The plague as a metaphor

Laxmibai Tilak, a contemporary writer, recounts how plague camps, where patients were quarantined, were 'kingdoms of the god of death'

The Moral Contagion

Author: Julia Hauser & Sarnath Banerjee

Publisher: HarperCollins

Pages: 137

Price: Rs 699

A knight called Antonius Block returns home from the Crusades to find that his country is reeling from a plague epidemic. He, too, is about to die. But he challenges Death to a game of chess, believing that he will survive as long as he can stave off a checkmate. Such is the central conceit of The Seventh Seal, the 1957 film directed by Ingmar Bergman, which The Guardian in 2007 described as “an untarnished gold standard of artistic and moral seriousness”. The film, which was also the first