For most people who have encountered the unwelcome coronavirus, this entire year has felt like a corkscrew tightening on their bottled lives. For others it felt like a languid holiday where they discovered new pastimes and unearthed old skills that had grown rusty. For others still, it led to the deaths of their loved ones, displacement and poverty.For me, it felt like the pangs of childbirth – tightly clenched and unrelenting, leaving me breathless. And yet, after it was over, life pushed out screaming and bawling. This was in March 2020.
Two years ago, I started writing a book – the book that would change the way I looked at life – the start of a new chapter, a new voice, a new personality: confident, fearless, and comfortable with who she was. But life is anything other than what it’s supposed to be, which is possibly why we have so many trashy books around. Mine could also end up being one of those, if it’s ever completed.
Resist jumping off
I signed the contract for my first book in December 2018. Here I am, more than a year and a half later with no sign of the elusive book, even though the cover is ready – a sparkling yellow with the colours of Superman, ready to fly off the shelf sans text. I want to fly away with Superman. Hide, disappear, be anywhere but here where there’s writing to be done and life to be lived.
My friends think this book on parenting will turn us into cool parents – uncomplicated beings who deal with their children and life calmly. I wrote the first half of my book, Unparenting, in less than three months. The first thirty thousand words flowed out seamlessly. My publisher loved it, as did my agent.
The few friends I showed a couple of chapters to couldn’t wait to read the rest – which is swirling somewhere within me. The time after I wrote the first half of my book feels like a dark abyss out of which I’m still clawing my way. I can’t think of any word better than gutted to describe how I felt from 2018 to the beginning of 2020.
Hollow and broken, I was unable to think, feel or go through the motions of being a sensible parent who had always stayed on top of things. Everything slid away from underneath me – my child’s schedule, my father’s health, the household, my diet and mental health, as if I was on a high speeding motorbike and I could see life whizzing past and being fed into machines in the distance.
I could only watch and resist jumping off. The speed was dangerously inviting, and I wanted to jump. But that kind of lack of restraint could only mean one thing: oblivion – a luxury I could ill afford.
In the summer of 2018, a great love whom I had treasured and grown used to for two years, slid off my arm and out of my life. Around the same time, my mother, who suffers from bipolar disorder, became very ill. My father and I would take turns to hold her trembling form as she fell asleep.
My siblings came home to Agra from all parts of the world to help but it didn’t get any better. By mid-2019, she began losing all sense of time and grew incoherent. I could no longer manage her condition on my own and, in October 2019, we had to admit her to a mental healthcare facility in Delhi.
I had to execute that sentence for my mother, sign the bills, and watch her helpless face crumble as I left her in the luxurious prison where she would be looked after by strangers. In the meantime, I visited her every weekend and tried to distract myself with poetry events and the anti-CAA protests taking place across New Delhi in the winter of 2019. After a month, we realised she could not manage without my father and me. Each visit became a protracted plea for us to take her home.
Two months later, we got my mother out of the institution. She seemed much better and it looked like the new medication and enforced routine had helped her. The year began with a sense of hope. We got new help, started a new schedule, hired an art therapist and I set about organising all of this. Of course, by then, COVID-19 had arrived in India.
In and out of consciousness
My experience of the coronavirus cannot be called unique. It is something every person on the planet is struggling with in one way or the other. The planet itself seems on the verge of a colossal breakdown. We don’t know if we are ever going back to normal. But then there is nothing normal about a world bursting at the seams with hunger, sickness, poverty, climate change, and the displacement of thousands of human beings.
After one of my visits to see my therapist in Delhi on 28 February, I came back to Agra feeling dizzy and more fatigued than usual. Within a week, I was bedridden. I couldn’t move without wanting to vomit and excrete at the same time. The tips of my fingers and toes alternately burned hot and turned ice-cold. My head felt like it was splitting into a million pieces several times a day and there was no keeping record of how many times in a day fever frolicked with my body.
I was, of course, suspicious by now that I had caught the infamous virus. My brother, a respiratory consultant with the NHS in the UK, analysed my symptoms and confirmed my fears, and I officially withdrew from the house, from the kitchen, from my parents, and my child. Over the next month, only my two obnoxiously dependent cats were able to breach my iron wall of isolation.
I hadn’t been afraid of death since I’d had a brush with it at the age of 19. This kind of fever-induced slipping away seemed a better choice compared to any other form of death. I didn’t struggle with the isolation either. I was used to being a homebody, staying within my boundaries is necessitated by my life as a carer for multiple people and a writer.
Only one thing frightened me – the thought of leaving my 12-year-old son alone. On most days I could hear him standing outside my door, checking on me repeatedly. But I couldn’t reach out, touch him or comfort him.
I remember this one afternoon when I was drifting in and out of consciousness. Someone from my dad’s hospital staff came every few hours to check my vitals. I felt sticky and hot. The sun streamed bright, pretty, and fluorescent from my bedroom window. The twin gulmohars outside our house had not yet burst into full bloom. I remember looking at them a lot. They were my outside world for five weeks and had been a source of delight for me for years.
Anyone who knew me well was aware that if I died, I wanted a gulmohar planted over me. In that state of semi consciousness, I was reminded of the comical resemblance of my situation to O Henry’s semi-dying artist heroine. I remember laughing out loud, but there was no one to indulge my morbid humour.
