1. Returning to Ourselves

“Protected Code Blue.” The speaker was booming. And she was rushing. The donning area down the corridor was just a few minutes away. Why, then, did it seem like a never-ending marathon? And instead of the antiseptic white walls and fluorescent lights of the hospital corridors, why was she seeing trees lining the passage? This wasn’t making sense.

Mini woke up with a start. Thank heavens it had been just a dream. In real life this would have been the stuff of nightmares. If the distance to the donning area had really been as long as it had seemed, she wouldn’t have reached in time to save her patient. Mini checked the time on her smart watch—2:00 a.m. Trying to go back to sleep would be an exercise in futility. Mini knew that without fatigue as its foundation, or the anticipation of a busy workday ahead, the sleep she needed would elude her. The stress of being a critical care physician at the forefront of a pandemic had seeped through every pore of her body. And even now, when she was self-isolating aft er testing positive for the virus, she was unable to relax. She was restless for her isolation period to end. She missed being at work.

All the years of her training as a critical care physician and the many certifications she had earned were important to her; but not as much as the satisfaction that the work brought her. She loved her job as an intensivist. Flashing lights, blaring sirens, and the apparent chaos of an emergency suite—she thrived on these. The surge of adrenaline and the demanding nature of the job had always pushed her to strive for excellence. And the onset of the pandemic had been no different. It had been a challenge that no one had ever anticipated; and she had worked hard to give her patients their best chance at survival. With so little information about the virus and the deadly disease, she had been one of the many doctors who put themselves at risk to attend to their patients. March and April of 2020 had been watershed moments in the life of every doctor everywhere, but most so for frontliners like her. Later, people had asked her if she had been scared. What could she have said—that there was no time for fear; or that the only fear she had felt had been for her children, and not herself? What if she brought the virus home? What if her precious babies fell sick because of her? Other than the prognosis of her patients, this was the only question that had haunted her. She shuddered. The memories of those days were still so difficult to process.

She had permitted herself no contact with the children. By the time she returned home, they would be asleep. Peeping into their room as she went upstairs to the attic, she would have just enough energy to finish dinner. She would be exhausted; the 12-hour shift had felt like the 30-hour shifts she had put in during her residency. The numbing pain she felt at trying to give her best in the overwhelmed healthcare system in one of the world’s most developed countries would overshadow her aching legs. She would drift off to sleep almost immediately, only to be disturbed by the constant buzzing of her phone.

This isolation was different. The worst of the pandemic was behind them; and she had even received her first vaccine jab (the children, of course, were too young). She was monitoring her patients from home, and the buzzing of the phone was a lot less ominous than in the early days of the pandemic. There was less anxiety. Instead, there was a sense of boredom and a restlessness. She wasn’t used to having so much time on her hands. Urgency, stress, and feeling rushed had been her baseline for very long; and had been a convenient way of sidestepping the difficult memories from work, and from life. Dreams like the one she had just woken up from made her uncomfortable and she longed for the dreamless sleep that exhaustion brings.

She checked her oxygen saturation and reached for her phone. There were the usual messages from colleagues—some asking after her health, others with news about the hospital. And a message from Amma, reminding her to take care of herself and to eat well— with a contact number for a lady who supplied authentic Kerala food. Mini smiled.

Only Amma, sitting far away in Kerala, could have found someone like this for her in New York! “I dreamt about stew, Amma! I could even smell the freshly ground pepper!” she had mentioned when they last spoke. That had been a nice dream; one that was perfect for sharing with Amma. “I didn’t know you could smell in your dreams!”

They had both laughed.

It wasn’t just tonight. Of late, Kerala was trending in her dreams. The trees, the food, those meandering estuaries, and their village—everything would come together, as if in a kaleidoscope, and wake her up from sleep ever so often. It had been years since she had been there. There had not been much opportunity, with the gruelling residency schedules and then the processing of resident permits and visas. Anyway, what would she do in the sleepy village in the backwaters of Kerala? All through her childhood she had been impatient to escape that sedate and dull life.

***

Mini had been only four when her father had passed away in an accident. The unfortunate incident had changed the form of her life completely. Having recently completed his specialisation in neurosurgery, her father had been on the threshold of an exciting new career in the United Kingdom.

Along with the prospects of immigration, her mother’s plans of further education had been shelved. Instead, her mother had returned to their ancestral family home and joined the State Health Service. Mini could never quite figure out how her mother had managed to live in that boring little hamlet all her life. Whenever she tagged along with her mother to the small health centre, little Mini would see its thatched roof and decrepit furniture and wonder why her mother had never looked for better opportunities. Vaccinating babies, treating simple ailments with limited resources, educating patients, hitching up her saree to wade through water to check on a new mother—Mini found her mother’s work completely glamourless. But her mother never complained and never, ever showed a desire for anything more. Mini would wonder how her mother could be content with so little. When the uncles from Dubai visited, when they went to the shiny new hospitals in Kochi for her grandfather’s surgery or when she heard of cousins studying combinations of arts and sciences in school in Canada while she struggled with the pedagogic teaching of the solitary school in their village—that was when these questions would find their way out of the depths of her mind to her lips. “Amma, why do you work in villages? Don’t you want to work in hospitals with big buildings and new machines everywhere? Don’t you think life in the city would be more comfortable?” She firmly believed that her mother should have aspired for a better life. It was her mother’s lack of drive and ambition that was responsible for the limited canvas of her life, she had decided early on.