, editor,
FT WeekendLife & Arts
Lexicon
UP P SA L A
D I A RYP ET E R
E N G LU N DEvery one of the walking people I
spoke to was worried about the virus.
But it was less real, less present in their
lives than looming unemployment,
starvation and the violence of the
police. Of all the people I spoke to that
day, including a group of Muslim tailors
who had only weeks ago survived the
anti-Muslim attacks, one man’s words
especially troubled me. He was a car-penter called Ramjeet, who planned to
walk all the way to Gorakhpur near the
Nepal border.
“Maybe when Modiji decided to do
this, nobody told him about us. Maybe
he doesn’t know about us”, he said. “Us”
means approximately 460m people.
State governments in India (as in the
US) have showed more heart and under-
standing in the crisis. Trade unions, pri-
vate citizens and other collectives are
distributing food and emergency
rations. The central government has
been slow to respond to their desperatehas incorporated the Covid story into its
24/7 toxic anti-Muslim campaign. An
organisation called the Tablighi Jamaat,
which held a meeting in Delhi before the
lockdown was announced, has turned
out to be a “super spreader”. That is
being used to stigmatise and demonise
Muslims. The overall tone suggests that
Muslims invented the virus and have
deliberately spread it as a form of jihad.
The Covid crisis is still to come. Or
not. We don’t know. If and when it does,
we can be sure it will be dealt with, with
all the prevailing prejudices of religion,
caste and class completely in place.
Today (April 2) in India, there are
almost 2,000 confirmed cases and 58
deaths. These are surely unreliable
numbers, based on woefully few tests.
Expert opinion varies wildly. Some pre-
dict millions of cases. Others think the
toll will be far less. We may never know
the real contours of the crisis, even
when it hits us. All we know is that the
run on hospitals has not yet begun.
India’s public hospitals and clinics —
which are unable to cope with the
almost 1m children who die of diar-
rhoea, malnutrition and other health
issues every year, with the hundreds of
thousands of tuberculosis patients (a
quarter of the world’s cases), with a vastanaemic and malnourished population
vulnerable to any number of minor ill-
nesses that prove fatal for them — will
not be able to cope with a crisis that is
like what Europe and the US are dealing
with now. All healthcare is more or less
on hold as hospitals have been turned
over to the service of the virus. The
trauma centre of the legendary All India
Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi is
closed, the hundreds of cancer patients
known as cancer refugees who live on
the roads outside that huge hospital
driven away like cattle.
People will fall sick and die at home.
We may never know their stories. They
may not even become statistics. We can
only hope that the studies that say the
virus likes cold weather are correct
(though other researchers have cast
doubt on this). Never have a people
longed so irrationally and so much for a
burning, punishing Indian summer.
What is this thing that has happened
to us? It’s a virus, yes. In and of itself it
holds no moral brief. But it is definitely
more than a virus. Some believe it’s
God’s way of bringing us to our senses.
Others that it’s a Chinese conspiracy to
take over the world.
Whatever it is, coronavirus has made
the mighty kneel and brought the world
to a halt like nothing else could. Our
minds are still racing back and forth,
longing for a return to “normality”, try-
ing to stitch our future to our past and
refusing to acknowledge the rupture.
But the rupture exists. And in the midst
of this terrible despair, it offers us a
chance to rethink the doomsday
machine we have built for ourselves.
Nothing could be worse than a return to
normality. Historically, pandemics have
forced humans to break with the past
and imagine their world anew. This one
is no different. It is a portal, a gateway
between one world and the next.
We can choose to walk through it,
dragging the carcasses of our prejudice
and hatred, our avarice, our data banks
and dead ideas, our dead rivers and
smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk
through lightly, with little luggage,
ready to imagine another world. And
ready to fight for it.ArundhatiRoy’slatestnovelis
‘TheMinistryofUtmostHappiness’
Copyright©ArundhatiRoy2020The pandemic portal
would be under lockdown. Markets
would be closed. All transport, public as
well as private, would be disallowed. He
said he was taking this decision not just
as a prime minister, but as our family
elder. Who else can decide, without con-
sulting the state governments that
would have to deal with the fallout of
this decision, that a nation of 1.38bn
people should be locked down with zero
preparation and with four hours’
notice? His methods definitely give the
impression that India’s prime minister
thinks of citizens as a hostile force that
needs to be ambushed, taken by sur-
prise, but never trusted.
