On Kindness & Privilege By Sonali Acharjee,
Memory works in strange ways. When I tested positive for Covid, I thought I would recall all the advice various doctors had given me throughout the pandemic. Instead, I remembered the eyes of those who had been in despair—an old woman in a Covid ward, isolated from her family for the first time in her life; a young man begging hospital guards to admit his oxygen-deprived father; a police officer who asked me for water because he hadn’t had the time to fill his bottle as he herded migrants off the highway. Over nine months, before I got infected, I had stared into countless eyes of those suffering. During my 14-day isolation period, they stared back at me. The average Covid patient, till July 2020, had to necessarily quarantine inside a medical facility, often with 15-20 coughing strangers in the same room. By the time I contracted the virus, I could isolate within the comfort of my two-bedroom home. I wasn’t battling the dread, like many others did, of having infected other loved ones. As for medical help, the doctors I had interviewed throughout the pandemic constantly kept in touch—sending lists of medicines I needed to take, things I needed to do and of what to eat. My war was never against loneliness or even with the virus, it was with the guilt of my privilege. As I reported on Covid through the pandemicwrecked months, I imagined all sorts of symptoms taking hold of me. I was certain that my close proximity to Covid wards would give me a viral load high enough to take me straight to the ICU. One morning I woke up, heard my cook in the kitchen and panicked because I couldn’t smell anything. It was a few minutes later that I realised she was yet to cook anything. And when it actually happened, I escaped with nothing more than mild upset stomach and a month of fatigue. My work, my health, my life never suffered; but my belief in equality did. What I did gain, however, was discovering how community structures in India pay off during tough times. On the days when I was too tired to cook, kind neighbours, friends, even old colleagues jumped at the chance to send me homecooked meals. If medicine took time to be delivered, my society guard offered to go and fetch it for me. One time, I woke up at 2 am, crying after a particularly vivid nightmare about getting lost inside a Covid ward and a friend calmed me down over the phone, helping me through the maze of confused emotions. “I survived on kindness,” a 92-year-old man who had survived Covid once told me over the phone. When I was finally Covidfree, I realised, so had I.