Niveta Ramakrishnan - Chennai, India

The street beside Niveta’s house

For Niveta, her transition into an adult life meant leaving Chennai in Eastern India and moving to Ireland. For the past few years, living atop the hill across from Christchurch Cathedral, she has been working as a medical student in paediatric facilities, in psychiatric hospitals, in obstetric wards. When the Royal College of Surgeons emailed her, she was in a lecture with a 100-slide-PowerPoint on infant developmental milestones. She told her classmates that the urgent message could wait. It couldn’t wait.

The college recommended all students return ‘home’ - home not being their accommodation, but where their parents lived. With a huge number of international students, this scattering to the winds was a monumental notification in the inboxes of the country’s future healthcare providers.

Everything was rushed from this point on. Comparing it to the ‘Contagion’ film, she is fixated on the fact that she never returned her hospital access card, or received her ten euro deposit back. Despite the hospital staff’s insistence she not lose the receipt, she had left it in the AirBnB during the pandemonium. A small piece of paper in a global pandemic, and a fact quickly forgotten by the staff, it was a human trip-up clearly felt as she was catapulted by events back to Chennai.

That Thursday night, on the way back to Dublin she called her father. Friday morning, the flights for her and her younger sister Monica (also a medical student) were booked. By Saturday morning, they were home. Returning, the authorities had checked her temperature and vitals before allowing her back in the country with no further measures – a fact she was grateful for.

Monica sits in the background of the call and occasionally chimes in. She angrily interjects when Niveta comments the younger sister was asleep when they were meant to be packing at 1am, but no more bitterly than any sibling would. Neither seem emotional at her recounting of events. She takes me through these moments, step-by-step, until we’re at the present. 

Niveta is in her fourth year of medicine in a five-year-course. She has experience in hospital wards and is no stranger to their procedures. When I ask her if there is any chance that she will be called back, she drawls the start of her yes. She puts her hand to her head and scratches her temple - keeping it there out of stress? I can’t tell.

“They need anyone who can give hands-on experience. So if the HSE calls me, I’ll be back there in Dublin. If there’s a need, I might as well be there. It would be nice to help out in any way that we can. I don’t mind being anywhere – I said Dublin, Kildare and Cork.”

If the Royal College of Surgeons and the Health Service will it so, special provisions can circumvent the closed borders and she will be back on the 12 and a half hour flight. Then, she will likely be in a lab processing swabs, providing the manpower to trace and track cases across the island.

I picture my own, terribly limited experience of Ms O’Kane’s Chemistry lab class. Lab technicians would be socially distanced, standing two meters apart. There would be a tinge of anxiety, horribly more real than anything a student is used to. A positive result wouldn’t mean a successful experiment and a pass mark, but that the Curragh tracing team would have to make phone call. Niveta in the lab as another rung on the ladder that would, eventually, wind up a statistic. Between her and the figures there would be tears, worry and, sometimes, death.

Instead, she is in the role of a child again, at home with her parents. Her meals are made for her. She isn’t choosing what to buy – she doesn’t do the shopping. Laughing, she recounts how Monica had bought cans and cans of fish prior to their placement. Now, the pair let their ‘parents be the parents’. She has full days of studying remotely – long hours taken in her stride. When I ask what she thinks of returning to Ireland, she is neutral. No matter how many times I watch the recording of our call back, I can’t discern what lies underneath. Is there more to her fingertip at her temple?

She does mention her parent’s social media use, and how it is a huge source of disinformation in India. “There’s a lot of superstition – particularly over WhatsApp. There are huge misconceptions being passed around. Its creating fear en masse – that’s why I’m sticking to the government advice.” The greeting Namaste is also a custom she notices has returned. While Indian culture isn’t hugely physically affectionate in the first place, physical conservatism is now present in its full. She comments upon her return the streets were full, but later realised this was to do with the population differences. Now, with lockdown in effect, police were roaming the streets. Where those crowds have gone is hard to tell.

Zulu, the pug, greeting a next door neighbour in isolation

But that is now. Initially relaxed before lockdown measures were enforced, the family had gone to a restaurant in the first days of the sister’s return.

“One of the biggest restaurants in Chennai. Literally, we were the only four people other than the waiters, and I was like what the hell is going on.”

Asking the waiter why the usually full restaurant was so quiet, he mumbled something back and avoided the question. They pushed, and he revealed the virus was to blame. His fear that the family would leave, and take away the last of their business was evident. “My dad startled the poor guy, jokingly asking for 50% off since we were the only ones.”

From there, the streets grew more and more quiet until her mother ran into the room two nights prior, saying they needed to switch on the news:“Things went from zero to one hundred really quickly.” Now, she sits, studying and listening to WHO guidelines and talking to some colleagues across the globe. One sent her the 30-step manual of putting on and taking off protective gear. She looks at the advice at a nation-wide level, seeing which policies work and which seem to falter and takes what she can take from this. 

She waits for a call from the HSE, or from the RCSI, or from the Red Cross - any of which could shunt her out of her family home and back into adult life – worrying which canned fish to buy and where her next meal will come from. For now, she is the elder daughter of a family of four, studying in their three-story house amidst the textbooks and research papers that describe the science of a pandemic ravishing the world around her. With another urgent email, that all could change, committing small scraps of paper and any other blunders to the memory of a global catastrophe.

Sam Cox