Last Days Of The Man I Called Baba

It couldn't have gotten any more surreal than this.

The place was, in entirety, canopied in large fig (Peepul) trees. At four in the morning, it was perhaps the time for the birds to wake up. So late, at this age, I realised that the first thing they do when they wake up is crap. They dropped like in a video game. Any time, on anyone. Incessant. Almost like rain.

While each one of us kept seeking clear sky above our heads (not all were lucky), another thing unfolded that seemed straight out of a B Grade Bollywood comedy. Especially where actors expected to act drunk, usually end up overacting, adding to the comic.

I remember I had mentally stepped back to take a broader view of the surreality of the moment. While the bird shit dropped all around us with some never-seen-before vengeance, the rest of us were trying all possible ways to wake a solitary man sleeping on the floor. Well, to give you an additional perspective, we were at the crematorium. And the conked out drunk was the man who was to wake up and cremate my father-in-law, who was, in turn, waiting in an ambulance parked nearby. In a body bag, of course.

He had lost his battle with COVID, just a few hours ago.

The man would move, moan and then turn and go back to sleep. After trying all sorts of sounds at all levels of loudness, finally, one of the ambulance guys bent down and shook the man up physically. The man on the ground opened his eyes wide and looked at all the three guys peering over him. From his angle at ground level, all of them must have looked like ghosts wearing those white PPE suits. The man looked at all of them and turned and again went back to sleep. I guess even I in his place, would have taken it as a bad dream and done the same.

However, this was not a dream. It was a nightmare that had started for us, a few days ago.

My wife's parents, whom I call Ma and Baba, are/were both old and have/had not been doing that well health-wise. Baba was about 86, and Ma is around 78. At the height of the COVID lockdown, Ma had had a fall and had fractured her femur. Post surgery, she had developed an early onset of dementia. So we as a family were struggling with her. She was getting delayed on her physiotherapy because the dementia medicines would keep her drowsy, and without them, she would be unmanageable.

In contrast, Baba was stable. He would quietly go about with his staid routine. Get up, eat his food. Go to the bathroom when needed. Have his medicines. Have small, short conversations with whoever came to meet him and then go back to sleep. Baba had an attendant who stayed with him in a separate bedroom. And Ma had her own attendant who stayed with her in another bedroom.

Back in the day, the man was a formidable and decorated officer with the Indian Foreign Service.

The COVID pandemic raged outside. So we too took utmost care. My bother-in-law lives just a few buildings away from my wife's parents. They also took the utmost precautions because they went to see them more often than us.

Baba's attendant suddenly put up a demand that he would go out for a few days during the Ganpati Festival. It was categorically denied. But he, however, managed to convince the family that he would take precautions. And in a lapse of judgement, he was allowed to be out for a few days. And he came back asymptomatically carrying the COVID virus.

On the fourth day of the chap's return, suddenly the caretakers in the house noticed Ma's oxygen saturation was hovering around 55/60. She had anyways been keeping drowsy. And she also had developed UTI and had a fever that came with it and was also under some hard antibiotics for it.

Scared with the dropping oxygen concentration, my brother-in-law and his wife immediately took Ma to the hospital. It was not easy to get a bed. We had Swab tests done both for Baba and Ma the same day in the morning and had to wait for a day for the results. Without the results, the hospitals were unwilling to take a patient in. We were considering to get a private HRCT scan done from one of the local labs and use that report to push for a bed somewhere. She was going bad to worse. But somehow my brother-in-law managed to pull some strings and eventually got her admitted to a reputed hospital. This hospital also has a designated COVID ward. However, at that point, all the beds in the COVID ward were full, and they had said that if after the scan, they suspected her of having COVID, she would immediately be evacuated. Luckily the scan showed fewer chances of her having COVID, and hence she was given a bed.

The same evening, by the time my brother-in-law returned, Baba had started showing signs of distress. He too was suddenly showing very low saturation of oxygen. A few days ago his attendant had reported a slight fever, but all of us were so preoccupied with Ma's apparently more severe issues that we had waited and watched Baba's health with just simple paracetamols. He looked fine otherwise. And it is not easy to get a doctor home in these COVID times. And it is even more challenging to take such infirm people to the hospital, where there is already such a massive dearth of beds. OPD consultations are just not possible. We all know the queues and the risks of waiting in those queues with old people.

