Dengued and back!!! There is more to Delhi than Dengue. So I thought till a month back. I never liked the city, not even after living here for a year. I was always a stranger. The girl who ate ‘masor tenga’. The girl who did not fast on Karva Chauth. The girl who didn’t know what Navaratri meant. I wasn’t accepted the way I was. Not until I embraced Dengue! Yes, Dengue is Delhi’s Ebola. Just like Ebola is Nigeria’s national identity. Just as I entered my second year in the city, just on October 21, I was declared a true citizen of the city. My lab reports tested positive for Dengue. The doctor who was shocked on hearing there is no seasons to eat fish, suddenly grew sympathetic this time. “Drink lots of fluids,” he said in a voice softer than normal. All animosity forgotten at that moment. He even forgave me for eating fish during ‘off season’. I was one of them. I was one with Dengue. The landlord played the role of the sympathetic listener. “Oh! You both have Dengue? Bataya kyun nahin?” he uttered when he came to give us the quintessential Diwali sweets. If he could, he would have given us two packets. Unfortunately he had only one. The maids were full of advice. Useless most of the time, yet they came in plenty. One was so sorry that she decided to make my food more spicy. The sick should eat, she thought, the spice would only make the sick eat more. I dismissed her the next day. She pleaded with sympathetic eyes, “What will you eat?”. Fruits, I said. If Andrew Zimmern gave America bizarre food, she gave me worse. Some were brought closer. A friend came to cook chicken for the sick. The bonding grew as the bird boiled in the pot. “You should eat, you are very weak,” he said. And eat I did, after ten long Dengued days. I returned to normalcy after ten long days. Fever forgotten, the pain of a burning 105 Fahrenheit forehead was like a bad dream slowly fading from the fringe of memory, lost appetite found its way back slowly, desire to go shopping grew as I arrived in office after two weeks dressed in my same old clothes. This time faces were more sympathetic. A year after I arrived in the capital, I got the welcome nod that I missed 365 days ago. Dengue made me a Delhite. Albeit unwillingly, yet one.
Posted on: Mon, 03 Nov 2014 10:07:25 +0000
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