Everything is True: A junior doctor's story of life, death and grief in a time of pandemic

240 Pages·2022·0.35 MB·english

by  Dr. Roopa Farooki

Everything is True
For my sister, Kiron
And for all those who have lost someone they love
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Bitter Sweets
Corner Shop
The Way Things Look to Me
Half Life
The Flying Man
The Good Children
BOOKS FOR CHILDREN
The Cure for a Crime: A Double Detectives
Medical Mystery
Diagnosis Danger: A Double Detectives Medical Mystery

‘After you have read this story of great misfortune, you
will blame the author for your own insensitivity,
accusing of wild exaggeration and flights of fancy.
But rest assured: this tragedy is not a fiction.
Everything is true.’
Honoré de Balzac, Le Père Goriot
Quarantine: originally defined as a period of forty (quarante in
French, quaranta in Italian) days of isolation to prevent the
spread of contagious disease.
Contents
PROLOGUE: Six Months Before Lockdown…
1 Zero Day – The Day Before Lockdown
2 Their Stories
3 Healers and Hitch-hikers
4 Birthday
5 Scribes
6 Witness
7 Pariah
8 The Mask
9 Angels
10 Soldiers
11 Frontline
12 Fighter
13 Coward
14 The Fridge
15 Insider
16 Nostradamus
17 Resurrection
18 Rage
19 Mothers
20 Sad Face
21 Sputter and Gag
22 Sick
23 The Good Death
24 Swab
Epilogue – Poem for Kiron
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Author
PROLOGUE: Six Months Before
Lockdown…
… your sister tells you that she’s dying, at her kitchen table, with the
sunshine streaming in from her expensive wall of French windows,
and there’s not much you can say to that.
A little bit of you wishes that you hadn’t turned up so dutifully, that
you’d made any feeble family-avoiding excuse, because she
wouldn’t have told you in a text message or on the phone. Not again,
anyway. She’d done that before, a couple of times, actually, about
matters of life and death, and it hadn’t gone well. Sadly, spiralling
dark news comes out as weirdly comic when you’re separated by a
screen. Holding a handset. She’d called you one morning, sixteen
years earlier, when you both worked in Berkeley Square in big
offices that were minutes from each other, and came straight out with
this:
They said Dad’s dead. A glittering thread of disbelieving humour in
her voice.
They said what? Matching disbelief in yours, admiration, even, that
your dad had managed to fake his death and saddle some poor
corpse with his debts. You both didn’t think that he would do
anything so mundane as to die.