Kalwanji Haldi
Putting a disappeared Covid conspiracy back on the internet.
You will not find this in any Google query or archived Reddit thread you go down, and the well-curated heuristics have filtered it entirely from the finest of LLM training data pipelines. Save for a few old social media site posts and WhatsApp forwards, this story can no longer be found. IT IS WIPED FROM THE INTERNET, SEO-ed out of existence, left buried, burnt off transistors by tech companies and social media sites, except for some artifacts along untouched bookmarked posts and private WhatsApp message histories that manage to extend back years, maybe already well on their way to be deleted when your Google cloud storage maxes out.
But that matters little.
Those who remember know.
During COVID, people in Pakistan began receiving millionth-degree message forwards that preceded the virus itself, but just like it, infected and occupied people's thoughts and conversations. Right under the daily "Good Morning" message, there would be a small prayer for health, maybe news, and sometimes, rarely, this small voice note (it warned "Forward Many Times").
Once clicked, at 1.5x speed, the phone's speaker would start imitating the voice of a rural Pahari-speaking woman in her 40s, and the voice note would begin like so:
"Shazia, have you heard of the child born in Poonch? There was news that a child was born and began to speak immediately. He said this whole Corona thing is a sign that the end of times is near, and then he said that there was a cure for it and that we should all make a herbal tea from ginger, mint, and cloves and drink it. May God keep all of us in His care, Shazia. Take good care of yourself and the kids."
In the northern parts of Punjab, it said the boy was born in Azad Kashmir -- that distant, mountainous state where there were as many landslides as roads. Who really knew what went on up there? In the Rawalpindi and Potohari areas, the voice note version said the boy was from Mirpur; in Gujrat, it said Bhimber. In Bhimber, it said Samahni; in Mirpur, it said Dadyal; in Dadyal and Samahni, it said Kotli. Even though it would not have been unusual for Kotli, given all the Pichalperi stories from there (anyone there who hasn't helped shape-shifting white-robed things hitchhike?), they said it was Khuiratta. Pallandri said it was Rawalkot, and Rawalkot said it was Pallandri. Maybe Muzaffarabad, the capital, said something, too, but that is unlikely. Every district pointed to the nearest, more remote district it could. Like real demons, the story too retreated to the remote, dark mountainous peaks and their endless Chirr forests.
How the voice note was born was never certain; a million other voice notes -- vulgar, humorous, poetic -- were always around, entertaining people for a month before receding into nothingness. It was hard to say who believed this story and who didn't. I am sure some people were quick to pull up photoshopped images overlain with captions in 3 colors and 4 fonts as undeniable proof, while most dismissively scoffed. The great wizard kings of Silicon Valley would have surely tried to subdue such news only if they understood Pahari, but personal DMs are far beyond the reach of their ever-growing claws, and so they had to console themselves with vague red-colored messages about misinformation on their social media home grounds.
Details of the story changed in the fog of war against Corona; neither the precise medicine nor the location of the child's birth were ever certain. Specifics and facts evolved and mutated in pace with the disease as the first germs brought back to Mirpur from its emigrant communities began to escape further up into the countryside.
But how would the voice note come about? And was the woman whose voice we were listening to, perhaps sounding -- suspiciously -- not too different from your aunt's, a liar? Was it some existing hoax a woman fell for and in good faith tried to warn a worried neighbor or sister or cousin, which was then important to share with everyone else for the greater public good? Or perhaps some sort of prank? But to what end? How could it be? And what mind dreams up something like that, anyway? The only thing stranger than imagination is reality.
Sure, seemingly everyone laughed and questioned it, and maybe that's exactly why it spread so far. They took the voice note and the story as a hoax, as a joke, as an act of malice, or as a genuinely concerned but awfully anxious village grandma who was probably just paranoid. The talking infant was clearly messianic, Christlike; the rumors that he had been one-eyed, cycloptic, made him Antichristlike, but details and answers could always be invented in the moment based on whatever happened to be humorous. After all, the infant had said nothing revolutionary; no one needed to be told to drink more herbal tea and try more folk remedies. If anything, the child should have been saved by divine providence to be deployed for something more important and inevitable, like iodide pills for nuclear war or something, maybe a hundred years from now.
And where did the boy go after that? He might have disappeared. He might have stopped talking and become as normal as a one-eyed talking infant can. He might have gone on speaking and become an expert debater and well-read 2-year-old, and proceeded to have a great primary school career. And some years from now you might have even run into him on a Sunday at the Pansarkhana -- the spice shop -- in Nangi Bazaar without realizing it: a bag of freshly haggled, deep red carrots in his left hand, a motorbike key in his right, his face hidden behind a pair of oversized sunglasses.
However, there were no follow-ups to the voice note. Who knew or cared where he went? I don't think anyone bothered asking, and voice notes don't talk back. And of course, no one would have gone out to search for the poor thing except maybe the government, who would have found in him the perfect poster child for the vaccine drive next spring, but alas...
Now, I had no need to pay heed to any of this because Mother would make sure to supplement masks and hand sanitizers with Kalwanji and Haldi for us every day. The Kalwanji, black caraway seeds, were from Tibb-e-Islami, the Islamic medical tradition, and the Haldi, turmeric powder, from Ayurveda, the Indic Study of Life; I'm not sure if she knew this discrepancy or cared enough. She admittedly didn't know if it helped with COVID, but it never hurt to be cautious, according to her, and so I would have to agree to swallow a spoonful of dusty yellow Haldi powder with milk and chew crumbly Kalwanji seeds that turned to grit on my molars every day. I had wondered what would happen if the one-eyed child ever endorsed her recipe in one of those voice notes, but it never did. But whatever the herb, I'm sure the Pansarkhana did very well that month.
This piece is based on the memory of a voice note that was doing the rounds in early COVID, one I happened to remember for no particular reason years later. I mentioned it to a few people around me, and a couple of weeks after, my mother came across someone who had uploaded the original audio to Facebook. So I suppose some people do remember.
The original audio turned out to be somewhat different from my recollection, here is a literal translation of what the woman actually says:
"Hello Samina, they said there's a phone call — there have been many phone calls coming that on the Kotli side a child was born, and right after being born he started speaking. From Samahni side. And he said: make kahva just with pati (dried tea leaves), don't put anything else in it. Everyone has pati, whether they're rich or poor. Make it with pati and give it to the whole lot. Tell this to the house over too, and right away make kahva and everyone should drink it. And the child only said this much — that this epidemic is a sign of doomsday, it's not corona virus or anything else."