A strange, desolate year
About the sickly afflictions of 2021. And the light that shone through the cracks.
Sometime in the first week of April, I received an unusual call from my father in Assam, most probably just before noon. Unusual because of the way he sounded – more tense than he usually does, even in the grimmest of times.
My mother had fallen in the bathroom the previous night at around 3 am. This was the second time she had fallen in less than twenty-four hours. The first time was when she was visiting the doctor earlier that day to get her aching hips checked. The second fall was a seemingly bigger one than the first, which, fortunately, happened right in front of the doctor’s chamber. The early morning fall was so bad that it almost induced a fever in her the next morning.
She was already suffering from two things at once – a mysterious, debilitating pain around her hip joint, which literally appeared out of nowhere; and falling haemoglobin (Hb) levels in her blood. About a month earlier, she had to be given two rounds of blood transfusions after a rapid fall in her Hb levels. Within a month, it had dipped again, this time compounded by the strange waist pain. Low Hb levels in blood worsen pains, Google told me, as I scrambled to make some sense of what was going on from 2000 kms away in Noida.
Following her 3 am bathroom mishap, our family physician advised her to get admitted into the hospital the very next day. That was what my father had called to inform me. I hadn’t gone home for almost twenty months, thanks to the COVID-19 situation, seasoned with my own wretched inertia. But, my father’s quivering voice, a voice that quivered not very often, told me that it was time for me to pack my bags and head home. I immediately booked my flight for the next morning, so that I could be home to help my father move my mom to the hospital.
Next morning, as I waited in the boarding queue at the airport, I called my dad to check up on my mom, hoping that she was slightly better. Instead, he told me that she had developed a high fever, was nauseous and refused food. They were moving her to the hospital immediately. A torturous flight waited before me. The very thought of being confined in a pressurised tube at 35,000 feet above the ground for two straight hours with all lines of communications with my dad cut off made me claustrophobic. I was certain that as the plane would rise, my stomach would sink. I felt nauseous – like my mom.
But, things were better when I reached home and was able to meet my mom at the hospital. She seemed better than I had imagined her to be. She looked much frailer than the last time I saw her, but still talking, smiling, fretting over my long hair and “beard” (which was barely even a stubble). Distance is a slimy, deceptive, unsparing creature. It can unlock the darkest recesses of your mind, and compel you to imagine the worst. The moment it goes away, you can see the light and feel the fresh air.
When I reached, the doctor had already begun running a series of tests on her. The first, of course, was a protocolary RT-PCR swab test (which, fortunately, returned negative). The others included scans to understand what was wrong with her hip and blood profiles to assess her Hb levels. The former returned with less-than-concerning results. She had a hairline fracture along her hip joint, which was causing the constant pain, but wasn’t serious enough for her to require surgery. There was no severe trauma, and the fracture had osteoporotic origins. The latter tests were more worrying.
Her blood was failing to retain iron, which resulted in dangerously low levels of Hb. She needed another round of blood transfusions, which were arranged over the next two days. The doctors were yet unable to figure out why her Hb levels had fallen so rapidly within a month. They were not very worried, it seemed, but the end of this road was painful. There are many causes behind dipping Hb levels, and one of them was the wretched C word - Cancer. Getting there would be even more distressing, as it involved a very painful bone marrow biopsy. We stopped our minds from running wild and managed to stay on this side of the red line.
Thankfully, the blood transfusion worked and her Hb levels climbed back up again. The problem was that it had worked even the last time, but her Hb levels had dipped again within a month. We hoped that the treatment would sustain this time round. Soon, she was back home, although relegated to a wheelchair. The doctor advised complete bed rest for three months – backed up by about twenty different pills, iron supplements, and a cutting-edge bone mass reformulation medicine that had to be administered daily through a subcutaneous pen syringe. She needed help with daily activities, including sitting straight, wearing her clothes and going to the loo. Both my father and I lent our hands.
Caregiving isn’t something that I am used to, because I’ve never had to do it before. It was the first time I was physically tending to a parent. It felt good. There is a peculiar and almost liberating sense of comfort in helping someone live their daily life, in easing their pain – especially if they are your mother. There is great solace in being a crutch. I left home when I was sixteen, which wasn’t something that my mother was very much in favour of, mostly because I am her only child. Since then, a yawning physical distance had crept in between me and my parents, which often bothered me. I felt this was the first time – as I held my mother sit up on the bed, fed her oats with my own hands, took her to the bathroom and administered the subcutaneous bone injection – that I had truly managed to confront that physical distance and even overpower some of it.
