In India at this moment. May, 2021.
An ultra honest look as an insider. Finding words to express this clenching feeling in my chest. You might be feeling like this too. You're not alone as we watch India shut its doors in crisis.
I woke up this morning from a vivid dream where a little yellow canary was singing sweetly to try to escape but an extra grill was being added to secure her cage.
When my eyes opened, the house was peaceful, but maybe a bit eerily silent. A steady stream of honks and traffic used to be a constant companion to the view from my balcony. It has been replaced by a haunting song of passing ambulances and police sirens. “TeeeTyuuu TeeTyuuu TeeTyuuu” then “Tyun Tyun Tyun Tyun Tyun” then “TeeTyun TeeTyun TeeTyun”
The roads and the weather is perfect to go out for a drive, but I’ve just gotten another reminder from Dad not to touch the car keys. He’s reading a tweet from the city police informing us that they impounded 1000 cars yesterday, from people who were driving around in Bangalore without valid proof showing why that they had to be out during a lockdown. Those drivers and any unfortunate co-passengers were asked to walk back home. Our trusty Maruti Swift has an on-and-off relationship with her old battery, so we just go down to start the engine every week to keep the car running.
I’m going to skip going for a run today. It is a Saturday, so my late breakfast is going to be delicious Idlis and Dosas made by our live-in maid. We are so grateful that she lives with us while the city is locked down. I know many friends and relatives who suddenly became activists when they learned about the latest lockdown applied across Bangalore. They weren’t lobbying for big changes to health policy — they were just ensuring that all Maids and Help would be allowed into the apartment complex they lived in. Without a Cook and Help, the chores of the house would have to be distributed across everyone stuck at home, and no one wants to volunteer for dishes, bathroom cleaning and jhaadu-poncha when they’re watching TV worried about everything.
I’ve been setting up the Fire Stick on my parents’ TV and introducing them to new shows — like Tandav which they binge watched in one evening. And Scam 1982, which we all watched with insane interest while Dad and I speculated ourselves and bought some DogeCoin and checked the price every hour.
While I’m spending time with my parents, my wife, Richie, is spending time with hers. They don’t have the good luck of having live-in help, but they do have a cook, a morning help, and another evening help visiting each day to keep up the home. Two days ago, my wife had to ask the morning help to stop coming to their home for a couple of weeks when she heard her cough violently into her mask while they were in the kitchen. She didn’t mention it to me of course, why would she?
Late last evening, I got a call from my Mother in Law. “There is no reason to panic”, she said, “Richie has some fever and body pain, if it doesn’t go away by tomorrow, I’ll call someone for a [Covid] test”. I said “Lets just be careful and call someone to collect Richie’s sample right away.” Mother in law said, “I’ve tried, I called 5 labs and hospitals, there aren’t any slots available for 5 days, I’ll try again tomorrow, but Richie has asked me to tell you not to worry. We will get an Oxygen-meter tomorrow when we’re allowed to visit the pharmacy in the morning. And I’ve gotten recommendations from our family doctor for what she should eat.”
Late at night, Richie finally picked up one of my calls. She sounded tired. Lovingly I asked how she’s doing and she said “my throat infections have always been deadly, love, I’m going to be fine.” Then she gave me the good news “Mumma called her doctor friends and pulled many strings and we have gotten a person coming to collect my test samples tomorrow. The doctor heard about my pain and suggested a whole bunch of blood tests, so I’ll give that blood sample to the same guy.” I said “That’s great. In your heart what do you think it is Love?” And true to her delusionally optimistic self, my darling wife said “I’m pretty sure I don’t have COVID love…But I’ve never felt this kind of pain before…”
I haven’t slept since then.
Right now, Richie is not in isolation, she needs a lot of care. So her mother is in her room, giving her cold packs for the fever and then hot packs for the aches. Feeding her fruits. Checking on her through the night. Her mother is 63 years old, unable to go to sleep worried about her little girl. Her father, who is particularly high risk doesn’t know what to do, swinging between fear — refusing to go downstairs to pick up deliveries, love — wearing a mask to go chat with his daughter in the next room, and anger — locking her up to ensure some sort of quarantine. My parents just on the other hand, frequently ask about her health.
When I left for college, 12 years ago, my parents were different people. Their hair hadn’t turned salt and pepper, and mumma didn’t need to first go get her glasses so we could start watching a show.
Having spent a few weeks in my parents house, it is clear to me that they’re aging faster than I’d ever believe. Old age is like a storm, it looks ominous from a distance… but within the storm, the conditions are unpredictable, violent, grim, and scary. My parents are jolly and take on life each day asserting that they’re in the pink of health, but their blood reports, dental scans, coordination, aches and pains, and most of all — their anxiety levels in this ridiculous era, tell a different story.
