Have you been ill? I have. And everyone I know. Some have asthma attacks which they last had when they were 10. One man blacked out. One woman went up to Spiti on holiday and then took the bus in a semi-comatose state to get hospitalised in Delhi. It’s not dengue. It’s not anything difficult to pronounce. It’s just that old flu. A flu that once meant a reasonably pleasant break from school.

The horrible thing about being ill as an adult is that it’s the new you with a new flu. It’s the flu doctors don’t know what to do with except to sing Dolo re Dolo re Dolo . And it’s the you that you don’t know what to do with.

Yesterday we got out of bed, all of us, and asked each other, “How was it?” And then we told each other (first sheepishly and then with increasing relief): I didn’t want to get out of bed. No, no, I didn’t think I could get out of bed. It felt like it’s all over. It felt like this is how it’s going to be from now on. How could I go back to work? I’m not capable of work.

This was the story we were telling ourselves under the blankets, in the woolly socks, next to the debris of lozenges and The Little Steam Inhaler That Could and ‘lots of fluids’ and books that made our heads hurt and the laptops that we were too tired to get up to recharge and the metallic sheen of strips of pills the first doctor gave you. The story we told ourselves was that it was all maya so far, this delusion of steady progression in life and career and health to a thinner, richer, better you. The truth is a vague pain in your lower back that no one can help. And your life is looking less graph-like and more free-hand drawing than you ever realised. So why get up? What is there to get up for?

Oh the comfort of knowing that other people lost track of their stories too when they were sick. Oh the comfort of suddenly realising what are the stories you tell yourself. For that alone it’s worth being ill and stuck under a blanket and just a little bit too far away from the plug-point. The stories that get you through life are so hidden, real life needs to be first obscured by steam inhalation for them to emerge.

The story may be: I just drive along in one lane at a predictable medium speed, doing no one any harm and please no one hit me. Or the story may be: I have got away with a lot of crap and if I don’t keep paddling under the water at top speed they will find out I’m a big fraud. Or the story may be: Shit, everything seems to be going cool and everything will continue to be cool, oh yes, let’s have an ice-cream, because why not.

And somehow when you are sick as an adult, the story that gets you through life loses its hold. Instead, to quote Jaaved Jafrey, there comes a situation of same plot, different bungalow. All events become mapped to a different blueprint. If you are lucky, the blueprint looks excellent and you are like: maybe I really don’t care that my mother is making me wear something ridiculous for my wedding. Because clearly the man is mine and the wedding is hers. And if you are really, really unlucky, there is a cold moment when you realise that the man you married 10 years ago has persuaded you to take all your savings and invest them in strange ventures of his own and you are not so sure what that means anymore. The plot has always seemed that you married someone who’s risk-taking and in your fifties you will be taking foreign cruises amicably. Unlike your nervous fixed deposit parents. Inside the world of flu, though, the plot could be that he is an evil rat who’s going to leave you high and dry, penniless and cruiseless. And probably has a second wife in Gandhinagar. You are convinced of it at three in the morning. But it is three in the morning and because you slept all day you can’t sleep all night. And you have to live with this new plot.

The worst thing inside the world of the flu is the terrifying realisation that you have told yourself these pleasant tales to get through life, just like you used to count the last few steps home to make the walk bearable. How could you be so foolish, you ask yourself at three am? How about a little realism?

And then luckily comes a morning when it is too gross to stay in bed. You sort of clean the house. You throw all the socks in the machine. And you think no more of realism because that’s a literary genre no one needs.

Nisha Susan ( @chaingiamb ) is a writer and editor of the feminist website The Ladies Finger

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