After more than a decade, I rediscovered the unspoken umbilical warmth between my mother and myself. It was tender, but powerful.
Then, something dramatic happened on 28 April. I will never forget that date. What was supposed to be an ordinary spring morning, turned terrifying in a minute. I was woken up, almost thrown out of my bed, by what seemed like violent shaking, sometime around early morning. A bookshelf and study cabinet in my room were quivering very noisily, the sound of shaking glass and wood creating a sinister symphony of sorts. I realised it was an earthquake, and dashed out of my room. I also instantly realised that my mother was left behind and would be unable to run by herself given her physical state. My father, who is usually very quick in heading for the door during earthquakes, had, this time, mechanically run to fetch my mother without thinking.
Earthquakes incapacitate me. I am terrified of them, not unlike my father. To me, they feel like a malevolent supernatural force rising from the depths of hell to annihilate humankind. I stood there, almost paralysed, in the living room as the shaking stopped for a few seconds. Right then, another massive jolt hit. I could see the ceiling fan sway and the showpieces in our living room tremble. By then, my mother, accompanied by my father and our cook, was on her way out the door. I rushed to help my mom down the stairs into the apartment’s common area. After a good fifty or sixty seconds of shaking, the ground had finally quietened.
As someone growing up in Assam – a Zone V earthquake region (the highest on the scale) – I had experienced many tremors, big and small. As a child, I remember most of them hit at night, and I was awoken not by the shaking but by the bedlam that my father (and later our dog, Scooby) created. But, by far, this was the biggest tremor I had felt in my life. It scared the wits out of me. For the first time, I genuinely felt like the house would come down on our heads, and that this would be the end of it all. After about fifteen or twenty minutes of waiting downstairs, we went back up. By then, I had fetched the wheelchair for my mom. As we entered the house, I noticed a wooden horse that was kept on a table top cabinet in our living room lying on the floor – like a stallion injured in a battle. It felt like the ground was still quaking.
Footage on social media and TV showed strange scenes from the epicentre, which was about a hundred kilometres from Guwahati – muddy water flowing out from beneath the ground across open farmlands, creating mini brooks. Cracks had appeared in several buildings in Guwahati and other towns close to the epicentre. A part of the roof in a newly-constructed five-star hotel in Guwahati had come down. The roof over a bedroom in someone’s house had collapsed, allowing pipe water to gush down and flood the floor. A certain building had come off its foundation and was leaning on to an adjacent one, like one lover resting their head over the other’s shoulder. A large section of an entire hill had come crashing down.
According to reports, the quake – which originated along the Kopili faultline cutting vertically across the Brahmaputra Valley – clocked 6.4 on the Richter Scale, placing it between the “serious” to “major” categories. As I crawled back into my bed, with the fear of another tremor gnawing at the back of my head, I felt a sharp, burning pain on my right thumb. I realised that I had scratched it on some sharp surface while running out, probably on the edge of a table or a door. I was so utterly numb during the whole time that I never felt the pain until now. It wasn’t a deep cut, but a sore scratch that hurt for more than a few days – much like the constant terror in my mind. It was like a physical manifestation of my fear, and also something that kept reminding me of the earthquake for days.
That night, I stayed up late. The news said that there were several minor aftershocks, but none of us felt them. Yet, I couldn’t sleep, scared that another big one would hit at night, like they always did. I kept tracking Twitter feverishly for updates. The post-midnight stillness, that amplifies every little movement, didn’t help. The terror had gripped me from head to toe, crawling up my back like a centipede. Suddenly, at around 1:30 am, I felt like the chair I was sitting on in my room sank into the ground for a second. Right then, I heard a faint creak in the door that opened into my balcony. I freaked, silently, not moving. Seconds later, I received a message from my cousin, Bublu, confirming that there was indeed a small tremor. My terror was well-founded, I thought. I woke my parents up, mostly out of fear rather than precaution (aftershocks are generally small and harmless). All of us stayed up and watched the news for another half hour, I think. I could sleep only when daylight broke.
