Memoir: Writer Andaleeb Wajid on losing her husband and mother-in-law to Covid-19 in the same week

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22-05-2025

It had all started with a swab up our nostrils.
When my eldest, Saboor, developed a fever at the end of April, I told myself it couldn't be COVID. I was convinced he was going to be fine, but still, being cautious, I quarantined him in his room and reduced his contact with others. I told everyone it was probably a regular fever.
But on the second day or so, I gave him some noodles to eat and he took it from me, then bent his head and sniffed the plate. He looked up at me. 'I can't smell anything,' he said.
The thud I felt inside was so huge that it eclipsed everything else in that moment. I told Mansoor frantically that maybe Saboor had COVID. Mansoor dismissed my concerns saying there was no way he could have got the infection but I couldn't take such a laissez-faire attitude. I booked a home test and someone came home to take the swab for the COVID test.
Our worst fears were confirmed in some hours. He had tested positive. I was beside myself with worry. As a baby, he'd already been in the NICU for fifteen days because his lungs weren't working when he was born. I focused on getting him better and making sure he was taking the medicines.
This was during Ramzan, when the second wave was already raging around us. Then, as I felt the first telltale signs of a fever, and all kinds of exhaustion seeping into me, I couldn't believe this was happening. I got myself and the rest of the family tested. My mother-in-law and I both tested positive.
I decided to have her quarantine with me in my room. I posted a jokey tweet saying that she constantly complained about everything in my room, right from the way I'd arranged the bed, to asking me questions about why the maid didn't clean the bathroom any better.
I was even wary of opening my wardrobes within her sight because she would take one look at the mess and give me yet another lecture about keeping everything in order. Or she would offer to arrange my closet herself. Her wardrobe, after all, was nothing short of a work of art. Sarees arranged in neat rows, folded just right, petticoats on one shelf, blouses on another. Me? I didn't know which dupatta went with which salwar.
I took her good-natured ribbing in my stride and told her that she was free to do up my wardrobes once she got well. The severity of the situation hadn't sunk into her. Once, I woke up in the middle of the night to see her emerging from the bathroom to make wuzu because she wanted to read the Quran. I told her that it was the middle of the night and she could do it the following morning. That's one thing everyone expects about quarantine but no one really knows until they're facing it – sitting in your room day in and day out gets old very soon. Thankfully, I had my laptop with me, but I found myself disinterested in doing anything. I didn't have the energy for it.
When Mansoor developed a fever, I insisted he test himself and Azhaan again. When his results showed up as positive, I sent Azhaan away so all of us could walk around the house, since we were all infected. But it did little to ease the worry. We were all too exhausted, coughing constantly, and the loss of the sense of smell was making me feel strange and inept.
On the advice from a relative who was a doctor, we decided to get our chest CT scans done. The CT scan would give us a better idea about the state of our lungs which were affected the most in the Delta variant of COVID that we all had. Mansoor drove us to the scanning centre one by one. The numbers that had stayed with me for so long elude me completely now, except that I remembered my score was the highest at 12 while Mansoor's and my mother-in-law's was 5 or so. A high score meant that the disease was more severe.
This worried me, but with the foolish optimism of someone who constantly postpones worrying, I decided it was fine. The main thing was that both of them had lower scores, and given their health history, it was important that they be better sooner than me.
When would this nightmare end, I thought. We all had to get better so we could look back on this period with a shudder and move on with our lives.
This was not Mansoor's first stay in a hospital. In 2015, I was working as a marketing head at a software company, a job that let me work from home and I had to go into office twice a week. It was a Thursday, and it was exactly a week since my birthday. I was at work when Saboor called me and said that Abbu wasn't looking too good. He was complaining of chest pains and he was sweating excessively.
Instinctively, I knew something was wrong. For years, I'd been telling Mansoor to take better care of his health but it was a joke in the family that he loved nothing more than good food. By the time I reached home from office, he'd been taken to the hospital in an ambulance. Thankfully, the doctors were able to treat him in time and he underwent an angioplasty.
It had been a close call but the doctors were efficient and they got everything under control. I was surrounded by family and extended family who showed up and stayed close, offering support. Their presence alone helped me stay strong and not break down while I was in the hospital.
When I returned home after his angioplasty, with my mother-in-law and the kids, while he remained in the ICU, I started crying while praying the Isha namaz. I was angry with Mansoor but at the same time grateful that he'd been spared. I was trying to hold onto the strength that came to me from being my mother's daughter.
I was in my thirties, my kids were small, and our situation wasn't too different from what my family's had been when my father passed away. I told myself that I was different. I wasn't my mother. I didn't know why I thought that I was better than her. Education and worldliness give one a false sense of security and I felt I was better equipped to handle anything.
When Mansoor returned from the hospital, he was a changed man. He stopped eating oily, fried food, switched to a healthier diet and lost much of the weight he'd been lugging around for years. I remember him checking himself out in the mirror, pleased that he could fit into the shirts he'd always buy in sizes that were smaller, saying they would motivate him to lose weight. Turned out, having a heart attack was the best motivation ever.
Sadly, the motivation didn't last for too long. He went back to his old eating habits and started piling on the kilos like before, despite my continued efforts to make him stay on the course.
The hospital visit in 2015 and the hospital visits in 2021 could have well been situated in two different universes. In 2015, no one had even dreamt of the word 'pandemic' and although worried people hung around outside ICUs, the situation was drastically different during the second wave.
Everyone knows, everyone remembers what it was like then. And yet, each experience is different from the others. No one would know what it felt like for me to walk into the hospital, my face covered with a face shield, under which there were two masks. That's not right. I'm sure many people would have experienced this too.