When you’re told you look like a peach, maybe they mean, all yellow and fuzzy

So after a gruesome ride all through the countryside, all thanks to an auto rickshaw dude who was high on cheap booze and life, I tumbled out of that green monster looking like I needed a morgue more than a doctor. My limp hair was now departed in the middle, clothes clung to me as if out of fright and my rash had gone berserk, I now looked like a plump tomato on sale at the grocery store next to my house.
I trotted to the doctor’s chamber and stood there motionlessly, waiting for something to happen. I was hoping she would ask me my name, that would help us break the ice but instead she too looked back inertly, the kind of look someone would have on their face if they forgot the ‘recipe’ to make ice-cubes.
And then suddenly I felt like Indiana Jones’ female version, out to save both our lives by resuscitation through conversation and I began in my radio practiced voice about how a common friend who happened to be a doctor and a host with us, referred me to this wonderful little doctor who was seemingly down to earth but definitely not enough.
Suddenly my speech got interrupted with the doctor’s wish to check the rash all over my body. It was an almost pornographic moment, standing in attention, stripping at the orders of the doctor, only that the lighting was too fluorescent and the room smelt of antiseptic. Also, one little glitch was that the doctor seemed least interested in anything but the fluid deposits in the blisters on my body. My moment of pornography died a premature, ugly and dreadful death.
I was marched off to the blood sample collection unit on the first floor and as vial after vial of my blood was being siphoned off, the dark almost intense red of my blood was causing me to have morbid thoughts. ‘It is fatal, whatever it is’, I thought to myself.
Blood sample collected, I was on my way back home. Surprisingly, I was in good spirits thinking about the time that I’d managed to get off from work, even if at the cost of what most probably was chicken pox. As I smiled to myself and hummed a faint Frank Sinatra tune in my head, I bumped into a rather handsome doctor who must’ve thought that I was on the wrong floor. By his reaction to me, I am presuming he would’ve personally delivered me to the fourth floor where the famed psychiatry section of the hospital is.
I finished the rendition in my head and went looking for an auto that would help me get back home in one piece. If a half-wit could work part-time for NASA then this was it, the man who drove me to madness and then my house. This auto rickshaw trip was even more ghastly than the previous. This one was driven by a man drunk on stupidity. He made me realize that talk is cheap. The supply surely exceeds demand and in this case, I was hoping we’d run out of stock forever.
By the time I reached home, I knew that auto’s in Delhi were shared by two or more drivers, that this particular gentleman disliked people who kept their feet up on the rods and that he learned how to dance in his childhood when he and three brothers would wait in line for the bathroom.
As I reached my house, I wished with all my heart that Id have chicken pox and that I’d be put under quarantine for a lifetime at least!

For a minute the team were in with a chance. But then the game started

So the blood sampling did the hospital some good and I was called back for further assessment today. I reached the hospital at twelve something and saw the familiar and charming face of Dr. Geeta, the one person I knew I could trust with my life (also because I know she’d have little use for it). She called me out of turn and asked to see my face. I did the honors, proudly as if I were the prized camel at the Pushkar fair and I was being bid for. I looked towards the ceiling and then to my right and then left, without the need to be prodded. As the doctor’s lips curled to echo out the words ‘ Chikky pox’ as she called it, I was overwhelmed with the thought of a compelled vacation. I almost heard mild applause in the background and began making plans right there.
Mom was with me in the tryst that today was, and as soon as got out of the hospital, we set out thinking what to do, since I could never bear to watch TV, we’d buy books, and of course, loose cotton clothing for the skin to breathe and not to forget, the new neem soap that promises to turn toads into princesses.
Shopping for chicken pox over, we were drinking watermelon juice at Full Circle and mom was chastising me for putting the café community at risk. She made me feel like a self-destruct nuclear bomb let loose.
I bought two books for myself at the book store downstairs and when I asked then for any available books on paranormal phenomenon, the blank stares I got in turn almost convinced me that my brain was so non-existent that they could make my eyes sparkle by shining a torch through my ear. I decided to thank my lucky stars for getting to lay my hands on a Woody Allen book and scamper out while I could.
But just before I could make my hasty exit, I saw this wonderfully stacked tray that carried small containers one on top of the other in a pyramid shape. On closer inspection, I found it to be flower essences. Made from specific fruit and vegetable blossoms, each essence came listed with the promise of adding enthusiasm, hope, mental vitality, cheerfulness and tender sweetness to the ones who tried it. The healer inside me needed some desperate healing, I had been losing the plot of life for a bit, so I called upon my instinct and it guided me to ‘Pear’, the essence that promises to bring peacefulness and emergency support (I’m not too sure what kind of emergency and consequently what kind of support but I am sure like most other things, life will lead me to find this one out for myself too)
And now here I am, one tablet of fexofenadine hydrochloride and one thousand, seven hundred and forty seven words down. My clock reads 5:20 p.m. and I still have at least four days of quarantine to go.
I can only begin to imagine how the rest of it will fare…