There were more than hundred aftershocks in the following weeks, according to some reports. More than twenty within the first twenty four hours itself.
In retrospect, the whole thing felt like some kind of an evil premonition. It reminds me of a scene from Alfonso Cuarón’s masterpiece, Roma, where a violent tremor rocks Mexico City and Cleo, in silent submission, watches debris falling from the roof inside a hospital. Days later, she gives birth to a stillborn baby in the same hospital. Back then, I didn’t know what great misery the quake was foretelling. Soon, it became clear.
My mother’s illness and my tense homecoming happened at a time when cases of COVID-19 had begun to rise again across India, after a nearly four-month long lull. There was a new, more virulent strain of the virus in town. The caseload graph was going up for sure, but hardly anyone knew how fast. The chatter in TV studios and living rooms was at best, vague and at worst, ignorant. By then, it almost seemed like the whole pandemic had transformed into a not-very-desirable way of life, a pestiferous banality of sorts. Somewhat like ants, flies or lizards – you know they are inside your home and you don’t particularly fancy that, but you don’t really bother about them too much either. You just cohabit silently, only frowning when you spot one.
Just a fortnight before I left Noida, India’s foreign minister, while boasting about India’s ambitious vaccine export programme, told the Parliament confidently that the country had enough domestic supplies to deal with the homeland situation. Election rallies were in full swing. Political leaders hung out amidst fervent voters sans masks. The Prime Minister hollered from the dais about how he hadn’t seen a bigger crowd in a rally. Chief Ministers joked about how wearing masks would stop people from going to the beauty parlour. Tourists thronged to their favourite destinations.
It was all a heady cocktail of political fervor, mundane merrimaking and a very typical desi dereliction of civil responsibility. So, naturally, there was a collective sense that even if cases were rising, things wouldn’t go south.
And then things went south. So south that within a week, the whole country had lost all sense of direction.
Barely a week after I landed in Assam, the situation in major urban centres, most prominently Mumbai and Delhi, began to spin out of control. The much-touted vaccine export programme came to a grinding halt. On 15 April, by which time my mom was back home and convalescing, India clocked more than 2.15 lakh new cases. By the second week of May, the number had crossed 4 lakhs. Hospitals were starting to run out of beds and oxygen. Those who could were scrambling to arrange personal oxygen concentrators. It was unlike anything we had ever seen before.
But, I don’t think people had still grasped the enormity and monstrosity of it all, given how wild the statistics were and how fast the situation got bad. Numerical figures generally elude most people, unless they have a more subjective or affective anchor.
We got that anchor in death – when people we knew or people they knew or people we didn’t know but could have almost known or just random people on our social media feeds started dying. Thousands were dying by the day. Like flies. On 23 May, the virus killed more than 4,400 people in India. I don’t recall, either in my own living memory or reading in history books, about anything, even a war or a famine, that killed that many people in a single day in recent history. Grim, almost dystopian, visuals of morgues overflowing with bodies and queues of corpses draped in white kafan, some covered with marigold flowers, waiting patiently in front of crematoria and ghats to be burnt to ashes, began appearing on my social media feeds. Mortality, and its public display, were becoming the only constants amidst the rapidly changing figures, protocols and forecasts.
I remember one particular scene, possibly from somewhere in Madhya Pradesh, of a crematoria chimney billowing smoke from the constant burning of corpses. It instantly reminded me of chimneys in the death camps of Nazi Germany, which never stopped spewing smoke from consuming the bodies of hundreds of thousands of Jews and other ‘undesirables’ who were gassed to death by Hiter’s regime every day. I had, of course, only seen grainy videos and photographs of these infamous chimneys, but I think the COVID chimneys haunted me for days because I had visited two of these camps in Germany and Poland – Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz – just six months back. Both places, which are now delicately-preserved memorials, had moved me immensely. And now, I could not stop thinking about how similar yet dissimilar these two sets of chimneys, and their ‘undesirable’ victims, were.
