TALES FROM THE OTHER SIDE

COVID SURVIVORS FROM WITHIN INDIA TODAY’S WORKFORCE ON FIGHTING THE VIRUS, WHAT GOT THEM THROUGH IT AND THE REALISATIONS THE DISEASE BROUGHT WITH IT

Going Viral

By Kai Friese, Managing Editor

Calamities are supposed to have their funny sides but the dull apocalypse of our time has gone on for so long now, it is hard to see any humour in it. Unless you find heavy, sententious, irony funny. In which case, sure: it’s Alanis Morissette humming through your quarantine like a big black fly. I am literally the guy who was afraid to fly—and got Covid the day after returning from my first post-pandemic aeroplane trip. Also, the day after I had registered for my first vaccine. Sure it’s meaningless—but so ironic, don’t you think?

Also meaningless: the whole thing. Other than the fear of having infected others—the off-colour joke was that I was the ‘Lutyens’ Tablighi’—it was an underwhelming illness. I know, I know! I was lucky and even while my infection was running its dreary course, three of my friends were hospitalised.

The other unfunny joke was that this was Covid’s ‘celebrity wave’, which, given Sachin Tendulkar, Alia Bhatt, Farooq Abdullah and who knows who, lent resonance to the popular rumour that this was really a disease of the rich—more ironic comeuppance. In fact, I was the target of one biting subaltern rebuke, from a woman who had served me dinner at a friend’s house the day before I took ill. She refused to come to work after hearing I had tested positive and complained that I had done a very bad thing by getting tested! The test only draws out the disease, she said, while informing my friend that she had suffered many symptoms herself over the past few months, but had kept Covid at bay by avoiding any medical test!