2022 started with new experiences. I should have known something is terribly wrong when I started to crave watching Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham. I sat through the over-the-top, misogynistic, problematic 3.5-hour movie, crying through every moment, even more than the very gaal-fola-Gobindor-Ma Jaya Bachchan did. I was feeling pretty down by then and decided to order biryani. I must be the only person in the world who got the news of being tested COVID positive and went back to eating biryani, now somewhat relieved that the sudden, inexplicable urge to watch a crappy movie might have had a medical reason.
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I’ve
been thinking a lot ever since, lying in bed and asking, why me? I’m doubly
vaccinated and always doubly masked up. I live the life of a recluse. I don’t
party. I’ve said no to most people wanting to meet in person. All my
friendships and relationships have been relegated to WhatsApp. I haven’t
attended a wedding since 2012. I have never had domestic help. I haven’t
traveled internationally. I mostly cook my food and order room service when in
a hotel. I teach online. I never whine on social media about how I don’t have a
social life anymore. Why me?
I got plenty of time to mull over these questions but found no answers. I spent
the whole of January coughing and sleeping out of sheer weakness. That is what
COVID does to you. Everyone who has survived it will have their own story to
tell. My story involves a quarantine room I fell in love with, some brain fog,
and a former US president.
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I am glad that I quarantined myself within an hour of showing symptoms, even
before my RT-PCR could be scheduled the next day. I had taken a flight to
Kolkata a week ago, just like I had done a few times in the past year, doubly
masked and fully vaccinated. I had managed to evade COVID for almost two years
since its outbreak. Yet, I shivered uncontrollably that evening, so much so
that I had to wear a few sweaters and don double socks, getting on my haunches
horizontally and hugging the bed. It also brought a sense of deep fear that
pushed me to message a few close friends and let them know that I was very ill
and I might be dying. I did not know what had afflicted me to bring about those
chills and shivers (I still did not believe that it could be COVID), but if
this is what dying looked like, I wondered if my financial savings would sink
down the bank’s floor remaining unclaimed for life.
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It was my sister’s father-in-law, Malay Babu, who took most of the brunt of my
illness. Within minutes, he had to vacate the bachelor pad where he lived,
cooked, watched television, and enjoyed his life. It is a small, cozy room on
the mezzanine floor I passed on the way to the rooftop. The doors were usually
partially closed, so I never really got a good peek into the room. That would
be my quarantine room at least till my test results were out. The sheets were
quickly changed, fresh pillows were brought from downstairs, and Malay Babu
barely got ten minutes to collect his essentials and move. I somehow limped up
the stairs, holding on to the handrails, entered the room, and collapsed on the
bed. I do not remember much from the rest of that night.
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I opened my eyes the next morning and looked around to get my first close look
at the room. There was a fan atop my head and an air conditioner on the wall in
front of me. There was a monitor. On the corner was a table with an assortment
of medicines, a bottle of hair oil, and shaving paraphernalia. On the right
wall were two windows, now closed. On the left wall were a series of pictures,
some in black and white and some framed. First, there were Maya's ancestors
staring back at me with stern eyes, I could tell the resemblance with little
Maya. Maya is my eight-month-old niece. In one picture, Maya looked like an old
man wearing dhuti and sitting on a chair. The resemblance of the forehead was
striking. In another picture, Maya sat in a white sari, her head partially
covered, with a striking resemblance of the cheek bones. Wait, was I
hallucinating? How could both her great grandparents look like Maya unless they
both looked like each other? My eyes drifted to the other pictures, a wall
calendar (the tell-tale sign of a Bengali household), gods and goddesses,
Thakur Ramkrishnadeb, Sarada Ma, and Swami Vivekananda. Then there was Sai
Baba, Radha Krishna, and wait, a framed picture of George W. Bush smiling back
at me. How did I forget about this picture?
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My sister got married many years ago. It was during the wedding that I met
Malay Babu for the first time. He seemed like a traditional, nice person who
spoke in Bangal and lauded me for doing a PhD (I was a PhD student at that
time). He had also made an unusual request, asking me if I could bring him a
picture of President Bush the next time. It would be one of the more unusual
things someone had asked me to do. Obama was already the president then, I
wonder if he knew it. I wondered what connection a gentleman from Kolkata who
has only left the country for three trips to Bangladesh and has never boarded
an airplane ever could have with President Bush. I told myself that it was none
of my business. The next time I visited Kolkata, I gave him a rolled and
laminated, 19” by 13” poster of President Bush, bought from Amazon for $10
(including $3.99 for shipping), that has gone out of stock since then. He was
thrilled and thanked me many times. He never asked me for anything again. I
heard that he took the poster to three shops in Rashbehari Avenue and all of
them refused to frame it after looking at the poster. He finally found a shop
where the person, after much coaxing and cajoling, framed the poster for him.
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And now, I was trapped in Malay Babu’s room, watching George Bush smile back at
me from the very poster that I had bought many Januarys ago.