Locked down we were. Many health
professionals and epidemiologists have
applauded this move. Perhaps they are
right in theory. But surely none of them
can support the calamitous lack of plan-
ning or preparedness that turned the
world’s biggest, most punitive lockdown
into the exact opposite of what it was
meant to achieve.
The man who loves spectacles created
the mother of all spectacles.
As an appalled world watched, India
revealed herself in all her shame — her
brutal, structural, social and economic
inequality, her callous indifference to
suffering. The lockdown worked like a
chemical experiment that suddenly illu-
minated hidden things. As shops, res-
taurants, factories and the construction
industry shut down, as the wealthy and
the middle classes enclosed themselves
in gated colonies, our towns and megaci-
ties began to extrude their working-
class citizens — their migrant workers —
like so much unwanted accrual. Many
driven out by their employers and land-
lords, millions of impoverished, hungry,
thirsty people, young and old, men,
women, children, sick people, blind
people, disabled people, with nowhere
else to go, with no public transport in
sight, began a long march home to their
villages. They walked for days, towards
Badaun, Agra, Azamgarh, Aligarh, Luc-
know, Gorakhpur — hundreds of kilo-
metres away. Some died on the way.
Continuedfrompage1 They knew they were going home
potentially to slow starvation. Perhaps
they even knew they could be carrying
the virus with them, and would infect
their families, their parents and grand-
parents back home, but they desper-
ately needed a shred of familiarity, shel-
ter and dignity, as well as food, if not
love. As they walked some were beaten
brutally and humiliated by the police,
who were charged with strictly enforc-
ing the curfew. Young men were made to
crouch and frog jump down the high-
way. Outside the town of Bareilly, one
group was herded together and hosed
down with chemical spray. A few days
later, worried that the fleeing popula-
tion would spread the virus to villages,
the government sealed state borders
even for walkers. People who had been
walking for days were stopped and
forced to return to camps in the cities
they had just been forced to leave.
Among older people it evoked memo-
ries of the population transfer of 1947,
when India was divided and Pakistan
was born. Except that this current exo-
dus was driven by class divisions, not
religion. Even still, these were not India’s
poorest people. These were people who
had (at least until now) work in the city
and homes to return to. The jobless, the
homeless and the despairing remained
where they were, in the cities as well as
the countryside, where deep distress
was growing long before this tragedy
occurred. All through these horrible
days, the home affairs minister Amit
Shah remained absent from public view.
When the walking began in Delhi, I
used a press pass from a magazine I fre-
quently write for to drive to Ghazipur,
on the border between Delhi and Uttar
Pradesh.
The scene was biblical. Or perhaps
not. The Bible could not have known
numbers such as these. The lockdown to
enforce physical distancing had resulted
in the opposite — physical compression
on an unthinkable scale. This is true
even within India’s towns and cities. The
main roads might be empty, but the
poor are sealed into cramped quarters
in slums and shanties.
appeals for funds. It turns out that the
prime minister’s National Relief Fund
has no ready cash available. Instead,
money from well-wishers is pouring
into the somewhat mysterious new PM-
CARES fund. Pre-packaged meals with
Modi’s face on them have begun to
appear. In addition to this, the prime
minister has shared his yoga nidra vid-
eos, in which a morphed, animated
Modi with a dream body demonstrates
yoga asanas to help people deal with the
stress of self-isolation.
The narcissism is deeply troubling.
Perhaps one of the asanas could be a
request-asana in which Modi requests
the French prime minister to allow us to
renege on the very troublesome Rafale
fighter jet deal and use that €7.8bn for
desperately needed emergency meas-
ures to support a few million hungry
people. Surely the French will under-
stand.
As the lockdown enters its second
week, supply chains have broken, medi-
cines and essential supplies are running
low. Thousands of truck drivers are still
marooned on the highways, with little
food and water. Standing crops, ready to
be harvested, are slowly rotting. The
economic crisis is here. The political cri-
sis is ongoing. The mainstream mediaOur towns and megacities
began to extrude their
working-class citizens likeso much unwanted accrual
Women bang
pots and pans to
show their
support for the
emergency
services dealing
with the
coronavirus
outbreak— Atul
Loke/Panos PicturesAPRIL 4 2020 Section:Weekend Time: 3/4/2020 - 16: 03 User: andrew.higton Page Name: WIN2, Part,Page,Edition: WIN, 2 , 1