Driving into Covid

One world. One virus.

In my parents’ house in Pune, there is a folding mattress next to their bed. With one flick of the wrist, it opens-up on the floor. And when I lie down on it, the world and its problems recede like a tide going out, leaving me in peace.

I was visiting my parents in March 2020 because my father had to be hospitalized with some heart trouble. But he is soon back home, my mattress is opened-up, and all is right with the world. On the TV in the bedroom, the news is going on and on about some deadly flu-type disease which is spreading around the world. But here I am, on my happy mattress, my father is looking fine and the birds on the trees outside are as chirpy as ever. My mother cooks me my favourite fish curry, filling the house with the delicious aroma of nigella seeds and green chillies being tempered in hot mustard oil - the beloved, trademark smell of any self respecting Bengali kitchen! Children gather to play downstairs in the evenings, and the sound of their laughter waft up to our apartment.

Sadly, the news on the TV keeps getting worse. There is talk of a lockdown and my father starts fretting about me getting back to Mumbai.  On 23^rd March 2020, I leave my cocoon to drive back to Mumbai with K, my parents’ driver and Man Friday. K is a trusted driver and once we hit the expressway, I get lulled into sleep by the familiar landscape rolling steadily by. The earthy greens and browns. The pale blue of the open sky. Uphill and down dale. K driving steadily on.  Me drifting in and out of sleep.

At the toll-naka in Vashi, the familiar rhythm suddenly breaks. Some cars ahead of us are pulling over to the left. K is worried. He has had a couple of calls to warn him that the expressway may shut down. I start looking out for a rickshaw or a cab so that I can let K turn back for Pune. There are none. The traffic is so light that we are sailing through the roads of my Maximum City in the middle of a weekday - this strange fact alone fills me with foreboding and sends shivers down my spine.

The Government of India announces the first Covid lockdown the very next day.  Covid brings the world to its knees. Lives are lost. Livelihoods are snatched away. Families are cooped up in their homes. Schools are shut down and children learn to live in the shadow of death. In India, lakhs of migrant workers walk hundreds of kilometres to return to their homes as factories and workplaces shut down overnight. Daily-wage labourers starve.

It will be one year and six months before I see my parents again. It will be two years and three months before my father becomes one of the more than 70 lakh people to die of Covid or its complications worldwide. He will spend the last two years of his life helping my mother with household chores, learning to do them as precisely as a surgeon. He will sanitize groceries, wash fruits and vegetables, and line up the dishes he washes neatly in the draining basket. He will cook eggs and cut salad. He will gargle with salt water, take steam inhalations, and urge his family and friends to wear masks all the time.

He will call for an ambulance himself when his Oxygen level drops after a mild bout of cold and cough. He will die of a cardiac arrest the next day, at the fag-end of the pandemic, leaving his detailed last will and testament on his perfectly organized desk. Along with his will, we will find boxes and files filled with records of all sorts, some in triplicate - medical records, electricity bills, financial statements, official letters from the large engineering firm where he had worked for more than thirty years…and a notebook with a detailed record of Covid numbers in Pune and pan India, with a graph to show the rise and fall of the horrors. I wish he knows that his efforts were not in vain - that he almost made it to the other side of the pandemic.