Hope keeps people alive, not reality checks

‘Why are you coughing?’ I raise a stupid question.
‘What? Haven’t you seen me cough before?’ my mother tried to remind me of simpler times when a cough meant having an ice cream at odd hours or being exposed to dust or one extra gol gappa.
I pass on the cough syrup suspiciously before I go back to my desk to check the mail. A mail that might turn my life upside down for the weeks to come.
You know..a single piece of paper, a value ranked out of 25 changes the way you look at a cough, it changes your anxiety when your father’s forehead burns to a level you can easily cook a pancake on it.
Every morning since the last month, I wake up from the sound of my own heart. So loud, I feel it might rip my chest apart. Thermometer, oxymeter, BP machine lie next to my bed day and night. I pick them up and like a nurse on morning rounds I knock at every door of the house. Each room a contaminated zone. My heart racing even faster now. I pray so badly for the right readings. ‘Please be above 95, please be above 95’, my mind chants as I take my grandmother’s finger and sandwich it between that little black box of threat.
I didn’t even know what an oxymeter did before. I didn’t use to put alarms for 2:00 in the night to check who all in the family were coughing.
But a two digit number can indeed change how you look at things.
With each passing day, I cut myself off from the world. I didn’t look out of the window to see if the sun cared enough to show up that day. I didn’t check the calendar to see which day of the week it was. But I did relish when someone told me how his grandfather was doing better now, or when someone dropped a late-night text saying ‘Hey! Dad is back home and ‘negative’ :)’. As if these were the substitutes for oxygen supplies. They filled my heart with pleasure and my lungs with a bag of fresh air. And I spread these notes, as much I could, as quickly as I could, to the ones whose situations mirrored mine. Because I, at those restless late-night hours, knew more than anybody, that people needed to hear who all are recovering more than they needed to be aware of the death tolls.

People need hope, more than reality checks, to keep surviving.