Mas in the time of Corona

THANK GOD IT’S FRIDAY

A version of this column appeared on Carnival Friday in 1992, when the panic was over cholera. Current Finance Minister Colm Imbert was then health minister and Panorama finals were on Carnival Sunday.

AT A DAY fete on Sunday, I had to drink beer all day long. It was either that or rum and cholera. Luckily for me, I can think of worse fates than drinking beer all day long. Not drinking beer all day long, eg, or drinking boiled water. Boiled water tastes either of nothing or of kettle and it must be the germs and filth that make water taste good. Most things in life become boring when sanitised and water is no exception.

But this cholera (pronounced by a drunken friend with the “ch” sounded, as in “channa”) is affecting my Carnival in a big way. No rum and water. Or, worse still, hot rum and water. Or, worser stiller, hot rum, no water.

I’m told ice is safe but can I really believe that? It was a drunk friend who assured me ice could be consumed in a drink without risking infection. He told me he would prove ice was safe by having a rum and water himself. I tell you, this damned disease has us in school: I promise to get cholera if you promise to get cholera.

But even if ice is perfectly safe, which I was also told by father, a man with a string of degrees and no vested interest in seeing me dead, how can you guarantee the barman’s hands? Trinidadian barmen are, in the final analysis, from Trinidad, a place where people have been swimming in a suspension of faeces in Chaguaramas for many years. How can you be sure the barman has ever washed his hands?

And, if he’s handling money, having washed his hands after taking a pee isn’t going to save you. I don’t know, I don’t know. I’m very wary about this thing. I don’t even get a hangover from drinking so I’m not mentally prepared to accept death as a consequence thereof. Not from one day’s drinking, anyway. Cirrhosis is a legitimate worry but not cholera.

The thing is, though, one drinks at Carnival, even if it is only beer, or hot rum and water. When you drink, the first thing to go is your critical faculties. That is why you go on drinking: because you cannot tell it would be stupid to go on drinking. It’s a spiral, first upward, and then downward, but always rapid. In that condition, you cannot properly assess risks. You get hungry and go for a cholera burger or cholera and chips, or a pumpkin, bodi and cholera roti. About the only hope I have is that alcohol will kill the cholera bacteria.

And how will I know if, God forbid, I contract the disease? The newspapers have deluged us with warnings of what to avoid but the only symptom I have read about is “explosive diarrhoea.” Is that necessarily and exclusively attributable to cholera? What about a bad curry? Or a good Cabinet meeting?

Now everybody will interpret their rummy-tummy as cholera and medical labs will be swamped with healthy specimens and real cases might pass stool in the rush. The additional symptom of vomiting was recently promulgated but that’s no help. I could vomit right now with the worry about this damned cholera.

What is Colm going to do about it? His cure-all might not work and is, in any case, otiose: it is not necessary to instal doves on every standpipe in the country because there are already corbeaux circling overhead.

If I am going to die of cholera, though, I hope I don’t get it until after Carnival. Cholera on Ash Wednesday would not be ideal but would have the edge on cholera on J’Ouvert morning. Dying in Lent would, I’m pretty sure, be acceptable to the Catholic Church. It’s probably what they had in mind all along, come to think of it, and have just settled for the sackcloth and ashes and no meat and no kaiso and so on through the years.

Dying in Lent might actually get me into Heaven. Certainly living in Carnival won’t do it, according to the church. I think the church is wrong though. I don’t want to sook any priests on myself but, if Christ was alive today, I reckon he’d be in the North Stand on Sunday.

BC Pires is a Pharisee