It was around 11.30 in the night when we discerned, Baba needed hospitalisation too. We began and then kept calling friends and doctors and hospitals till about 12.30 or 1 in the morning and then in sheer desperation got in our car and started physically visiting hospitals asking for beds. On the phone, everyone kept saying that there was no bed available. But something told us, being physically present, we would be able to swing things or get more information. So while my wife and I took a route visiting hospitals and calling random hospitals that showed up on the google search, my brother-in-law and the attendant (the culprit) took Baba in an ambulance and went to the same hospital where Ma was lodged. They had no beds. Baba stayed in the ambulance in the hospital's parking while he was given oxygen. My brother-in-law also kept trying various hospitals. At one point his wife, who had stayed back at home with the phone and google, calling up everywhere possible, found a hospital who were willing to take Baba in, provided he tested negative for COVID after an HRCT scan. Because, that hospital was again, not a designated COVID hospital.

We reached the hospital around the same time they arrived there with Baba. They took him in the casualty first and then took him in for a scan. It was around 3.30 am by then. As we waited for the scan report, another ambulance wailed in, with a 40-year-old lady who had just died inside the same ambulance a few minutes back while in transit! I gathered, she was absolutely fine and had had a sudden bout of breathlessness and then she was put in the ambulance. Some of her relatives following the ambulance didn't even know that she had breathed her last, in transit. They were all in absolute shock.

Baba's report showed pneumonia, but there was still some doubt about COVID. So they thankfully took him in the ICU. We were about to leave the place at daybreak when I received a confirmation on my cell that in the earlier day's swab test, Ma's report had come negative. But they had withheld Baba's information. As we now know, the negative reports come very quick. And for all the positive patients, the word first goes to the Mumbai Municipality (BMC), and they are the first ones to call on the number given to not only confirm that the patient has COVID, but also take over from there to help the patient get the right treatment.

I will never have enough words to praise the Municipality in the way they are fighting this war in Mumbai. More about that, later.

So when we got the negative report for Ma, we immediately knew that Baba was then COVID positive. But if we told the doctors, they would instantly evict Baba. At the same time, he was a risk to all the other patients and health workers in the ICU of that hospital.

We immediately began strategising for the next steps. The day that dawned was a Sunday. We waited the whole day for a call from the BMC, but it did not come. In the meantime, we told the concerned doctor that we feared that he had COVID, but without the BMC confirming it, we were not in a position to shift him to a COVID hospital as all COVID beds are controlled by the BMC. The doctors understood, and they isolated Baba within the ICU and asked us to immediately send his attendant home. Which we did.

Early Monday morning, BMC called on my cell phone and told me about Baba being COVID positive. As we sped to the hospital to get him shifted, my wife had multiple conversations with many BMC people, including doctors who swung into action looking for an ICU bed for Baba in a COVID hospital. We could sense the urgency in their efforts at every moment. They behaved like an extension of our own family.

So many nameless, faceless voices on the other side of the phone, but each one equally concerned and helpful.

By late afternoon, Baba was lodged in the ICU of a COVID ward of another reputed hospital, all managed and organised by the BMC. They even control the ambulances in which a COVID positive patient can be transported. One cannot hire just any ambulance service for an infected patient.

I had an extreme real-life 'Grand Theft Auto' driving experience (without the expletives) as I kept behind the crazy ambulance driver. This is not the right forum, else I could go on some more on the thrills of breaking signals at high speed right in front of the cops!

That was the last we saw of Baba. People are not even allowed to stand near the place where they transfer COVID patients in and out of the hospital. We spoke with him as he was wheeled in. He feebly nodded in response to our questions, and also tried to say something which was not very clear because of the oxygen mask he was wearing.

The last we saw of Baba

Once he was in, the doctors took over, and we had just one phone number for all information. We could sense they were all considerably over-stretched and under-staffed. So we could not even call them too often to get news of Baba. We just got to know that he was fine and was responding to the treatment. In the initial drop of oxygen on the first day, they said, there was a possibility of some brain damage, which they couldn't comment too much on, yet.

The next day went in prayers. Ma, in the other hospital, was also not doing too well. They had done a new swab test, and that had come negative again. But she too had developed aspiration induced pneumonia. In the meantime, we got Baba's attendant and the cook in their house tested. Those two came positive the next day.

