Valence of Mortality

By CK Wilde

I was laying in the clammy, humid, dawn light on hay mattress, with light cotton tapestries stuck to my body with sweat when I realized I was going to die. The small quiet room faced an interior courtyard on one side, the sandy dusty path to the sea on the other. The bungalow was close to the beach on the Indian Ocean. I could hear the fishermen on their way to work, performing ablutions in the warm water. Birds of a million colors called, two stroke motors grinding and coughing exhaust, tiny radios turned up blasting tinny music in Hindi. The gentle surf crashing mixed with the wind in the palm trees.

A mosquito. So small I almost couldn’t feel it. It’s perfectly designed proboscis penetrated my body to feed on my blood, and in so doing inadvertently her saliva let a few strands of malignant viral dna into me. A virus called Chikungunyea was replicating itself in her belly. Billions of her kin were busy around the fishing village; a mountain of dead children and elderly grandparents in their wake.

My friend K, whom I was visiting, told me vaguely about the outbreak before I flew from New Zealand to Chennai. The scale of the epidemic was unimaginable to me in 2007, over a million people were infected. Chikgungunyea spread to India from Africa. It was called the “breaking bones” or “bended walker” disease, for the affect it had on the infected: it felt like every bone in the body was breaking and bent the sufferer into a stooped posture. The joints arthritically swoll up, pain accompanied every movement, a dizzying fever compressed and expanded time, the skin burned and itched. There was no cure. I was a relatively healthy person of 35 when I was infected. I had never experienced anything like it. I felt separated from my body in way I never had before; it was as if my self was projected from my body, the only tether was the pain. I was helpless and so weak I couldn’t drink water or go to the squat toilet bathroom. Moving my eyes hurt, swallowing hurt, any shift in my weight hurt. I lost 25 pounds in a month. Days and nights washed into each other confused. That morning, in the darkest moment, the reality of my own death was clear to me, in a way it never had been before: I will die. I asked myself if I had lived well, if I could die happy, if I had done more good than harm... I didn’t want to die: there were the people I loved and wanted to see again, to accompany in this world, there was so much undone... and yet I accepted the inevitable wholeness of life and death: I could go, and leave the world- filled with the wistful ecstasy of having lived at all. I was at peace.

Slowly, miraculously, I recovered. The careful ministrations of Mrs.Navineedum and my friend K brought me back into myself. Day by day, week by week I hobbled a little further: from bed to the patio to the garden to the sea to town... Having had a preview of old age and bodily suffering,  I vowed patience for those who moved slowly from pain.

Eventually I was was well enough to fly back to New York, to my empty and blown out loft. I collapsed after the flight, sleeping for 30 hours. I awoke to a cold and grey Brooklyn, the bright colors of the coastal jungle fading into a low angled sun, a winters day on the river. I was gratefully alive, for what I did not know.