So it finally happened last week. For the first time ever — more than three years after the WHO called it a ‘public health emergency of international concern’ — I have tested positive for COVID-19. I’ve taken the RT-PCR at least a dozen times over the past three years but the results were always negative. I was so used to negative results that the ‘positive’ test came as a shock.
Bizarrely enough, instead of getting worried, I felt high, as if I had just been recognised for selfless service to the nation. Maybe because this was the first time an objective assessment of any kind had yielded something ‘positive’ about me. It’s also possible that since I never got COVID-19 all through the pandemic, I may have felt vaguely flattered by this sudden show of attention from an exotic sub-variant, XBB.1.16, that sounded like a limited edition variant of Bugatti Chiron.
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“How did you get it?” the wife wanted to know when I broke the news.
“How should I know?” I said. “It’s not like I secretly went out drinking with Coronavirus.”
“But someone did transmit the virus to you,” she said. “I’m curious to know who.”
“It’s not a woman for sure,” I assured her. “This infection feels totally masculine, tough.”
Nobody cares about COVID-19 any more
When a colleague called, I promptly told him. He was unimpressed. “Relax machan,” he said. “It’s only Omicron, not the Delta. No big deal.” Excuse me?! Is it my fault that I got Omicron instead of Delta? It’s not as if I get to choose. The variants decide among themselves who gets to infect whom.
When another journalist friend called, I duly informed him that I was in the trenches of my immune system, marshalling my brave antibodies against the evil coronavirus. His response: “Oh. I see. By the way, do you have Shashi Tharoor’s number?”
“I have the number,” I said to him. “But I have to search for it, and I can’t search right now because, you know, I am SUFFERING from COVID-19.”
“Cool,” he said. “What else? Seen anything interesting on Netflix?”
“I am not watching Netflix,” I said, feeling my temperature rising, “because I am infected by this deadly microbe known as SARS-COV-2, and it has inflicted on me a disease known as COVID-19. You may have heard of it.”
“Okay, then.” He just hung up. No expression of sympathy, or awe, for the fact that I was, at that very moment, harbouring in my body dreaded biological terrorists responsible for killing more than 6.8 million people worldwide.
Taking advantage of staying home
If it was just a matter of man’s indifference to (COVID-infected) man, I would perhaps have ignored it, but no — people were actively taking advantage of my situation. The wife one morning peeped into my self-isolation to ask, “How are you feeling today?”
Truly touched, I launched into a detailed update on my body temperature, sense of taste, ease of breathing, muscle pain, fatigue levels, and so on, when she cut me short.
“So you’re not going to the office today, right?”
“Do I look like I can go to office?” I said. “I am single-handedly fighting for survival against a million-strong, marauding army of invaders that I can’t even see.”
“Good,” she said. “I’ll be out all day. I have a lunch meeting with a vendor, then coffee with a supplier, and dinner with a client. Make sure Katta has his meals on time and doesn’t stay up beyond 8.”
I was going to say, “That’s not fair, I’m too sick to deal with him”, but she had already banged the door shut.
I couldn’t help but feel that COVID-19 wasn’t COVID-19 anymore, not like in the good old days when the entire family spent time together at home because one person got infected. Obviously, I’m glad we’ve tamed it. But I do resent the banalisation of it all.
Only Katta is still old school. He is, after all, the quintessential COVID generation. His first exposure to the outside world, his introduction to school, happened during the pandemic/ lockdown years. Around lunch time when I went to check on him, he was already set. We have a somewhat longish dining table — you could say it has social distancing built into it — and he was sitting, all double-masked, at the far end of it, like a little Putin. He was armed with a jumbo-sized hand sanitiser, its nozzle pointed at me.
I put my hands up. “You’ll eat by yourself?” I asked.
He nodded, then yelled, “Go, Corona, go!”
The author of this satire is Social Affairs Editor, The Hindu.
sampath.g@thehindu.co.in
