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I didn't step out of home even once in three months
Updated On: 28 June, 2020 08:30 AM IST | Mumbai | Jane Borges
What's it like for someone living with mysophobia to get through the Coronavirus pandemic? Horror-thriller writer K Hari Kumar recounts his experience
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Illustration/ Uday Mohite
More than seven days have passed since I risked that flight from Chennai to Kochi. And though, still in quarantine at my family home in Thrissur, it feels like I am finally able to breathe. Our house is in the back of beyond; there are more trees swaying below the heavy rain clouds, than people. For a person like me, who lives with mysophobia [an extreme and irrational fear of contamination], this has been a blessing in disguise.
I have been on pins and needles since late December last year, when there were rumours of a contagion spreading in the Chinese city of Wuhan. By the second week of January, there were confirmed reports of an outbreak. People were dying like flies. I cannot quite explain how anxious that made me. It felt like I was finally living my worst nightmare. This fear, I was experiencing, was rooted in something unexplained that happened to me 10 years ago, as a 22-year-old. I was in my final year engineering then, and living in Gurgaon [now, Gurugram]. I remember snacking on a bhutta [roasted corn] on the roadside, and picking up an infection soon after which left me indisposed for months. It began with a shooting pain in my stomach, which quickly moved to my back, and head, due to which I lost consciousness on several occasions. During this time, I couldn't eat a morsel. I had become 15 kg lighter, and the sudden weight loss, had damaged my liver. The many doctors we reached out to, had put me on antibiotics, but never ended up diagnosing the condition. I was only able to recover eight months later, after switching to Ayurvedic treatment. That incident left me scarred. Even as I was beginning to put this behind me, another experience caught me unawares in May last year. I was newly married and had moved from Mumbai to Chennai. This was around the time of the Lok Sabha elections. I had gone to a supermarket to buy groceries, and, while paying at the counter, I recollect the cashier sneezing into my face. This was almost 10 months before the pandemic, and "masks" and "social distancing" were still not part of our everyday vocabulary. I came back home, forgetting all about it. But the very next day, I caught the chills. My fever shot up suddenly, and my throat started to hurt. This was accompanied by diarrhoea. Once again, my doctor couldn't diagnose what I had, and I was put on anti-malarial drugs, though I had tested negative for malaria.
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