The virus had reached Assam, but the caseload hadn’t spiked to crisis levels yet. On the other hand, it was sweeping through Delhi-NCR, the city I was locked down in for more than a year, like a raging wildfire. I watched in silent horror, painful visuals of ambulances, patients and their families waiting outside hospitals, desperately looking for an Oxygen bed. Some of them were hooked on to portable Oxygen cylinders, others simply wailing their lungs out in submission or mourning. To cope with the overflowing corpses, public parks and parking lots were converted into open cremation grounds. It pained me to see this city suffer so much – the city I lived in for more than nine years but never thought I would feel sad about. I knew I had come about to like it in my own reticent ways, but this time, I realised I felt for it.
My mind began to wander into the dark wildernesses of irrational thoughts. I kept thinking if I would return to the same city that I had left behind, if the air would smell of burning bodies and the streets would be littered with Oxygen cylinders. Distance does that, you know.
I had left for Assam thinking I would be back within two or three weeks. Instead, I remained locked down with my parents for three months. Contrary to what I had imagined, it didn’t bother me. It felt like a fireproof cave in the middle of a burning forest. During those months, I watched my mother recover, quicker than what her doctor had predicted. Within a month, she was able to sit up, eat and even walk on her own. Her Hb levels, unlike the last time, stayed up. She was getting the colour back in her face. Her medication had come down from twenty to about ten tablets. We had developed a certain evening ritual as part of which I made soup and toasted bread for both my parents. Then, I worked out and made coffee for myself. Sometimes, I followed that up with some good old jhal muri or spicy Korean noodles. It was an intimate routine that I got hooked on very soon.
That house, which never felt like home to me (I grew up in a different childhood home), had started to feel like home for the first time. And I had started to feel like a member of a complete familial unit in ages. I felt protected, cared for. It gave me strength.
Yet, the peace of my home contrasted jarringly with the mayhem outside of it. The pandemic showed no signs of stopping and the caseload continued to climb. My social media was flushed with SOS calls from helpless friends and family of COVID patients. Many were simply dying of hypoxia, and could have lived if they found Oxygen cylinders or hospital beds on time. The entire health infrastructure in major cities and towns had come crashing down like a house of cards. The central government, with all its raging incompetence and hubris, had almost given up. I, like many others, tried amplifying calls for leads on empty hospital beds, Oxygen cylinders, Remdesivir vials and what not to the best of my ability. But, it always felt like I wasn’t doing enough, like no one was doing enough, like we simply couldn’t do enough no matter how hard we tried.
Besides SOS calls, my social media feeds were also inundated with condolence posts. I don’t think I have ever written so many of them within just a few weeks. It was like some medieval festival of death. One morning, I woke up to learn that Professor Nehginpao Kipgen, who taught at OP Jindal University and whom I knew closely, had passed away of complications due to the virus. Professor Kipgen, a young man of much warmth and intellectual promise, was a noted voice on Myanmar affairs in Indian academic circles. His untimely death came as both a shock and a loss. Only a year earlier, he had chaired one of my panels at his University.
Few days later, I learnt that Joyeeta Bhattacharjee, who worked at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi, had suddenly passed away from the virus. The last time I had met Joyeeta was less than a year earlier at the Australian High Commission. She had an infectious smile, which was perhaps the first and last thing anyone would notice about her. That was also my final memory of her, as she and her husband, Subimal da, offered to drop me to the metro station in their car from outside the High Commission. The fact that she was no more didn’t feel real.
It was absolute madness, clouded by a profound sense of both helplessness and hopelessness. I could hardly stop thinking about what the other end of this long, dark and seemingly unending tunnel would look like. Would it look like a nuclear wasteland? Would we ever recover from this? How does one process so many deaths at once? Do we even need to process it all?
As if all the soul-piercing images of mass cremations, burials, bodies lying in state, people sitting on pavements with their own Oxygen cylinders, like Zombies from a fictional dystopian world, weren’t enough – we were soon shown pictures of bloated corpses floating on the Ganga. This was followed by yet another set of visuals that were unlike anything I had seen before – vast stretches of shallow sand graves on the holy river’s sandy banks. Unable to find cremation grounds, people had fallen back on the Ganges’ laps.
Only one thing floated into my mind when I saw those photos and videos – the lyrics of Bhupen Hazarika’s O Ganga Behti Ho Kyun. Inspired from Paul Robeson’s iconic Ol’ Man River, Hazarika’s lament about the Ganga flowing by with stoic silence as the world around her fell apart fit perfectly in this surreal tragedy. It was almost as if Hazarika, ordained by some otherworldly foretelling, had written his ballad as a dirge for 2021.
