Epicentre of the epidemic

Room 000: Narratives of the Bombay Plague
Author: Kalpish Ratna
Publisher: Pan Macmillan India
Cost: Rs 449

Dr Ishrat Syed, a paediatric surgeon and one half of the writing duo Kalpish Ratna (other half being surgeon Kalpana Swaminathan) speaks about medicine and the history of diseases with a fervour that perhaps can’t be matched. His latest book which he wrote with Kalpana is Room 000, an account of The Bombay Plague of 1896 which claimed around 20 million lives, in a span of two decades.

The book’s title alludes to one Waldemar Mordecai Haffkine, a Russian bacteriologist who in ‘Room 000’ of Bombay’s Grant Medical College injected himself with the first vaccine against the Plague.

“The ward boys and the Indian doctors also injected themselves with the vaccines but their efforts were never mentioned in the numerous accounts about the plague maintained by the British during their rule,” says Ishrat. As an effort to track the untold stories, the duo has travelled across countries, ransacked different library archives in New York, London and Bombay and spent four years researching and writing the book. He adds, “As doctors we deal with diseases everyday. But we don’t have the time to contemplate on the context of a disruption. We are merely looking at a symptom but not the actual condition or origin of an epidemic.”

And then he asks a simple question: “How do you think the Bubonic plague spread in Bombay? Or how is Swine flu claiming so many lives in India?” Dismissing the theory that the Bubonic plague travelled from Europe to India through the rats who resided in the sacks of grains in the ships that docked in our yards. “Fleas which caused the plague reside on all rats but over centuries they have come to a settlement where they don’t affect the rodents from whom they derive nourishment. But when we humans encroach into areas where these rats stay, we push them into our homes.”

And the same is the case with the H1N1 virus which gets transferred from bats, because we think that we can do away with trees where these animals stay.”
His book, in a way, he says is a way of making people understand that we are not independent of our environment — “we are our environment.”
Ishrat says, “Even in the age of modern medicine we can’t expect to fight diseases, if we can’t get the pothole leading up to our chamber fixed. Because Room 000 has fallen silent now, but the city around it continues to breathe.”