It was afternoon, Tuesday. My head echoed every breath I took, making thinking a loud and nasty process. The back of my throat felt as if there was a large army of little ants scurrying around there wearing hobnailed boots and scrubbing away at my tonsils with medium-grained sandpaper of the particularly inefficient kind. My nose had feathers lining it that rustled ticklingly in the breeze of every inhalation and exhalation and my eyes teared every now and then, even though I was not watching a weepy movie or reading the chapter in the Little Women series when Beth dies.
By evening, Tuesday, when I got into the car for the ride home, my head was pounding, my eyes were watering constantly, my nose was coming off its moorings with my sneezes and my breath was coming out in whooping coughs that pulled hotly through my chest. Not again, I sighed painfully to myself as I tried to find a cool spot for my back to nest into in the back seat. “Didi, you are not well,” my driver told me, with masterly understatement. I muttered something that could have been rude if I had been able to think of it quickly enough and closed my eyes as we negotiated early-rush-hour traffic and copiously pouring rain.
“Baby, you are not well!” my father said as I walked in the front door at home. It seemed like something I not only knew, but had been told before, too. There was an odd familiarity to the phrase. I sat back on the sofa, trying hard not to feel as terrible as I wanted to, because worrying Papa was not on my to-do list. Grinning cheerfully and squashing sneezes before they could express themselves, I told him all about my day, managed to get through dinner and pudding and then debated whether I should admit I was not feeling well, or not.
“I am not well,” I agreed the next morning, when I woke up and sipped my green tea with the same feeling of batteredness as I had felt the previous day, but worse. After some small battle with my conscience for causing the aforementioned male parent more worry than he needed, I decided that maybe Papa knows best and I would stay home. That is when I really asked for trouble. Why is it that when you allow yourself to be unwell, you are given lots of advice, none of which you really want to follow? Drink chicken soup, Thereza ordered. Up your immunity, it’s too low, Anjali said. REST, Shivangi insisted. You really have to stop falling ill so often, Anita stated. Eat some chocolate, you will feel better for a while, Shyam said - perhaps the only sensible suggestion I got.
Papa clucked and fussed like the Mother Hen of the cliché. If I was asleep, which I had a distressing tendency to be whenever I closed my eyes, he would check my forehead or lean fondly over me to see if I was fevered and/or awake. I will make you some nice hot jeera-garlic rasam, he said, and got diverted by the phone ringing its piercing tune through our apartment. Go lie down, he ordered, and then insisted I get up for lunch or tea or whatever the time of day was. Finally, he sloshed out through the rain and wind to get garlic bread and the cutest little fruit cake he could find for me, his baby, insisting I eat it when all I could taste was woolly, sandy nothingness on my tongue. If I hadn’t known that it stemmed from love, involvement and worry, the situation would have given rise to Epic Family Battle # 12,000,000,000,001.
Finally, un-fevered albeit still wobbly, my knees, as mentioned previously, still not all found and reinstalled, I tottered back to work this morning. Since I am still alive, have all my limbs and seem to be whole in body, mind (appearances can be deceiving, remember!) and soul, people are not telling me what to do. Which to me signifies triumph: I won the battle against my pet virus, this time!
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