OUR LIVE-IN VIRUS

Corona has settled over this landmass like a moving cryptic crossword. How do we read its clues?

- Ajay Sukumaran

Let’s take a step back from a Covidinduced humidity, if such a thing is possible. And rewind to the mid-1980s when another scourge, a real ‘unknown unknown’ that had unnerved the West, was beginning to surface in India—HIV, or the human immunodeficiency virus. Veteran physician T. Jacob John has a vivid memory of a panic-stricken October evening in 1986 when Vellore’s Christian Medical College—where he headed the virology department—admitted one of its first HIV patients. An American, the patient was taken in by evening and at night his room was locked from the outside. The door was opened slightly, tremulously, for dinner—it was pushed towards him by a wardboy who scampered back to safety soon after.