Nobody waits for COVID. People just get it, no one really knows from whom or where. Contact with an infected person can be a likely cause, and that is what made me wait for COVID recently.
My niece and her husband, both in their seventies, live in an apartment three floors below mine. They frequently visit me. Within 24 hours of one such visit recently, the husband went down with fever, and the wife got it the next day. They both tested positive. They as well as relatives who came to know about the development were deeply concerned that I might have got it, too, from them. They had all the reasons for worrying: I am very old, frail and vulnerable, live all alone, have what they call underlying conditions…
Several, including the couple, asked me to have a PCR test, and even offered to arrange one for me. I had had it a couple of times earlier and knew what it meant — nothing unless one needed a “negative” certificate for travel and such. I don’t stir out of my apartment. I, like anyone else, may test negative on the day but be positive the very next and yet show no symptoms. You can’t have tests every day. So waiting it out seemed the best option, and I chose that.
My niece checked with me every day by email or phone how I was doing. “Still waiting for COVID,” was my stock answer. One day I slipped up and said, “Waiting for Godot, I mean COVID.” That was a natural slip. Waiting for Godot was a celebrated play by Samuel Becket in the 1950s and I had read it. Nothing happens in the play. Two men waiting for a mysterious Godot carry on a dialogue bordering on the absurd. But the play was acclaimed as perhaps the best in the then in-vogue “theatre of the absurd” genre. I can’t claim I understood any of it. But the association stuck. The words “waiting for” automatically “fetched” Godot, though Godot never makes an appearance in the play!
The infected couple had a hard time of it for a whole week. In about 10 days, they were out of the woods. And my niece called to say my wait was over. Her doctor had told her if I had not caught the virus in five days from the first contact, I was unlikely to get it, at least from the couple.
So it turned out to be another case of Waiting for Godot. Only, my Godot may still come — out of the blue!
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