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HOW TO DRAW A CORONA VIRUS

HOW TO DRAW A CORONA VIRUS

Lessons have come riding the second wave but accompanied by too much melancholy

It was in January last year that we all were introduced to the term social distancing. Back then the virus had seemed, to me at least, a threat unique to China. But soon the Americans were doing the same in a matter of weeks, and then a few other countries and it was already here at our doorstep. I never realised that the phrase would soon be joining so many others — community spread, an abundance of caution, flattening the curve. The growing realisation that like the days under lockdown last year, this time too I have no choice, has given me a panicky loneliness. The way this second wave is lapping at us makes me wonder if we came faced with this pandemic recently — a couple of weeks back? We’re in a health emergency in spite of the lurking threat for over a year. Hadn’t we had enough time for planning and preparation? If only we knew our priorities! Soon started the onslaught of social media posts about all the adorable quarantine activities that seemingly everyone was undertaking with their families — making cakes, cookies, re-enacting famous paintings for photography and, at times, virtual get-togethers and alumni meets. I took perverse pleasure in newspaper articles about China’s spiking mental diseases, rising divorce rates, increasingly desperate dispatches from parents who had failed at home school. It was around this time last year my sons’ school had moved to online learning, and shops and restaurants began to shutter. My kids, like all others I believe, suddenly found themselves sealed within the walls of their homes — no school, no sports, no outings. Both my sons, in their early teens, initially responded by immersing in the world of video games, and very soon started lamenting the impossibility of hanging out with friends. Last year, around this time of the year, when a dialysis patient walked in and came positive on the RT-PCR test for COVID in the hospital I work in, the hospital was marked a containment area. So along with a couple of others, I had to be quarantined for having examined his body fluids under microscope. I had no option but to lock myself in one of the rooms at home. I sat on the bed with my laptop; but did no constructive writing and, instead, ended up signing up for a free 15-day trial of NatureGlow and started watching YouTube stuff like how to wear your hair to bed, and developed a costly impulsive online shopping habit.

My husband had been taking a life-must-go-on approach to the virus, and was doing good getting engrossed in his work. His texts (we had to communicate through phone as I was locked up in a room for quarantine) were about why the media wasn’t reporting on the bleakest epidemiological models, why a freight train’s worth of tanks were heading up the Himalayas to Indo-China border when the country is battling to hold its rickety healthcare system? I would sip my coffee and text back in validation.

One evening after my quarantine days, a friend from school, Nayna in NYC, who had been complaining of a sore throat, was admitted to a hospital because she couldn’t breathe. When I heard this, a sudden cold passed through my body. It was the first time I had been able to actually conceive of the disease that had been obsessing me for weeks now; and the first time, too, that I realised that we would — every single one of us — be intimately touched by it one way or the other. Now in 2021 spring, the virus began its exponential climb in India, worse in Delhi. We went into lockdown again.

The TV screen in front of me was filled with burning pyres in a certain crematorium in Delhi. Bodies burning in rows. Ambulances brought bodies and a sole man appeared in a PPE in the crematorium with a task of burning bodies placed on dozens of wooden pyres. Every day or so I end up communicating with friends across the globe, listening to their tales of quarantine. It will be interesting to see, Nayna and I agreed when we last spoke, all the ways in which this contagion will bring us together or rip us apart.

(The author is a doctor working in Moolchand Medicity, New Delhi, as a pathologist consultant and general manager. The views expressed are personal.)

HOW TO DRAW A CORONA VIRUS

HOW TO DRAW A CORONA VIRUS

Lessons have come riding the second wave but accompanied by too much melancholy

It was in January last year that we all were introduced to the term social distancing. Back then the virus had seemed, to me at least, a threat unique to China. But soon the Americans were doing the same in a matter of weeks, and then a few other countries and it was already here at our doorstep. I never realised that the phrase would soon be joining so many others — community spread, an abundance of caution, flattening the curve. The growing realisation that like the days under lockdown last year, this time too I have no choice, has given me a panicky loneliness. The way this second wave is lapping at us makes me wonder if we came faced with this pandemic recently — a couple of weeks back? We’re in a health emergency in spite of the lurking threat for over a year. Hadn’t we had enough time for planning and preparation? If only we knew our priorities! Soon started the onslaught of social media posts about all the adorable quarantine activities that seemingly everyone was undertaking with their families — making cakes, cookies, re-enacting famous paintings for photography and, at times, virtual get-togethers and alumni meets. I took perverse pleasure in newspaper articles about China’s spiking mental diseases, rising divorce rates, increasingly desperate dispatches from parents who had failed at home school. It was around this time last year my sons’ school had moved to online learning, and shops and restaurants began to shutter. My kids, like all others I believe, suddenly found themselves sealed within the walls of their homes — no school, no sports, no outings. Both my sons, in their early teens, initially responded by immersing in the world of video games, and very soon started lamenting the impossibility of hanging out with friends. Last year, around this time of the year, when a dialysis patient walked in and came positive on the RT-PCR test for COVID in the hospital I work in, the hospital was marked a containment area. So along with a couple of others, I had to be quarantined for having examined his body fluids under microscope. I had no option but to lock myself in one of the rooms at home. I sat on the bed with my laptop; but did no constructive writing and, instead, ended up signing up for a free 15-day trial of NatureGlow and started watching YouTube stuff like how to wear your hair to bed, and developed a costly impulsive online shopping habit.

My husband had been taking a life-must-go-on approach to the virus, and was doing good getting engrossed in his work. His texts (we had to communicate through phone as I was locked up in a room for quarantine) were about why the media wasn’t reporting on the bleakest epidemiological models, why a freight train’s worth of tanks were heading up the Himalayas to Indo-China border when the country is battling to hold its rickety healthcare system? I would sip my coffee and text back in validation.

One evening after my quarantine days, a friend from school, Nayna in NYC, who had been complaining of a sore throat, was admitted to a hospital because she couldn’t breathe. When I heard this, a sudden cold passed through my body. It was the first time I had been able to actually conceive of the disease that had been obsessing me for weeks now; and the first time, too, that I realised that we would — every single one of us — be intimately touched by it one way or the other. Now in 2021 spring, the virus began its exponential climb in India, worse in Delhi. We went into lockdown again.

The TV screen in front of me was filled with burning pyres in a certain crematorium in Delhi. Bodies burning in rows. Ambulances brought bodies and a sole man appeared in a PPE in the crematorium with a task of burning bodies placed on dozens of wooden pyres. Every day or so I end up communicating with friends across the globe, listening to their tales of quarantine. It will be interesting to see, Nayna and I agreed when we last spoke, all the ways in which this contagion will bring us together or rip us apart.

(The author is a doctor working in Moolchand Medicity, New Delhi, as a pathologist consultant and general manager. The views expressed are personal.)

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