How India helped me defeat COVID the second time around

Recently, a second bout of COVID left me in quarantine, only this time it was in Mumbai, in the residence of two luxury hotels. During my enforced stay, I found myself understanding afresh the many gifts that life has bestowed upon me and the lucky perch from which I live.

Miles away from the comforts of my own bed and missing my bloodhound, Clouseau, I wasn’t concerned about the 104 degrees Fahrenheit fever and painful chills, incessant sweating and debilitating cough racking my body. COVID had taken from me the joys of touching lives at the pop-up planned by luxury-brand consultant Anandita De and superstar restauranteur Suren Joshi. Instead of worrying about the headache, which was worse than any migraine, and body aches that felt like I’d been hit by a truck and left to die on the road, I was sad that the chefs in the kitchen of Joshi House in Bandra, Mumbai, weren’t giving me lessons or getting hands-on cookery lessons from me. I was lamenting not being able to sit in a pre-service meeting and observe how the manager of the restaurant inspired his team or hear how they questioned the format with which my mentee Vardaan Marwah and I were presenting our progressive Indian cuisine. I mourned my inability to interact with the team members, as I’d wished to enrich my mind with their voices, questions, reactions, unique perceptions. Of course, I’d also wished to leave them with a little bit of my own quirk and self.

When I first got COVID in the US last year, days before my left-shoulder surgery, I found myself in a deep, dark abyss. A glum, gloomy, sepulchral space of tenebrously lugubrious thinking and dire hopelessness. A disconsolate, wretched malaise had overtaken my usual sunny disposition. My chipper mind had been chipped away by the virus and the fraying social fabric that is 21st century America. My hotel stay in Westchester, New York, seemed like an incarceration worse than life imprisonment. Even with family visiting me at a safe distance, I couldn’t shake away my angst. NYC, my soul city and home for 30 years, felt cold, incapable of healing me. Even before my body felt pain, my mind and heart were being shattered beyond repair. I saw death at close quarters, and it took everything I had to fight the terror my mind was wreaking on my psyche. That I came out alive, had surgery, and lived to tell the tale is a miracle I couldn’t foresee in that hotel.

The fever was much higher the second time around, the body aches worse still, and oxygen saturation just a hair better. I also suffered a horrible migraine-like headache that connected me to that dark period after my stroke when I returned to India to possibly die. Yet — what amazes me the most — I felt no fear, didn’t feel alone, and I certainly didn’t see death or envision any scare of hospitalisation or worse. In quarantine, without any immediate family close by, a physician who knew my medical history or could be a comforting figure — in Mumbai, I felt comfortable, hopeful, cheery, and in command of myself and my senses, assured of my future and making it safely to a negative status.

Anandita De, my new bestie, is a friend I was destined to have so that my second COVID battle would have a Mumbai native caring with heartfelt concern for me. Her many calls daily, rich with conversation, would last for hours and keep me engaged and challenging myself. These hours of human connectedness, the sights of salt-of-the-earth living on the streets I saw from my hotel window, the sounds and smells of Mumbai, the knowledge that I was co-existing with people far richer or staggeringly poorer than I who were also battling COVID, kept me true to myself, unafraid of the outcomes that the virus could have inflicted.

India’s heart and soul, its unmatched beauty, its deeply vexing poverty, its citizenry’s peerless generosity and elastic hearts and ruggedly brute stamina to deal with every rebarbative vicissitude of life… The fluidity with which India breathes, moves forward, connects with the past, and looks ahead to tomorrow and the tomorrows beyond… The incessant honking on the streets, the cacophony of sounds that are deafening and also comforting… The tireless energy of the birds in song and flight, despite the scary and superlatively high pollution levels… The majesty of the gnarled old trees, the rich vibrant flowers, and the lush and plush verdant greens of the grass and leaves in places you expect them, and those places where one wouldn’t think of such a blessing… It is this that kept me from breaking, even when on the verge of being broken beyond repair — this magical truth of India, this foundation from which the Indian man, woman and child springs forth — this made me see hope where a year ago I found none.

Quarantined for more days than I wish to count, I found myself happily resigned to my fate. I made my peace with the virus. In finding space for it in my mind, I found room to accept and embrace my reality and to tackle the pain and life’s loneliness with COVID. The chef, teacher, mentor, public speaker, consultant, and author — these professional hats were relegated to some faraway closet in the deep square footage of my mindscape. In connecting to my environment, as rich and mystical as India, as rip-roaring as the world’s largest democracy, I found my salve, comfort, hope, the healing and faith that gave me the courage to keep going, living, believing, loving, being at peace with the self and rhythms of the world.

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