Richie and I were discussing last week how life has been rough on our parents. I guess life shows its roughness to different people in different ways. Yet it is harder to swallow when it is reflected by the lines on your father’s face or the veins on your mother’s legs as you’re pressing her body to relieve the pain. Watching how they use their time and their vices is also fascinating — all that gardening, and meditation. All those drinks and all those sweets.
Watching your parents get reshaped by age is disconcerting in any situation. But at this moment, it is worse, because they seem so vulnerable to all of life’s health challenges, and especially this bastard of a coronavirus. So a priority for this trip, was to get them vaccinated. Get those appointments and get those injections done.
Both of Richie’s parents are vaccinated. So are both of mine. Well, almost; my dad has had only one dose. Thinking of our parents’ vaccine shots gives me such an immense relief and such an immense sense of weight lifted off my chest. They’re not fully safe yet, but honest to God, we have done everything in our power to get them as protected as possible. And we’re pushing them to take all the Vitamin D and iron supplements and eat their fruits while we’re here.
This feeling of relief just about envelopes Mumma, Papa, Baba and Sasumaa’s protection from Covid due to the science of vaccines. The relief vanishes when I think about anything else.
One thing no one mentions about being in a situation like this is just how the reality of the situation starts to envelope you. It doesn’t happen at once. The seriousness of the situation starts gnawing at you from different bits of information. I’m a numbers guy — so the growing number of cases made me pause my activities when I was in India. But the numbers are not even 0.1% as effective at drilling it into your head as when the virus itself invades your inner circle.
This pandemonium is no longer just getting close to home. It is now inside our homes. It has now struck our families. All of us. There was once a time that the pandemic was just numbers, some vague thing happening in China. Then it spread, but it seemed distant, and I didn’t know anyone who was personally affected.
Then, in the middle of last year, in San Francisco, my buddy+next-door neighbor and his wife caught COVID. We were struck by its closeness then. Then suddenly my buddy’s dad passed away. We were blown away. We didn’t know how to react.
This time in India, it is even closer. It feels like a cloud of grey is trying to seep through our doors. Within the past 30 days. Almost every dear friend I know has caught it, or their family member has it. My friend Sai caught it, so did his girlfriend and it was hard on them, even though they’re just 30. Lots of distant, elderly relatives caught it. Some lost their lives to it. The numbers kept adding up.Then, my cousin caught it, so did his brother, mother, and father.
My cousin’s mother is in the ICU right now. It was a herculean effort, first to get her admitted to a hospital, and then transferred to an ICU bed in that same hospital, against whatever Reservation was placed on ICU beds upon the hospital administration. Can you imagine what happened to my cousin happening to you? Imagine you’re standing in your bedroom, you know that you’ve just tested positive for the virus along with your dad and brother and mother. Each of you is healing but suddenly your mum’s Oxygen levels are rapidly depleting, from 96 to 91, from 91 to 85, then 80 then again 84, then 81, then 75 — OH SHIT. She needs to be rushed to the hospital and put on Oxygen. And instead of telling you that they have moved her and started her on the ventilator, the hospital tells you that there’s no capacity to treat your mother properly. You lose your cool, forget the requirement to be self-quarantining and get in your car and start driving to deal with the hospital nonsense in person.
All this while, you’re working the phones. You keep the pressure up on the hospital to give your mother an ICU Bed, which you just learned became available because someone another patient passed away. But according to the government reservation system, that ICU room is reserved and can only be allocated to someone through the government’s allocation app or some ministerial pressure. You keep working the phones, you send a plea for help out on Twitter, on Instagram, on Facebook. All your friends and family start sending you phone numbers to try to call “as leads”. “Leads” — as if this is some sales funnel where you’re trying to convert a prospective buyer for your products. When in fact, there is no sales quota here, this is a matter of life and death; and an entire country of a billion people, the world’s fifth largest economy, is falling short of the machines that are required to save your mother.
But you’re willing to do anything. Spend any amount of money, even if a scamster’s trying to trick you but there’s some semblance of hope. You’re willing to call in all the favors. And eventually, finally, after an unacceptably long few hours of trying, you’re able to transfer your mother to the intensive care unit that she needs. You breathe a sigh of relief as the doctors start trying to help her breathe better.
The Oxygen numbers start ticking back up, from 81 to 82, 82 to 86, 86 to 94, even up to 95. Assisted, your mother is able to breathe. Turn off the machine and she’s helpless again. And thus the next chapter starts — how will you keep your mother safe when she returns from the hospital? What if she needs oxygen then? Well you now have to find an Oxygen Concentrator. You’ve begun working the phone again, trying to understand why there’s an enormous shortage of concentrators as well.
