The wailing siren jolts me from my reverie. Must be an ambulance entering the neighbourhood to whisk someone away to a hospital. I wonder who it will be this time. Do I know that wretched person, and if I do, will he or she ever return home? Have they found a hospital bed? Will there be a ventilator and sufficient oxygen?
It’s a weekly affair now—this wail of the ambulance. The sound used to be so rare once upon a time. Even last year, during the first Covid wave, I hardly ever heard it. But this time…. I shake my head and continue to look out over the balcony. There is nobody out in the street below, though it is 10 in the morning. Even the birds in the trees are silent. This city feels like a ghost town at 10 am.
People who I’ve known for years—no, decades!—have died or are dying of the coronavirus. Neighbours, acquaintances, friends of friends, relatives of friends….3 former colleagues of mine passed away in the last 5 days. My best friend, someone I’ve known and loved for 50 years, is in the ICU for the past three weeks with Covid related complications, as I write this. His family is not taking any calls. I don’t know if I’ll ever see him again.
Nor do I know if and when the axe will fall on me, or my family. There’s not much we can do to avoid it, to be frank. People who I knew to be paranoid about Covid precautions, sanitizing everything that came into the house, banning all domestic help from entering, taking their own pulse oxygen levels and temperatures daily….careful people enjoying reasonably good health…are now no longer around.
People are living on a prayer.
And my family? Frankly, we’ve been following just basic precautions of staying at home except to go out to buy essentials, social distancing when outside, wearing masks outside the home, and washing our hands when we remember to, which is not that often. Sometimes I’d forget to take my mask along with me and hurriedly make do with a handkerchief outdoors. We’ve never sanitized a thing we brought in. We use only soap and water to wash our hands, never a sanitizer. Generally no precautions other than the basic ones. Therefore I’m a little surprised—and very grateful—it hasn’t happened to us yet. Our luck has held. So far.
What I don’t understand is when this virus does attack, why it attacks some people fatally, just touches others in passing to induce mild symptoms and gives some no symptoms at all. I mean, has anyone figured out why those testing positive for Covid are affected in different ways—some gasping for oxygen, some needing just a little isolation and TLC at home, and some remaining asymptomatic? It’s not just the elderly or the sick succumbing to the disease. Healthy, physically active people I know are collapsing suddenly. Finicky, fastidious people who followed every Covid rule in the book, every instruction from the WhatsApp do’s and don’ts videos they received….are now gone forever.
The first lockdown was an irritant, a terrible inconvenience, and to many a loss of livelihood. We could live with those. But this one appears to be a matter of survival!
This time it is no longer a novelty like it was in April last year. It’s no longer a picnic at home in the warm bosom of the family on a weekday. No one, including the perennially attention-seeking celebrities, is posting photos of the meals they’ve cooked or sharing videos of their exercise routine at home in their body-hugging leotards. Nobody is talking of the new hobby they’ve picked up, or cheerily talking of blue skies, starry nights, and clean air to breathe. The arty types too are being merciful, no longer discussing the silence of true solitude that lifts the spirit and encourages reflection, retrospection, and quest for knowledge.
During last year’s lockdown, we didn’t share in our WhatsApp groups locations of hospital beds and oxygen cylinders, or which vaccine centre had a supply of Covishield on a given day, or where to get an RT-PCR test before those became unavailable. Hundreds are dying in the chilling anonymity of the isolation wards. Thousands across the country are being given mass burials. Hundreds of bodies have been just thrown into the Ganga. Dog crematoria are being converted to accommodate humans. People are dying just outside the hospitals, unable to get in.
Yes, it’s worse this time, much worse.
The optimism and hope of last year (remember ‘Go Corona go!’?) have given way to a fear, a shroud of gloom, a sense of uncertainty, and wondering if the end is near. Yes, we’re scared now.
My respect and awe for the coronavirus has grown. It seems to have remarkable intelligence. It retreated a bit last year, rallied its forces, mutated, and came back just when we’d let our guard down. Is it trying to prove Darwin’s theory that only the fittest will survive? Is it trying to save Planet Earth by ‘adjusting’ the population? We’ll know soon enough.
So how do I personally feel about the coronavirus knocking on my door in the near future? Quiet acceptance, actually. I do believe in fate—what is meant to happen, will. Que sera sera. I’ve had a pretty long and full life…been there, done that. So I really shouldn’t complain. I take each day as it comes, follow the basic precautions and I don’t worry too much about the future while going about my daily business. And I remember to pray daily for the welfare of those I love.
My reverie is again broken and the silence shattered. But this time it is the raucous music of the Municipality garbage truck belting out a ‘Swachh Bharat’ song. It’s pretty loud. During the ‘old normal’ this would have annoyed me. But strangely, nowadays, this sign of normalcy is comforting.
Stay safe, all of you. Good luck, and see you on the other side.
Beetashok Chatterjee is the author of ‘Driftwood’, a collection of stories about Life at Sea and ‘The People Tree’, another collection of stories about ordinary people with extraordinary experiences. A retired merchant ship’s captain by profession, he lives in New Delhi with his memories of living more than 40 years on the waves.
His book is available on Amazon. Click here.
Comments