विस्तार है आपार, प्रजा दोनों पार
करे हाहाकार निःशब्द सदा
ओ गंगा तुम, गंगा बहती हो क्यूँ
नैतिकता नष्ट हुई, मानवता भ्रष्ट हुई निर्लज्ज भाव से बहती हो क्यूँ ?
Those who live
Along the vast stretches of your banks,
They scream in grief
Yet, O Ganga,
Why do you flow,
Silent as always?
Morality is sullied,
Humanity is dead,
Yet, O Ganga,
Why do you flow,
Without shame?
When one is at a loss for words, it is poetry that comes to rescue. In the immortal verse of others, we find the lost string of words in us.
There was also the fear that one day, the virus would come knocking on our doors, as it had on those of so many of our friends and family. For now, the pandemic was like a storm raging outside my window pane, something that I could watch from the safe confines of my room. What happens when it breaches my protective perimeter? What would happen to my already ailing mother and my father who had several comorbidities? What if they got infected and we had to isolate completely and there was another big earthquake? How would we run out of the house? We would have to be crushed under the debris, while being loaded with the virus.
By some good fortune, we survived the viral surge without catching the virus. By that time, further tests had revealed the reason behind my mother’s Hb retention problem – Thalassemia Minor. It was a genetic disorder that triggered anaemia, particularly in women. But, it wasn’t anything life-threatening and could be managed with an iron-rich diet and perhaps, the occasional blood transfusion if the Hb levels dipped too low. I was told that there was 50 percent chance I had inherited it from my mother, much like the other maternal heirloom I possessed since childhood – asthma.
At the very least, we were glad that it wasn’t the C word. It gave us all solace to know the root of the issue. As things settled at home, I returned to the blistering heat of midsummer Delhi-NCR.
Three months later, something very ugly happened in Assam. An eviction drive in Darrang, which lies within the central district of Sipajhar, turned violent. During the confrontation between the evictees and the eviction authorities, who were backed up by several bulldozers and a massive contingent of armed police, one Mayanal Haque, armed merely with a stick, came dashing at the security forces to protect his home and hearth from being forcefully uprooted. The cops, who were armed with semi-automatics, instantly opened fire, placing one neat bullet in Haque’s chest. As he lay there dying, a local photographer called Bijoy Bania rushed towards him and repeatedly stomped on his near-lifeless body, with hatred so unsullied that it looked like a dramatic enactment. He stopped halfway, retreated, and returned again to do the same. Not a single policeman standing there stopped him. All of it was captured on a cellphone camera, and was relayed on social media not long after. The video went viral. An avalanche of national, and eventually global, outrage followed. For a few days, the whole country only talked about Assam – something that doesn’t happen very often. The authorities had to give in and arrest Bania.
The video of Bania jumping over Mayanal’s body – it was both shocking and ordinary. Because Bania’s violent act of pure malice was repugnant of course but also, in many ways, a pinpoint reflection of the times. There was hardly anything befuddling about what he did. Just that this time, it was captured on camera and broadcasted to the world. Yet, it was something I couldn’t get out of my head. So, I did what I usually do in such situations – write about it. Two days later, my blog piece, which was mostly written in metaphors, reached Assamese Twitter circles and hence, began the trolling. Some of them had cherrypicked a line that mentioned the 17th century Ahom warrior, Lachit Borphukan, in a metaphorical context and spun it literally. I started getting threats of police action. I had apparently insulted Borphukan, and by extension, all Assamese people. I worried about my parents who were in Assam. What if they faced the adverse consequences of my writings? They don’t deserve that. It was a well-understood fact that taking a political stance in today’s time has a high cost and I, and only I, had signed up for it. Why should they face the heat for it?
Soon after, the trolling, like most trolling, died down. But it had managed to do the job – unsettle and intimidate me. I removed that particular line from my article and issued a clarification-cum-apology. I didn’t want any more trouble or anxiety. It was just not worth it, I thought.