Outside India, cousins are still considered distant family. And it is still easy to imagine that maybe all these people are just not being careful enough. Just not wearing the right mask. Just not staying socially distant enough. Just doing something differently from you, because you’re trying your damned hardest to follow every guideline, sanitize every package upon delivery, and stay masked in even the scant interactions that happen each day. But the bastard virus doesn’t care about your precautions.
When my own Sister caught it, she traveling to a city for work, and had not taken off her mask for even a minute while she was out there. She initially declared “it seems to be a mild case” when she first lost her sense of smell. Then the body pains bent her over, she began to lose precious weight she couldn’t afford to lose, and the fatigue wouldn’t let her relax even two weeks after she had recovered enough to test negative. She finally relented that “maybe I got a moderate case of this COVID after all.”
We kept sending her food, grateful that we were feeling healthy. And why wouldn’t we? Our help — Jyoti, my dad, mum, and I, haven’t left the apartment complex in the past 20 days. At all. We have gotten all groceries delivered. The vegetable vendor comes to our door. We are being hyper-vigilant because vaccinated or not, my mother’s a super high risk human. So it is a bizarre day when Jyoti starts catching a fever. A day later she has lost taste and the COVID test result comes back the next day — positive. While ensuring she gets the best of care and lots of rest, we’re freaking out. We take out the car out after weeks and go to the hospital to get ourself tested. The Hospital is out of tests today, so we rush to one that has it. They tell us we’ll get results in 48 hours.
Dad, Mum and I don’t have any symptoms at all, except body pain. We’ve been cooking with Jyoti, chatting with Jyoti, and she gives us food as we eat at the table. It feels pointless to isolate her now that her fever has subsided and it has probably been a week since caught the bug. We shrug and figure that we caught the bastard virus too. There seems to be no plausible way that we could avoid catching it from someone in the same house, so close.
But nope. No further symptoms at all. The test results come negative for all three of us. We celebrate by ordering in food and high-fiving all around. It is a miracle. What happened to all the science of how this spreads? Who can explain our negative results? It will forever remain a mystery how Jyoti caught it, and how we didn’t. I’m a scientist by training, but this was weird. We can’t stop talking about it without using mystical references to God and miracles.
Yet, all is not well in the hood. My wife started showing symptoms two days ago. Not just symptoms, Richie is starting to feel body pains like she’s never felt before. The fever is getting hard to break. The doctors are surprised she can still taste, and smell, and by god she can eat. What an appetite she has. She’s at her mother’s place, my mother in law’s home. She is obviously being cared for beyond any level that I could ever achieve. But you know what? Since we got married, I’ve been taking care of Richie. Through all her throat infections and all her migraines. And whether she’s being a good patient or I have to yell at her to behave and take her medicine, she’s my baby now, and I want to take care of her. Or maybe I want to be the assistant to her Mother and follow around and do things. I want to participate in bringing my wife back to health.
I realize that the one thing I can do right now, is to prepare in case her health gets worse. I will not be caught off guard in case she needs a hospital bed or a particular medicine, or whatever else. I go deep. I’m chatting with every COVID whatsapp group, I’m joining Discord servers, and I’m trying out different resources to figure out how the current situation works. And I’m not being stingy, everywhere there is a double match on my donations and NGOs are working to bring equipment into India, I’m donating money. I’m also talking to my friends in the US, getting them to look at avenues of buying and shipping devices to India.
While this is going on, I keep a brave face on to not worry my parents. I can’t help the situation by tending to her since she’s on the other edge of the city, so I might as well shield the situation from additional stress. So, I focus on making sure I win all the games of Ludo against my mother. She’s getting really good at Ludo and she won’t change the funnily made-up rules that we play with. In Ludo, the number on the dice is sometimes more important than the strategies you put in place, and like in life, you gotta play each turn based on the roll of the dice.
Ah! I’ve got work to do, so I focus on work.
I’ve been working non-stop since I arrived in India. Generally, I live and work in San Francisco, in Pacific time (PST) and we coordinate with our European team and their timezones as best as we can. Suddenly my team is grappling with me being in Indian Standard Time 12 hours off their schedule. This means I start working around 3pm getting my own work done. By 7 pm the meetings begin and keep going through dinner and late night snacks. I cut off taking meetings by about 2am. I’m not coherent by then. The life of a product manager is such that you’re in meetings all day, and you deliver on your promises soon after the meetings end so that none of your teams are blocked by you. I find myself writing emails, responding to Slack, or drafting designs till I force myself to bed. Sometimes that is at the point when the Namaaz begins around 5 am in the mosque near my house.
