Holding the Fort

Over the past week, I have managed to cut, burn and injure myself in the kitchen in a myriad ways in my attempts to cook three decent meals for my family daily. I have never been much of a cook, but needs must. Ours became a Covid-positive household on April 7. My wife Sunanda and I tested positive for the virus; my 11-year-old daughter, Saiaa, has, thankfully, been spared. It all began on the grey morning of April 5, when I found my wife shivering with high fever. Two days later, a test confirmed we had Covid. We had managed to escape the virus since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, even as I visited quarantine centres for work and reported on the pandemic, mostly thanks to good mask habits, but with the latest surge, it found a way to get past the mask. Our daughter has been relegated to one room in our two-bedroom apartment and has mostly stuck to it, except on the first night when I found her rummaging for something outside in the middle of the night—her doll, to take with her to bed. Amid all the dreariness of medicating ourselves and dealing with our symptoms, my wife’s case being worse than mine, I manage to sneak in moments of joy and fun— deriving peace and wisdom from Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev’s videos, making Horlicks for my daughter (who has taken to calling on my cellphone and ordering ‘room service’) and allowing the journalist in me to take a break. We have failed to determine how the virus entered our home (was it my visit to the government secretariat on March 31 or maybe the technicians who came home for AC servicing?), but it no longer matters to me. My aim now, as we continue to isolate, is to try and improve the next sabzi I make, mostly so that I don’t have to watch my daughter suffer through her father’s cooking.