I was sweating into my bedclothes, clutching the sheets, fighting to not allow the mattress to engulf me completely. It was like the dream of falling we all experience at some point in our lives. In that split second, I made a mental will – a list of things I wanted the people I loved and cared for to have as a memory of me when I was gone: a silk saree each for my closest friends, my wedding ghararas for my sisters, my oldest books for my brother, my silver jewellery for my sister-in-law and an artist-friend. My poetry books for my poet-friend and ex-lover.
My own poetry I would leave in the care of my best friend, B, who would make sure it was published some day if it was worthy. And then I thought of my unfinished book. The book that was walled up inside me, that had been the promise of change and newness in my life – what would happen to the book?
Amidst all this, I refrained from telling anybody outside my family that I was sick. A couple of friends reacted with such dismissal that I didn’t have the will or the energy to tell anyone else. Two others messaged casually and, when I told them, they checked up on me regularly.
The only person I told with some hope of understanding was my neuro-linguistic programming teacher. Her classes were perhaps one of the lifejackets that I held on to during this time. I sat through them whenever I could manage. Her bright energy and belief prodded me ahead. She helped me reframe my thoughts and I clung to the fact that I had something of consequence inside me that was yet to be delivered.
Running away from the deadline
I had to get better and, eventually, I did. By mid-April, I could walk around, come out of isolation, hold my son again, smell my father’s hair, touch my mother’s hand, hold my cats and feel their warm bellies pulsating with life.
All of it was joyous, but only briefly. I fell sick again and the symptoms came back with a vengeance. I couldn’t walk without throwing up and my head felt like a sack of clanging knives. A weakness of the magnitude I never hope to experience again ravaged me. I couldn’t walk. Days blurred into nights with little difference.
It was confirmed that the virus had never really left my body. I had contracted the prolonged Covid syndrome, in which a person can suffer from all major symptoms for more than eight weeks with a brief lull in between. Antibiotics, analgesics, antipyretics, and isolation drills began again. It was so bad it was comical.
I remember moaning to my sister on Facetime on a slightly good day and she responded with a poker face: “Suicide, divorce, depression, breakups…But look, two months of Covid and you’re not on the ventilator!” I remember laughing so helplessly that I wet myself. Morbid humour has always been our family’s coping mechanism. Better than being drunk, I say, especially when there’s no one to clean up your vomit.
It was the beginning of May by the time I somewhat recovered. At present, I am virus-free but I still struggle with the physical and mental after-effects of the illness. My sleep is ruined and I cannot concentrate for more than an hour a day.
As for the writing, the process has been transformed for me. The book that I started in 2018 was a happy, confident book. It was the experience of a parent who knew what she was talking about. I feel lost as a parent.
I have often felt overwhelmed at being the only one responsible for my son’s needs, but now I struggle with the bare essentials. The smallest demands ticks me off. There are days when the touch of his hand on my shoulder or his desire to be close to me makes me want to scream. There have been days of exhausted angst when I have inflicted pain on him with words that still singe my tongue.
I wonder if I am worthy enough to write this book when I don’t know how to take care of him except holding him at night and watching TV with him as he manages on his own through days that are out of sync with our pre-lockdown lives. I don’t know how to maintain a routine. I don’t have the energy or the will.
I can’t make him eat healthy or teach him to stop obsessing with our dogs. How can somebody like me write a book on parenting? Is this one of those ill-fated projects that should be abandoned halfway because the vision that gave them life is now lost?
Running away from my already extended deadline seems easier when there are other prospects that demand less from me. During the lockdown, there was an exponential growth in online events and I was invited for a few Instagram Lives and Zoom sessions where I had to just act confident and look nice. Not a very intimidating task for someone who has faked through most of her life.
I’d say yes to anyone who asked because not feeling useful is hard to live with, even when you’re very ill. So I’d look glamorous and authentic even though it hurt my insides. It would take me two days to recover from the strain of an hour-long session. People would text me and tell me how wonderful I was and how they couldn’t wait to read my book. And when I’d say it wasn’t done yet, they’d cheerfully say, you know what, this is the perfect time to write.
But how does one write like this? When it’s difficult to sit at my desk for more than two hours. When I feel like a fraud. When certainty about the self and the world and the nature of life itself has been dissolved by sprays of expensive disinfectants?
Maybe I was never meant to be a writer. Maybe my editor, my agent, my friends, and family will still think well of me even if I fail at my mediocre book. Or maybe they will still look at me with hope, like my mother looked at me through a crack in the door on days when I was sick, hope straining through her frightened eyes.
I am not like the great artist who painted with broken bones, twisted ribs, and steel rods stuck inside her. I am just me. Some days I look at the last bit I wrote before everything happened: Chapter Five, it says, five more chapters to go – five more lives or lies or half-truths or dreams. Who knows?
Reema Ahmad is a work in progress, a comprehensive sexuality educator and counsellor, something of a poet and amma to one son, two parents, two cats, and four dogs. Six months after she tested positive for Covid-19, she is back to her writing, counselling, and training in neuro-linguistic programming.
This series of articles on the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on publishing is curated by Kanishka Gupta.
