Back at the single room, I spent the next two days alternating between getting dangerously close to panic and mustering the determination to stay positive.

In my frenzy sometimes, I wished I weren’t blind and I could see what’s around me. May be, if I had seen the bench, the I/V stand, The bed and the drab coloured wall, I’d have felt less horrible. May be I wouldn’t have let an invisible virus play tricks on my mind. May be, watching the other, more normal hospital staff, would’ve reassured me that things weren’t as bad. A pair of seeing eyes would’ve put the focus on normalcy and lessened the effect of being in a dark alley with sound effects symbolising disease, suffering and death.

Sometimes, I woke up in the middle of the night to the combination of coughs and beeps, , feeling in a strange way if something terrible had happened to me or someone in my family. I’d grope around for my towel to wipe away the cold sweat.

“The X-ray looks much better. I’ll probably discharge you in a couple of days. We need to take one more x-ray just to ensure everything’s fine,” the doctor declared the next afternoon, sitting across from me on the bench with my case file open on his lap. He flipped through more reports and asked the nurse to cut down the medicines to half.

“If everything goes well, I’ll also discharge your uncle with you. The good news is, he has also tested negative,” the doctor said, getting to his feet and striding out of the room with the nurse in toe.

I woke up with fresh energy on Wednesday. It was nearly a week since I arrived and the day the doctor has marked for my discharge. I slipped into a new t-shirt, smiling to myself that it’d be the last time I was bathing and changing clothes in the crampy room.

I tried untying the sambar sachet on the breakfast tray with the same nervous excitement. And…it happened so fast that I momentarily lost control. The grandma knot untied sooner than I expected, the sachet shifted in my palm and the open mouth tilted down, spilling the reddish yellow content on my pure-white dhoti and on the t-shirt. I groped with my right hand to check the damage. Most of the sambar was spilled on the bench. I should be able to wipe it off entirely. And I did, or so I thought. But the Aaya who came to sweep and mop the place discovered the sambar stain on the bench. Thankfully, I was inside the bathroom and didn’t hear her gripe. I washed my face and got ready for the visit to the x-ray room two floors below.

*** *** ***

I adjusted the face mask and put out the white cane for the nurse to hold the tip, wondering all along if I’d ever adjust to the ‘new normal’. The sneezes, coughs and whirring of machines followed me on the lengthy corridor until the elevator at the corner, like the taunt of a ghost that knows I was scared.

As I stood hugging the metal frame for the x-ray, I prayed earnestly that the doctor shouldn’t find anything to suggest that the infection was coming back instead of fading away. The rapidly filling up beds at the hospital justified the fears that someone could breathe the virus back into my lung with deadly effect.

*** *** ***

The release of my breath seemed long and full as the doctor declared I was fit enough to go. Suddenly my chest felt less congested and I realized I could move around without stiffening my body in panic.

“Half of it is stress,” mom told me on the phone, knocking me off balance yet again with her accurate insights. Ordinarily, I’d have argued that point just to prove her wrong about the assessment, but not on the day when the doctor had issued my discharge orders.

My cousin Narasimhan’s call provided the last confirmation. He’d come at 8 o’clock in the evening with Swamy to take me home. The ordeal was well and truly over.

Passing through the corridor for the last time, I felt something was amiss though I wasn’t exactly able to put my finger on what it was.

“You seem preoccupied,” my cousin remarked. I brushed the statement away by asking him about the day’s work at the office. But as I sat in the rear seat of the autorickshaw after bidding farewell to the nurse and the aaya who took care of me, it suddenly flashed. ‘Uncle’. As my fellow covid-19 patient who bravely fought the disease and recovered, I found uncle to be a fellow soldier in the war against the coronavirus. Our shared fears and frustrations bonded us stronger than before and I badly wanted to know whether he was getting discharged as well.

I realized it was too late to shout for my cousin, who was going ahead of me in a car, as Swamy kickstarted the autorickshaw. Not wanting to give up, I called his phone to ask about uncle.

“The doctor wants to keep him for a day to fix his prostate. He’ll be back home tomorrow,” Narasimhan said.