Fiction: 68-year-old Gajanan casts aside his meek old self and embraces his new homicidal avatar

COVID got my wife, Sumitra. In the second wave. I didn’t get to see her dead. COVID protocols and all. So, Sumitra got a state-sponsored cremation, and I didn’t have to do a thing. Not that I was in any position to, for COVID almost got me too.

But I survived. No one thought I would – not the doctors, not the nurses and ward boys, or even the young patient next to me in the ICU. But then that’s the thing about me. I’ve often pulled through in life pretending to be half-dead.

My name is Gajanan Godbole, and I am sixty-eight. As they say in the Bible or one of those holy books: “The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong, but time and chance happen to all.”

I don’t remember much of my epic life-and-death struggle against COVID. It’s all a blur, and I think half the time I wasn’t even in my body. My soul however got the uncanny feeling that I wasn’t much wanted in heaven either, probably because in life, I wasn’t much of the pious God-believing type.

Also, as eerie as it might sound, I seem to remember hearing this whispered conversation, while comatose:

“Do we take...

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