About a week later, I was woken up from my random afternoon siesta by a WhatsApp message from a friend. I am not an afternoon sleeper, but for some reason, I had dozed off on that dry autumn day. The message sent a chill down my spine. A group of people under a certain organisational banner had filed a police complaint against me for my article in Guwahati. Two others were mentioned in the complaint – my friend, Suraj Gogoi, who had recently published an article on the Sipajhar eviction in The Hindu, and a senior editor from The Hindu. I contacted an Assam-based journalist friend to confirm the same, which he did promptly. The complainants had requested the police to file an FIR under several sections, some of which were non-bailable. For a second, I thought that was the end of my life as I knew it.
This is probably the most apt place to talk about that one person in my life without whose presence and support I would have completely melted away by now – my partner, Mekhala. Despite facing a serious crisis in her own family, one that almost changed everything for them, she remained the anchor that held me firmly to the port as typhoons ripped through the coast. She was the lighthouse that patiently guided me to the shores as I lost sense of direction in the middle of rough seas and could see nothing but pitch darkness in front of my eyes. Without Mekhala, and her extraordinary situational awareness and capability to sieve out the husk from the grain, I would have probably just lost my mind. It was only because she calmed me down and assured me that things wouldn’t spiral any further, that I was able to pick myself up and go on. She stood steadfastly by my side through that entire episode, which seemed like one long, unending nightmare.
Anxiety does weird things to you, not just mentally, but also physiologically. I was so tense that I lost my appetite and I struggled to sleep. I could barely focus on anything. Gradually, the worry gave way to anger and frustration. I hated how they had managed to throw me off completely. I hated how I wasn’t able to live my life normally because of them. I hated how I had to explain myself to a dozen people. Finally, I hated myself for writing that line. I had no one, but myself, to blame for my pathetic state.
As distressing as the whole thing was, there was also something profoundly empowering about it. One of the first things that I worried about after being told about the complaint was how I would break it to my parents, and how they would take it. I was sure they would mostly blame me for going overboard with my writings and not being smart enough. I was more concerned about the effect of it on my father, who has a tendency to exaggerate things in his head and worry himself sick. Some time back, when I was home, my father was watching the TV news about the release of two young activists, Devangana Kalita and Natasha Narwal, from jail. He was visibly distressed about how the state had come after them. I had asked him then, “Would you stand by me if something similar were to happen to me?” He had replied confidently, “Yes, of course I would.”
I was hoping he remembered that promise. At the same time, I didn’t want him to go through any mental or physical agony for my deeds. It was killing me.
But, I was surprised – and immensely touched – when both my parents stood unflinchingly by my side when I was hounded. They understood the core of the issue: an attack on my freedom of expression. I felt much lighter. And then, it dawned on me that my anxiety wasn’t as much to do with my own plight as with what the whole situation would do to my parents. Would it bring them shame? Would it rob them of their sleep? Would they fall sick beating their heads over it? Would their families ostracise them?
There were certain people in my family who were in a position to help out, but they refused to, because the matter was “politically sensitive”. Strangely, almost everyone grumbled about how “times were difficult”, but no one wanted to do anything about it. One of them even heaped the blame on me, urging my father to tell me to stop posting my opinions on social media. Instead of concurring, my father staunchly and unwaveringly defended me and my credentials before them. I was so proud of him, especially because he was probably battling his own ethical and ideological dilemmas through the whole episode. When I told him that I’m contemplating leaving the country for a few years, as it had become almost impossible to express my thoughts without the constant fear of persecution, he told me, “Kio bhoy korisa? Bhoy nokoriba. Why are you scared? Don’t be scared.” These were very simple, mundane words. But, they were extraordinarily reassuring. More than that, they infused some sort of divine strength in my bones. In fact, very few things anyone had said made me feel as empowered in recent memory as those words from my father. For a moment, I felt invincible.
And I felt my anger ebb. I felt liberated. Eventually, I was strangely grateful to my detractors – if not for them, I would probably never know how much my father’s moral, emotional and ideological support meant to me. I felt like myself again, like a thorny shackle around my body had been undone by some magical force. The episode soon drew down, probably because the complaint did not have any meat and was only meant to scare us. Sadly, it achieved its objective. I had already edited the controversial line out of my blog piece. Now, The Hindu also made salient edits to Suraj’s article to soften the blow.