One morning I went to bed after the sun had risen and the birds had begun their morning singing practice. I looked out of my balcony and cursed myself for missing the sunrise. It has been a while since I was awake to take in a good sunrise.
Around 2 am on Friday, I get a WhatsApp message with an article link, announcing that the US will stop allowing flights from India on Tuesday. — OH SHIT. I’m in my last meeting and it is Friday, so I announce the bad news to my team. I quickly let them know I’ll try to get on a flight right away to make it before Tuesday’s restrictions kick in. In the back of my mind there’s the huge concern that I need to 1) Buy tickets quickly 2) Get negative COVID tests for proof to board the flight 3) Pack and grab Richita’s luggage so we can go to the airport in time.
Till now we haven’t received confirmation that Richita has Covid. There’s a guy coming to conduct a battery of tests on her on Saturday. I call her to check in. She’s awake. She’s in too much pain to sleep. I realize that the time’s up. There’s probably no path to getting a negative test result for her in time to catch a flight back to the States. But I’m delusionally optimistic too — what if she’s fine by tomorrow and it isn’t COVID, I ask myself. There are 40 hours in my hands, could I grab some flights and go back in time?
I decide to try to put a plan together. I start by calling up my Airline to change my flight and getting put on a 46 minute hold. During the ‘Hold music’ I scour the web for tickets from Bangalore to San Francisco. There are no tickets that will land before the Tuesday deadline. Ah- there’s one by Qatar Airlines. It is $3000 one way per person. Screw it, who cares about money right now, I click buy. By the time the Qatar page loads, the tickets are gone.
The hold music has suddenly stopped, I ask the agent what the airline is able to do to reschedule my ticket since US travel restrictions have been applied. She says, “Sir, this news is too recent, we don’t have guidance yet, please call back tomorrow”. I say, that will be too late, “could you look for any flights from Bangalore to ANY city in the US?” The answer is NO. I say thanks and hang up. I realize that getting on a direct flight or an indirect flight before Tuesday isn’t possible.
I’m not a quitter. I start looking at how to return to the States via a third Country, thinking — maybe I can stop by somewhere for a few days and then enter the states. Turns out the US won’t let you in if you’ve been in any of the banned flight countries within 14 days prior to arrival. Whoa — 14 days, that’s a lot. So I figure I should stay with some family abroad on my way to the US. Maybe I’ll go to my cousin’s in London. Oh, Wait, the UK Banned flights coming from India way before this week.
At this point I call up my best friend V. He’s also working PST hours while visiting India. He lives in Vancouver, Canada and Canada has also banned flights from India. V has come to India to get married. His goal is simple, he wants to get the wedding done this week, with the least COVID risks and fly back to Vancouver with his wife. He’s also stuck right now. And he’s also stressing about his 30 person wedding plans while the city is in lockdown.
V and I laugh for a while at the situation of how we came home to take care of our parents and now we’re stuck. And then we get into finding solutions. We are on the hunt for a particular, specific kind of country to return to North America and get back to work. We need to fly to a country that:
Still allows flights from India
Doesn’t require Indians to get a Visa before landing in the country
The US has not banned flights from
Ideally, doesn’t have mandatory quarantine requirements and isn’t obscenely expensive so we can stay there 14+ days.
We settle on Indonesia, and Maldives. Maldives turns out to allow only visitors who will stay in a tourist resort, so fine, we start to plan a route via Malé. We’ll just wait till V is married and till we safely test negative for COVID after his wedding. Then his new wife, V, Richie, and I will fly together to the Maldives. He will get a Honeymoon, I will get to reconnect with Richie who will hopefully have fully healed by then, and then we will go back to the cities we call home.
I fall asleep thinking happy thoughts about having figured out a path even though my original plans had been thrown off with this twist.
Then I’m in the middle of this weird dream in the morning. There is a cute yellow bird. It is singing loudly, “Tyun Tyun Tyun Tyun” and flittering about. A big new cage is being fitted outside its current cage so that it just can’t escape. I wake up.
My dad has walked into the room to check if I’m awake. He reads me news from the blue bird of Twitter.
“India just suspended all international flights leaving the country. For all of May.”
The US has shut us out. India has shut us in. The birds can no longer fly away.
I looked at dad and said “guess it’s time you teach me how to meditate properly. No better time than now.”
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Despite how terrible the situation is, I'm amazed at your tone of optimism. Beautifully written piece. Much love to you, Rich and both your families. Hope to see you back state side soon.
Thanks for this beautiful write-up Prateek. Many of us who live far away from our parents are so worried about them and we have no way of going anywhere close to them! Wishing Richita a speedy recovery and hope to see you both in SF soon ❤️