SUBHASHREE RAGHAVAN, working woman, 53 years
NEVER has my mind dwelt so much on death as it has done these last few months in the times of covid-19! Every satisfactory breath I exhale, I dub as “God’s breath” and say thanks. Because there was a point in July last when for reasons unknown I would get breathless as I lay down to sleep. The first and foremost lesson I am still learning in this pandemic is that life can go in a snap, there are no guarantees that if you have a normal today, tomorrow will also be the same. If it is you have no idea how lucky you are.
Such truths we always knew but it took a corona virus to hammer it home. Did we ask for the story of Buddha and Kisa Gautami to be brought home to us in this manner? Every night as the lights go out, I try to recall all the friends we once knew, now snatched away by coronavirus…all the cousins who went in 2019, 2018 and 2015, and even before we knew of the virus’ existence. I hope you’re in a better place, I tell them. I make it a point to pause and say, I pray for you are all right, each time I hear an ambulance siren whiz by outside on the streets — which is ever so often, each day, in Mumbai where I live.
Covid-19 has snatched the girl with the lovely smile. The quiet young man with shy smile — my husband’s friend from childhood, both we knew from our college days and now they’re gone, just like that. Also gone, my only remaining maternal uncle, who suddenly left us between two vaccinations. My father cried like a child on the phone over a brother-in-law he had been so fond of and how we both worried about how to break the news to my mother? Like a coward I behaved each time I visited her, unable to find a right way to tell her, and my father had told her that her brother was in hospital. It was well after a month that he finally told her, her brother was no more.
Another childhood friend of my husband’s gone after having been missed on their WhatsApp groups for a few weeks. A couple we knew were gone within weeks of each other, leaving their young son orphaned. In what frame of mind will the lad pick up the threads of his academic life abroad, we wonder. Two former neighbours from our old days. One of my father’s few surviving friends and his wife, within months of each other, in last year’s lockdown. A beloved schoolfriend of mine in Dubai and her mother who contracted the virus after two relatives stopped by on a flight layover to visit them. Her mother had to be hospitalised and was still there when I last checked…it’s one new complication after another and she’s going to need years of physical rehab if she makes it, my friend sighs.
In retrospect the last 11 months I’ve spent to-ing and fro-ing back and forth from my parents’ home to ours, helping them out with chores every day, seem to have been the easiest part of my life! Sitting and repairing our face masks on my day off is somehow therapeutic. My father laments: So many I know are gone, so why am I still here? I have no answers.