I thought that was the final act in the spectacle of a year that was 2021. Four months later, our COVID perimeter was breached.
Sometime around Diwali, my father called me to tell me he wasn’t feeling well. His body ached terribly. He had developed mild arthritis about three years ago, which flared up periodically. Additionally, he had an underlying nerve problem that compounded the arthritic pain. Both of us thought the latest pain came from that wicked mix. But soon, he developed a fever. The doctor initially sent him back with some paracetamol and basic antibiotics. Two days later, after the fever and body pain grew more intense, he went back to the doctor who asked him to get admitted to the hospital for further screening. For the second time in a year, I got one of those calls from him in one of those rare tones of concern, which told me it was time to go home.
He was immediately admitted into the hospital. The doctors suspected a severe bacterial infection. But, the tests returned negative. Meanwhile, I booked my ticket for the next morning, but broke into a fever myself later that night. I had no other option but to delay my departure. My father’s fever had gotten worse, I was told. That night, at around 1:30 am, I got a call from Bublu, my cousin – the same Bublu who had texted me at around the same time six months ago to tell me about the aftershock. He had been kind enough to accompany my father to the hospital along with my mother and attend to him through the night. The protocolary RT-PCR test had returned a positive result, he told me, in a somewhat nervous voice. He was to be transferred to the COVID-exclusive branch of the hospital the first thing in the morning. Naturally, my cousin was worried about getting it himself, as he was in close proximity to my father throughout the day.
Fortunately, and very much so, both my parents were double vaccinated by then. That was literally the only thing that gave me some solace. The next order of business, however, was to get my mom, cousin and his mother (my pehi, or father’s younger sister) tested. I had to further push my plans of travelling back. Next day, my cousin and pehi returned negative in their RT-PCR tests. My mother, however, returned a positive. Although she was completely asymptomatic, she is above sixty years of age and has chronic asthma. Thus, the doctor advised that we get her admitted to the hospital. Thankfully, the hospital was able to accommodate her in the same isolation ward as my father. I was glad that my dad would have company. Personal stories of COVID patients had told me that the experience of isolation was often way more lethal than the virus itself. Patients ran out of hope much before they ran out of Oxygen, I was told.
Thus began a tense period of waiting and hoping that my father’s symptoms don’t get worse and my mother doesn’t develop any. Once again, the curse of distance was playing its part. I wanted to be close to them, but I knew I couldn’t even meet them, unlike the last time. I desperately hoped that the two shots would do their job, but my mind wandered to dark places. For hours on end, I would pace up and down the house. I spoke to the attending doctors on the phone to get a comprehensive picture of their physical state. They were not worried about my mother, but were somewhat concerned about my dad. His fever wouldn’t go down, which implied surging infection in his body. Chest scans showed moderate lung involvement. Blood tests revealed that his creatinine levels were rising, indicating stress on his kidneys. He was diabetic and had a relapsing Typhoid problem, both of which could complicate his condition. However, his Oxygen saturation remained stable, which was a good thing.
One of his attending doctors sounded more concerned than the other. He seemed to tell me that my father hadn’t yet gone into the critical zone. He refused to rule him out of it either. Worse, he warned me that they would move him to the ICU if his Oxygen level, which was hovering towards the lower rung of 90s, dropped below 90. The vagueness of his assessment flustered me even further. The next morning, I woke up with a jolt that reminded me of the earthquake from six months prior. It seemed like 2021 had been reduced to a never-ending sequence of jarring wake-up jolts. This time, it was a different type of jolt – a phone call from the doctor. My heart sank. Was it the worst? I picked it up, almost reflexively. The doctor told me what I didn’t want to hear. My father had gone over to the critical side. His Oxygen saturation had dropped below 90 and he would be moved to the ICU for Oxygen support. The doctor also told me that my mother had developed a fever. I remember that I pretended to be calm on the phone, but broke into tears the moment I hung up.
Once again, this is where Mekhala pulled me back from another breakdown. If not for her, I would have surely proven to be a worthless son when my parents needed me the most, both when my mother was hospitalised earlier in the year and when COVID hit home later. Thanks to her rational reassurance that the situation was probably better than what the doctor was making it out to be over the phone, I was able to collect myself into one piece and relay strength to my mother who was now left alone in her ward. Mekhala truly was the Pole Star to my 2021.
