April.
Early summer in Delhi is usually associated with the first searing heat-waves of the season; with ripening mangoes and golden amaltas that burst into blooms on the trees that line the streets. Melting ice-cream and warm nights. Hay-fever…I usually have bad attacks of sneezing and coughing in April. This year, it was no different. Except when I developed a sudden raging fever. It was the second week of April. Delhi was already seeing a spike in Covid cases.
I live with my parents—both elderly, both with assorted co-morbidities. So, naturally, I’m careful to the point of paranoia. I hadn’t gone to any crowded spaces or been careless. But here I was, with a fever edging rapidly over a hundred degrees. I isolated myself from the start. I don’t remember too much about the next few days, to be honest.
My mother tells me that, for the first day, my fever just didn’t abate. It obstinately refused to budge—eventually staying static at 104.5 degrees. My head felt as though it was splitting and my eyes were on fire. The doctor recommended all the urgent Covid protocols be started right away, particularly because I have a history of asthma. If this went to my lungs at any point, there would be hell to pay. A list of medicines with strange names—Ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine—was handed to my mother. It was late at night and there were no taxis. The neighbourhood stand’s drivers had deserted the city at the start of the second wave. My mother didn’t want to call an Uber as she didn’t even know where she would get this assortment of medicines. Finally, a kind taxi driver came to her rescue, and took her to Yusuf Sarai. She was away for hours—visiting shop after shop. But, medicines were already in short supply, as oxygen was soon going to be. It was nearly midnight and my condition was rapidly worsening.
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At some point, I passed out. I can’t tell you what it was like in chronological order. Reliving it now is difficult. But there are emotions that I recall, if that makes sense to you.
I remember my mother’s terrible fear as she searched for medicines she couldn’t even pronounce the names of, her panic as she tried to arrange a bed for me, her horror at my blood test results that showed soaring D-Dimer, CRP and IL-6 levels—terms that were strange to us at first, but would become horribly familiar over the next few weeks. I remember her despair at my refusal to allow her anywhere near my room. She wanted to be with me, to try to help me. I couldn’t let her.
I remember my own fear as I watched my parents beginning to display signs of infection themselves, some ten days into my recovery. Amma was complaining of fatigue and weakness. In between looking after our two dogs, my dad (who had a cold) and me, she slept for hours.
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But somewhere between the cold fear, I also remember relief—a blanket of it—as friends and family closed ranks around us to protect, to help. There were no questions—just complete, unstinting love and kindness. Friends organised a bed for me—it’s another matter that I did not eventually need it. An oxygen cylinder arrived at our home. Medicines—including the elusive Fabiflu and the even more elusive Dexona—were sent, via Swiggy Genie. A nebuliser arrived in the dead of night, sent by a worried aunt. Family members who live nearby took turns to cook meals and send them over via WeFast or Dunzo. Our domestic help made fresh mosambi juice and sent it, along with dozens of daab. All those green coconut husks…another day, this could have been a beachside holiday!
Ten days.
That was all it took for Delhi to buckle under the brutal second wave. No beds. No oxygen. Hospital CEOs had joined ordinary individuals in taking to social media in sheer desperation, pleading for help, broken in ways I can only imagine. In some hospitals, oxygen ran out altogether. Opening social media pained me almost physically—death and suffocation and disease was everywhere. If my parents fell seriously ill, I had no idea what I would do, where I would go. The sense of helplessness, of impending doom was almost heartbreaking. Then, on my tenth day of illness, my mother’s oxygen levels fell sharply, with no warning. One minute she had excellent saturation levels, the next moment she was gasping for air. Her oximeter was flashing at 82 and dropping.
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Again, it’s all a blur of sleepless, terrified days and nights after that.
But I am lucky. We are lucky. We made it. My recovery has been very slow—hit hard by the lack of rest and almost overwhelming stress. I had a mild fever, fatigue and immense weakness for weeks afterwards. The brain fog still persists. I’m doing my best but there are days—sometimes consecutively—where I have to be reminded about things I would have usually remembered. Anxiety knocks me flat. Insomnia comes and goes. My mental health skates on thin ice. Recovery—if you can call it that—has been indescribable. Exhausting.
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I have clung onto the comfort of old books and photographs. Memories and stories held my hand in ways that nobody else could while I was recovering, while I still agonised over every cough that my mother gave at night. I read Agatha Christies by the dozen while I was lying in bed between serving meals to my parents or washing the dishes. I couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t just Covid—it was the sheer panic of hoping that nothing would happen to my parents in the middle of the night. Somehow you feel even more helpless at night. But I wasn’t alone. A friend stayed up resolutely all night with me, every night—for three weeks or more. We would talk about life, about old times, about silly, happy hopes for the future. All the while, I was listening to the sounds of a quiet house—hoping like hell that the silence wouldn’t be broken by gasps for air.
Nearly three months later, I haven’t forgotten any of it. I just find it hard to remember. I don’t know if that makes sense. I’m still taking things really slowly but 10 consecutive days of work leave me with intense fatigue. I am trying to ease back into exercise. I remember the air at Sunder Nursery on a nippy November morning, and the laughter of friends who met me in between lockdowns. Yet as much as my mind recalls those happy moments, my body still remains exhausted even at the idea of the week’s work-load. Zoom calls instill a faint sense of dread. Why do I take on everything? Why did I take on this piece? Is this helping me cope, or aggravating everything instead?
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On social media, things are almost back to normal. You don’t see those panicked calls for help anymore. There are no announcements for oxygen-filling plants and concentrator requests. You don’t read so many obituaries or see photographs of those who left us too soon. But they are there—in the numbers that you can’t dial anymore, in the voices that you will never hear again, in the photographs of the burning pyres that met our eyes every morning for two horrible months—in the memories that they have left us with.
Carbon. Is that where I should have started? It’s the opposite of oxygen, but it is how we will all end. Particles of soot floating through the air, near the bank of a river, free of all the burdens of life, aimless and desultory.
The months of April and May aren’t easy to forget. But they are even harder to remember.
(The author is a historian and foreign policy analyst)