But before that, late this night, at around 12.30, we received a call from my brother-in-law. It seems he had just got a call from Baba's hospital.

He was slowly sinking, and his pulse rate had already dropped to 5 or 10.

We jumped in our car and sped. Earlier, the same evening, my other brother-in-law had arrived from Delhi and was staying with us. We reached the hospital around 1.15 am, and the people at the casualty reception told us that he was already dead.

We never ever met the doctor whom we had been talking to, ever since Baba was admitted. The gentleman finally held his phone on camera mode on Baba's (dead) face while we added close family members from Delhi and Belgium on the same call so that we could all have a last look at him. The call must have lasted about two minutes or so. In the end, we heard the doctor's voice, "Is it fine if I end the call now?" We said yes, and that was the end of it.

That was our last glimpse of him

At around 3.30 am, we were then given a paper which needed police approval. So we put google maps on and drove to the nearest police station. Strangely that night, the entire police station was managed by only women officers. It felt so good to see these women in uniform. They quickly gave us what we wanted, and we went back to the hospital. Once we handed over the stamped paper, they called the BMC to organise a COVID ambulance for the body.

As we waited for the ambulance, we saw another ambulance roll in with a very sick COVID patient. May be destined for the bed that Baba had just vacated. The BMC has a minute to minute inventory of COVID beds all over the city.

A new fighter comes in the ring

Soon, our ambulance arrived too. Three men quickly got down and got in their PPE overalls. They went in and were quickly out with a long black bodybag on the stretcher that had Baba in it. In minutes they were ready to leave, and behind us, the hospital janitors were ready with sterilisation paraphernalia to spray the entire area after we would go. We were just another cog in the long churning wheel.

We left the hospital at around 4.15 am and followed the ambulance to the nearest crematorium.

Once the paperwork was done, we finally faced the man who would just not wake up!

Exasperated, when we were wondering if we could next poke him with something, another attendant appeared from nowhere and kicked his buddy with the choicest of abuses. The man woke up, dazed. He soon figured it was work time.

Those two guys also got in new PPE overalls, and then the five of them with matching attire went back to the ambulance. They got such a flimsy bamboo stretcher with so fewer crossbars, to carry the body, that I felt scared that Baba might bend from his waist and fall through it. But he didn't.

The last yard

They took him straight to the electric incinerator.

I have been in such situations before. Usually, some rituals are conducted on the body of the departed before it is offered to the fire. Here, we had to almost run to keep pace with them.

The last minute was perhaps the only time we had, to connect and bring a prayer to our lips. As some of us prayed, and the rest watched numbed, they opened the doors and rolled the remains of Baba into the red glow of the fire inside.

Goodbye Baba...

Though it seemed over, it wasn't. When we were leaving, the office-bearer at the gate called us to show that the forms were entered wrongly by the hospital staff. Which meant, the death certificates would later be issued in the name of my brother-in-law by the BMC instead of Baba. They had switched the names! So we all had to go back to the hospital to rectify the mistake and correct the entries in their registers!

We were back home at 6.30 am.

The same day, BMC called us to inform that Baba's attendant and their cook had been confirmed with COVID and had to be home quarantined as they did not show any significant symptom.

By the time we managed to wrap our heads around the arrangements for the two helps to be quarantined in that house for the next 14 days, my sister-in-law and her son's wife also tested positive!

As I write, today the house-helps have come out of quarantine. Baba's attendant had to be let go of because he has no one to serve anymore. And the two members of my brother-in-law's house have been in quarantine. One of them had a bit of an issue, but that seems to have gone now.

Ma was relieved from the hospital because the hospital was keen to reclaim the bed for more needy patients. But in the interim, her dementia and pneumonia have unfortunately taken a toll on her throat reflexes. She has stopped talking or gulping. So she is being fed through a nasal pipe, and the doctors feel she might soon have to be put on a peg tube for feeds directly to her stomach.

She could not go back to her house as it was still a sealed house. She could not go back to my brother-in-law's home as there were (and are) two live COVID cases there.

Yesterday she was brought from the hospital to our house. She looks better and happier though she still cannot talk or gulp.

She still doesn't know that Baba is not alive anymore. Since she can't speak now, she has not been able to ask us. And we too haven't figured how and when to tell her...

The siblings after immersing the ashes in the sea...