As I fretted over my father’s state, Mekhala told me that the hospital, like most private medical establishments in India, was probably trying to make some extra bucks by putting my father into the ICU without any real need to do so. In retrospect, I think she wasn’t wrong. As the day progressed, I spoke to the other attending doctor. He told me something that surprised me somewhat. My father was moved to the ICU only for “observation”, and wouldn’t need Oxygen support as his saturation had crawled back up above 90. Moreover, he told me that my mom didn’t have a fever. When I spoke to her, she confirmed she was fine. Why did the first doctor, who had turned my morning into the darkest of nights, tell me otherwise? Clearly, something was amiss. Yet, I was glad that my father was okay. I found it laughable – how I was happy that the other doctor was only lying. One of the few times I didn’t mind being lied to.
In any case, I flew back home the next day. I knew, and Mekhala agreed, that if I closed some of the physical distance between myself and my parents, even if I wouldn’t be allowed to meet them, the bulk of my worry would disappear. I just wanted to be in the same city as them. At the airport, I struggled to remember the last time I was heading back to Assam without a heavy heart or something weighing me down. I didn’t want to associate homecoming with sadness. I desperately hoped that the anxiety would fade away and everything would be fine again. It felt like I couldn’t take it anymore.
But, the next few days turned out just fine. My father’s fever broke, the body ache went away and he was wheeled back out of the ICU within two days. I was able to return home after staying out for a couple days, waiting for the premises to be chemically sanitised and my cousin and pehi to be retested. Fortunately, they never caught the virus (both of them were double vaccinated). Every day, I visited the hospital with my cousin to drop biscuits, fresh fruits and medicines for my parents at the delivery counter. I couldn’t have managed it all without my cousin – who was there for us from the very first day of my father’s hospital admission. His company at home kept me sane, in a situation where I couldn’t see my parents despite being in the same town.
One day, after dropping the day’s needs to my parents at the hospital, we rode to the banks of the Brahmaputra on his scooty, about thirty kilometers outside Guwahati. The next day, we rode again to see the sun set over its banks, this time in the middle of Guwahati. He felt like a genuine companion and I drew strength and hope from his presence. In fact, he was one of the very few people in the family who genuinely stood by us in this difficult hour. Crises are like sieves – they help you separate the husk from the grain. I realised that there was a lot of sieving this time. And I was nothing but grateful for it. I have always believed that it is better to keep your circle tight and meaningful, rather than wide and frivolous.
My parents returned home within about thirteen days of admission. My dad returned a negative result two days before his release, but my mom stayed positive, although without any symptoms. The two jabs had done their job alright. Once again, I moved out of the house, as the doctor advised complete isolation for them for another week. Before leaving, my cousin and I stocked the place with enough supplies for at least two weeks. We were also able to find a good home food service delivery that specifically catered to COVID patients under isolation. I used to meet them every day from a distance – they stood on their balcony and me downstairs in the apartment’s common area. We had long conversations in that manner, talking about everything under the sun, from multivitamin supplements to national politics. It was bizarre, hilarious and a little sad at the same time. Like meeting two prisoners behind bars. Except I wasn’t sure who the prisoner was here – them or me. Perhaps all of us were.
Two months later – just a week ago, in fact – I was in Sissu, a riverside settlement on the vast frozen, snowed-out expanse of Lahaul, Himachal Pradesh. It was my first getaway in about two years. The sun shone bright over the snowy mountains, creating a dramatic winter spectacle. And then, the sun disappeared behind one of the mountain-tops, creating a strange halo around it. Yet, nothing around us was less beautiful without the sun. It got colder, frostier, but the snow, the river and the jagged peaks still looked stunning.
Yes, 2021 was a strange, desolate year. But, also one that gave me hope and taught me things in absurd ways. A year plagued by many afflictions, but also illuminated by light that managed to shine bright through the cracks. A year marked by debilitating distances, but also renewed closeness. A year that laid bare the full force of hate, but also the overwhelming power of love.
As odd as it may sound, I am grateful for 2021. In all its menacing crudeness and benevolent mercies, I am glad I lived through it.
Wish you all a happy, healthy and meaningful 2022.