An Oral History of the COVID-19 Crisis: 'Death had taken hold everywhere I looked and leaned'

Manik Sharma is a Delhi-based writer. It’s night. I amble my way towards the washroom on our floor, hoping it’s the last time before dawn, which is only a few hours away. It is terrorising to walk down a corridor lined with beds in which unrecognisable faces are curled into the warmth of their arms. An old woman, possibly in her eighties, sits upright, unfazed by her surroundings – her casual smile the brightest light in the building. She has smiled at me before, but this time she tells me in this intimately shared privacy between the only two people who must be awake at that hour: ‘You’re young, you’ll be fine’. I don’t sleep until morning. At sunrise, she is gone, dead in the sleepless quiet of the night I spent shifting between different corners of my bed. Hers is recycled to make way for a new patient. After spending six days in a dedicated COVID hospital in April 2021 I’ve been unable to take away well-timed epiphanies or a profoundly recalibrated sense for life. That much-too-casual claim of the ‘second birth’ never seemed like it would arrive because while physically you started again, mentally, the scars have become like time… their weariness you just put on and carry until either of you is lost.

COVID hospitals are like frantic traffic jams, only their gridlocks are internal and of course, fatal.

I don’t really remember falling asleep in the hospital ward. Not because it was crowded physically, but because it was mobbed by pain, the uncertain whispers of anxiety and suffering, that eventually roll up into a soundtrack of noise you can tell everyone is listening to inside their heads. You begin to doubt your ability to walk, your ability to lift or even hold onto anything with something like a grip. For years our imagination of what the apocalypse might look like has been coached by the terrestrial visuals of some mega-event. Inside the hospital it is a quietly surreal tick of the clock, of chests heaving in and out, of people struggling to say the things they want to say to their loved ones, one last time maybe. The desperation of it all is numbing. In all the ways that I imagined death would sneak up on me, I had always reserved the gratuity of nostalgia as a given. There must of course be time to think, to remember and to reminisce. COVID, on the other hand, lets you have none of it. The memory lane you assume you’d get to go down is shoved to the side by the impermanence of your next breath. At times, unknowingly, I was counting heartbeats, trying to sense their presence as some sort of empirical sign that life still flourished inside me, even if death had taken hold everywhere I looked and leaned. Read more from the Oral History Project here. It’s my third or fourth night in the hospital. I’m starting to feel better and can walk unsupported. Outside the men’s washroom, a fellow patient asks me to check on a man who seems unconscious behind one of the doors. I don’t have the courage to question or rationalise in that moment. I walk in and spot a pair of naked feet, seemingly comatose, peering from behind the half closed door. They aren’t moving. I push the door open, slowly, so I don’t risk losing a breath or two due to whatever horror waits on the other side. Naked and limp, a middle-aged man sits in a tub of warm water, a bath someone has obviously drawn for him. His eyes are loosely focussed on the corner of the booth. They don’t react to my presence. I notice his chest rising and falling. Alive, I register and realise immediately, the vagueness of what that means here. Thankfully, his wife walks in. I take a piss in their presence and leave. I never got to know what became of him, not because I couldn’t but because I refused to.

FirstCulture · Oral History — Manik Sharma

That’s the thing about collective trauma, that it is eventually impossible to soak in its entirety. At some point you do the inhuman thing and move on, try to lift yourself to a land that obscures itself to certain vulnerability. A land that takes so much forgetting to get to, it makes lucid accounts of that period impossible to reconstruct. You remember only what your mind won’t let you forget. It’s the dexterous, undiplomatic clarity of this pandemic, its slowly extracted violence that unlike anything else confuses even your sense of victimhood. Even if you’re alive, a lot inside you has been killed. And it surfaces only on your return to the normalcy of social life, the jagged edges of which seem ever more discomforting to adapt to. People tell me I don’t smile enough. They tell me I am doubting myself to the point of puncturing my own confidence. I know all of these things are true but I can’t bring my head and body to agree to fix them. I sit through the nights, awake, staring at the roof, trying to figure the million things that could possibly still go wrong. So much of this disease pushes you towards the mathematics of a body you only knew as an acquaintance, it has become impossible to relate to the unquantifiable – love, emotion, care and sympathy. I spontaneously break down, react to things unnaturally. But nothing seems natural to begin with. I’m not me, this is not the person, the body, or the soul that I’ve known to have lived with. But it is all I’m left with. A second birth would imply a newfound zest for the life that has survived. But I think you get better not through rejuvenation but by resignation. You resign yourself to the fate of the invisible after you eventually get tired of measurements, of the machine-like precision that it suddenly takes you perform the most basic of humanly functions. There is no new chapter, just the prolonged release of this absurdly maniacal one that might take months, maybe years to overcome – should we even survive that long. It’s weird on one hand to carry an image of the apocalypse in one half your brain and with the other commit to living still. The one thing that thankfully works in our favour, as it did in mine, is the humbling tiredness, the fact that humans eventually tire even of the feeling of having either witnessed or experienced loss. Beyond the rather grim poetic quality of that fact lies a somewhat uneven pasture of familiarity, where you can do some of the old things like laugh, cry, sleep and walk. To run, however, you must still resign yourself to the unanticipated, the unknown and the uncontrollable. Write to us with your COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown experiences for inclusion in the Oral History Project at firstculturefeatures@gmail.com