Viral fever.
It comes on slowly but suddenly, if that makes any sense. It doesn't feel like anything about the experience makes any sense. Around lunchtime I get a splitting headache, and then my stomach starts giving me trouble in the car on the way back to the in-laws' flat, but I figure it's not so bad, don't want to turn down our dinner invitation.
So then I'm sitting down to supper at the well-appointed flat of diotina's jethima, enjoying delicious food and hearing about what's involved in making it, when abruptly I realise that I have to leave the table. I think I'm probably going to throw up or something, maybe I'll have diarrhoea, but it turns out that's not it at all. I go to the toilet and I just need to cry and cry. Diotina arrives soon after and tries to comfort me, but there's no stopping the weeping.
It's a strange feeling, crying for no obvious reason, and it's one of those things where your brain fills in the gaps involuntarily - oh no! Crying! This must be because the marriage is breaking down, because you're not succeeding the way you hoped with the PhD, all these possible reasons retrofitted to explain this sobbing collapse, and really it's all physiological but maybe in a way it feels good to take this opportunity to cry about all these things regardless. So I'm led to a bed in a spare room, and I lie there in the dark sobbing my guts out and blowing my nose for a long time.
Later the monsoon rains come back, there is flooding in the streets and I feel terrible, so guilty! I wanted to see a monsoon and now here it is and people are dying, their livelihoods are getting washed away into the Hooghly and this is what I asked for, it's really my fault. I laugh at myself for thinking such things, but the feeling of guilt doesn't entirely dissipate. Neither does the sickness. I am bedridden and borderline delirious for days after this.
←Kolkata Metro-