The first wave: When Covid came knocking on my door, I answered

To think today was the last normal day of our lives, four years ago, is quite surreal in retrospect.

I remember play-by-play that 17 March of 2020 centenary celebration of the birth of Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, as well as Children's Day.

Little did we know, this was going to become yet another day in history.

I was a school teacher at the time.

On the day, all teachers attended the campus for a get-together to celebrate the day. A lot of the students didn't show.

Thank god, they didn't. I know now.

I had a mild fever and a cough. I figured it was probably the change in weather.

I attended work and then university – final year at NSU.

For whatever reason, I took a lot of pictures with my friends that day. I remember looking very sickly and tan in those. Could we have possibly known this was our last meeting for a very, very long time? That instead of casual hugs and fist bumps, we were about to resort to sending each other emojis over video calls on Messenger or Zoom?

For the next 1.5 years, this was the last day I had gone to work at that particular school – a job I'd quit just months later into the pandemic, and had physically attended classes at my alma mater.

On 17 March 2020, Bangladesh was proud. Overjoyed. But it had no inkling about what was to come.

Amidst the oblivion, when a certain uninvited new guest came knocking on my door, I answered.

It barged in with all its fiery force and it almost took our lives.

By mid-day of 18 March, we were basically googling this reintroduced but brand new word "lockdown" and trying to understand what it meant when we were told we couldn't get out of the house.

Moving at a distance of six-feet between two people, wearing a suffocating mask, going out for groceries at only a permissible hour of the day were only some of the super absurd things we had encountered.

I lived in the Bashundhara Residential Area at the time. So that meant more attentive lockdown measures compared to some other, more crowded, corners of the city.

My cold got worse until I realised it wasn't just a cold. I heard that the ICCB, like 10 minutes from where I lived, had been turned into an isolation centre. I was so afraid they would put me there that I could not tell anyone how I was feeling. My first time experiencing Covid went by untested, until months later when I had it the second time.

That was my reality at the time. Anxiety, stress and pure and utter fear of the unknown.

So, here's how we coped. As a teacher and a student, I bore witness to the industry and setting most harmed by the lockdown.

Another new dynamic – "online classes" and "work-from-home" –  seemed to take over.

While relying on smooth internet connection, and having anxiety attacks when there were constant network disruptions, we learned patience.

I never got to see my students in person again. I never got to finish the paintings we were making to decorate our classroom walls during English classes, when I decided those teenagers needed a breather.

I never got to see my teachers at NSU or my classmates again. Not until convocation in 2023.

I graduated from home. My final year and I never got to experience the lasting hangouts and trips and hustle of fighting to score better grades near the end.

In contrast, it was now about how are we to receive our salaries, how are we to pay our tuition, our rent, can we even go to the grocery story, how do we cope with emergencies, how are we to run the operations at work and how are we to attend the classes at NSU, will I ever get to go the gym again… Life, operational as it was, had come down to a standstill like when the lights go off in a blackout and chatter turns to quiet or when a manufacturing factory shuts down with all its machinery slowly thudding to a deafening silence from constant blaring chaos.

Covid was already here. It was me, myself and I. Now what?

The most excruciating challenge yet was when July of 2021 came, on Eid day, we found out my mother was Covid-positive.

Covid nearly took her from me, my one surviving parent. While caring for her, I contracted the virus. But that was the least of my concerns.

My whole life had turned into a prism of goodbyes that year. But I refused to say goodbye to my Mum.

July 2021, Eid-ul-Azha

My family and I rented a car and drove off to my hometown in Cumilla. I was having asthma attacks during the whole ride. As soon as we were done with the sacrificial rituals, I pleaded with my Mum to come back home. I simply couldn't breathe.

I had this tingling fear that I may have been putting everyone else at risk. When we got home, I called Praava Health. Two medical practitioners came over and took my sample with a cotton swab. That instant, I requested them to take one of my mom's. Though she showed no prominent symptoms, she was an elderly. So I thought, better to be safe than sorry.

Within the next day, we got our results. Suspected patient Zero of the house, i.e yours truly, went by scot free. So, it was just a cold after all.

My lord, it was Mum. She was positive.

July went by with my Mum being stubborn and not allowing us to have her hospitalised – her diabetes was off the charts, 40% of her lungs damaged and nearly dying of pneumonia. By August, another wave of lockdowns hit.

We had no luck with hospital beds. I had managed to get an oxygen cylinder which needed refilling every week with an ambulance showing up in my garage every time. I could not get out, no one could come in. And my mother was dying.

By the grace of lord we got a seat at a ward in Mugda Medical College and Hospital which had then been transformed for Covid care.

Living in the Red Zone was my hellscape

The first day there, we went inside and I saw at least a hundred people awaiting just one spot at the hospital to seek treatment. I watched my mother get carried into the ward on a table. Amid the chaos, I demanded to see a doctor who could explain to me what her treatment would entail, someone, anyone to tell me she was not going to suffer the same fate as those bodies I just saw get wrapped in shrouds and put in an already crowded ambulance.

The first night was the hardest. I was panting and puffing and sick with worry but I had to be strong for my mom. She was undergoing extreme medication. Doctors said I was lucky she even got a bed. They also gave me a heads up about how gross public hospital bathrooms can be. I was grateful.

Clock struck 3:00am, an ungodly hour broke loose, darkness loomed and all I could hear was echoes of incessant coughs, vomiting noises that stretched across the floors, and what I saw was grotesque.

Mum was trembling. I put a blanket over her head, turned her toward the wall and I said, "No matter what happens, don't turn around."

Just outside the ward, a man from the men's ward fell to the floor and gave in to his coughs. He fell before my feet as I got up to use the bathroom sink to wet a towel to put over mom's forehead scorching from the fever.

I was on a mission, I had to keep walking while the nurses ran over there attending to the dying man. And all I could recall were lines from "Anthem for Doomed Youth".

"What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

— Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle

Can patter out their hasty orisons.

No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;

Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—

The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;

And bugles calling for them from sad shires."

Two weeks in that hospital felt like a scene out of a Wilfred Owen anthology. I've never seen, and never wish to ever again witness, so many body bags coming out of one place, at one brief point in history.

There were bodies dropping everywhere. My mother's condition only suggested a similar fate, she was transferred to the ICU.

By a miracle, after 25 days of zombie walking with no sleep and utter loss of my sanity, and by this time having contracted the virus for the second time, my mother was released and we returned home. But danger continued tailing us. Mum had a long Covid which lasted a total of three months. I recovered much faster.

But this period of two years was nothing short of a war zone.

As a soldier returns home after an experience so gruesome and grotesque that cannot be told to those he's returning home to, I too had to learn to reintegrate into society like I hadn't just survived an impossible battle.

"What candles may be held to speed them all?

Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes

Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.

"The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;

Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,

And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds."

During this time, some of the most major life experiences had already engulfed me. I graduated university, a war of its own. I was able to save my dying mother. I ended a 10-year long career to embark upon an absolutely new one with no promise of fruits. I came out the other end wanting to live, for a change, and not just survive.