Swine Flu

The school calendar for this time of year is loaded enough with holidays:
Varamahalakshmi (I never got that day off when I was a kid).
Independence Day (polish shoes and badges extra shiny, show up at school for flag raising, lots of extra homework... how did I ever consider this a holiday?)
Janmashtami and Ganesh Chaturthi (didn’t get both these either).

Deduct a few days of attendance because of the coughs and colds kids pass to each other in the rainy season.

Then, faster than you could say gesundheit, dozens of city schools shut down indefinitely. Even pre-schoolers can tell you the name of the new long school holiday: Swine Flu.

The newspapers are splashed with photos of scared-looking people wearing surgical masks doing yagyas, with smaller, buried headlines (that’s how they attempt to show balanced coverage) stating there is no cause for panic.

My children’s school has sensibly remained open despite the city-wide scare. Why shut down? There was no directive from the government’s education or health departments recommending a shut down for schools. Our school let parents know that children with any cold symptoms should be kept at home.

My ever-prepared daughter packed a bottle of hand sanitizer in her book bag. What fun to open a bottle of cold, nice-smelling, squishy stuff in class and have other kids ask if they could please, please, get a little drop too. It’s a girl thing. I remember the little sachets of wet tissues from airlines I would hoard in my sanitizer-less childhood. On extra hot days, I would unfold one cold square with slow drama, and pass around the cologne-scented icons of luxury travel to my circle of cousins. I was the only one who had ever flown on a plane once, briefly, as an infant. Of course, I had no recall of that heavenly experience and only knew about it because my parents told me. Still, that made me special; I had been closest to where angels and fairies might live. Girls are programmed to take ordinary little objects and use them in elaborate and sometimes twisted rituals of belonging.

Boys are more direct. My son already regards soap as an invention as pointless as homework but submits to it from time to time. Hand sanitizer in his school backpack … now, that’s pushing it. Even fear of the swine flu virus hasn’t pierced his sunny, invincible disposition into buckling to something as effeminate as hand sanitizer. He squirted a bit on his palm last week and was quick to underline it wasn’t due to any namby pamby germ fear. “Umm, alcohol,” he said, with slow, taunting relish, to show me he already has a manly recognition of a distant relative of beer and other forbidden liquids. His friend’s eyes popped with awe.

He usually gets a rise out of me, but this time I didn’t react. I can handle swine flu. The virus cannot resist high temperatures. I’m the mother of a teenager. I can.