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I tested positive. I postponed my tickets. I called my parents and told them
that I am not coming back to spend time with them for a while. There were
tears. There was pep talk. There were dozens of medicines—cough syrups, nasal
sprays, and multivitamins that replaced Malay Babu’s medicines. And there was a
lot of brain fog. I was too weak to sit or walk or spend time on my phone, so I
spent the next many days looking out of the window to see darkened algae stains
on the walls of the adjoining homes on the right and President Bush smiling
back at me on the left. I do not know if one was more interesting than the
other.
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I fell in love with the room. It had a calm, restorative energy to it. I would
doze off by 8:30 pm and wake up by 6 am, opening the windows and waiting for
the first rays of the sun. With winter sunlight streaming in, this became the
window to the world I was temporarily quarantined from. I suddenly had the gift
of time and started taking note of the small things. An old woman, now blinded
and possibly in her 90s, sang devotional songs praising Ram and Krishna every
morning. I learnt that she has been abandoned in that house with a servant, her
children having moved out long back and now waiting for her passing so that
they can sell off the house to a promoter and build a high-rise apartment. On
the other side, I heard loud voices of a child and a rather overbearing mother
that left little to the imagination. “Why aren’t you eating breakfast? Why
aren’t you doing your homework? How much water have you been drinking since
morning? Have you emptied your bladder? Come, it’s time for a bath. It’s time
for your drawing classes.” At night, the mother cooked and the child sat in the
kitchen doing homework, the mother constantly nagging and asking him to frame
sentences in English with perfect grammar. “Make a sentence with the word boy.
What is the opposite of a boy? Make a sentence with the word girl.” One mistake
in sentence construction, and the mother would be very upset. I wondered what
all the fuss was about perfecting a language, a foreign language that too.
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I listened to many such conversations throughout the day, all while in bed,
that I eventually discovered was raised on a platform using bricks and
discarded blocks of wood to increase under-the-bed storage space. I sometimes
wondered what would happen if the bed collapsed under my weight. The sunlight
continued to give me hope every morning while President Bush kept smiling at
me. Time had slowed down, and with nothing much to do, I thought a lot. I
thought about my childhood and the winter of fourth grade when I had contracted
chicken pox. We used to live in a really big house, and I was sent to the
farthest room to quarantine. I lay there on a folding bed all day and watched
the Telugu neighbors erect a grand pandal for a family wedding. They played
loud music very early in the morning and with the absence of television or
phone, that was my source of entertainment. Thirty years later, I still
remember some of the songs of Kumar Sanu they played; those songs still remind
me of chicken pox.
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My symptoms changed for the next few days. The chills were gone, but then came
high fever. Then one day, there was sneezing. And coughing. The night when I
threw up my dinner, I had an elevated heartbeat. My body had no clue how to
respond to COVID. I went downstairs only a few times every day, for bathing and
for using the restroom, my head reeling as I climbed up and down the stairs. My
sister and her husband sanitized everything I touched with gusto. They gave me
delicious home-cooked meals, peeled pomegranates, washed my dishes (so that I
do not touch more things), and refilled my hot water flask, being at my beck
and call 24/7. After living on my own for 16 years, I was glad that I was not
left to recover on my own. On days when I felt a little better, I sat on a chair
atop the stairs. From there, I watched little Maya play or watch “Gaiyya meri
gaiyya” (Oh cow, my dear cow) on television.
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Malay Babu, the fantastic story teller that he is, regaled me with hundreds of
stories from his life in Bangal bhasha. He enunciates Corona as Koruna
(sympathy), and told me stories from the time when he served in the army, how
he ran away from home once, how he drove jeeps during war, lifted weights, and
ran miles every day to stay fit, how he went to Bangladesh to meet his extended
family decades after his parents had moved to India, how he went bargaining for
Ilish maach (fish) from Podda when the person selling fish told him that he has
two begums (wives) and 18 children to take care at home, and how he got on a
cruise ship near Barishal (might have been a large boat) with no money when a
Muslim don who wore “jaali genji” (a vest designed like fishnet) rescued him. I
relished all his stories from my vista point atop the stairs till I had no more
energy left. Then I would go back to my room and stare at President Bush till I
fell asleep. I am not sure if I was hallucinating, but I sometimes thought that
he was moving his lips to talk to me.
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Eventually, my quarantine ended. I slowly started spending more time
downstairs. Wearing a mask all the time became a habit. We celebrated the end
of quarantine with biryani from Nusrat’s, just like the day when I had tested
positive and spent the evening watching a crappy movie and eating mutton
biryani. I booked my tickets. My parents visited. I packed my bags and put the
sheets and pillow covers for washing. I hung my blankets in the sun. I picked
up my things and took one last look at the room that had become my safe haven
for the past two weeks. And I was awash with sadness. Sunlight was streaming
through the windows just like it did every day. The mother was asking the child
if he needed help separating the bones of the fish on his own. Maya’s ancestors
started back at me. And on the far end, President Bush smiled back at me,
wishing me health and waving me goodbye.
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sunshine
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