oxygen

Been chasing O2 vendors (amongst other things one never thought much of before this year) in the city for the better part of this past month, perhaps more. Rental prices for concentrators and pressurized cylinders have gone up now. The man arrives on his motorbike, helps set it up and rattles away with instructions.

Meanwhile, he also fields endless phone calls asking him for cylinders and concentrators, all of whom he has to refuse, for I managed to rent out his last remaining device. He is annoyed at the system, the commercial incentives of hospitals in the region, accepts he is a part of it too.

He leans in, before riding off: “We sell a cylinder at 500 while the hospital charges you 150 for a minute’s usage“.

The math is simple – it is a retail market, B2C for the sick.

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More than a year into the pandemic, hospitals remain busy. So fast is the flurry of activity, one wouldn’t think to look into an alleyway in the corner. I myself came across it while idling away for hours in the building, waiting for a doctor who was supposed to meet me “in the next ten minutes, definitely“.

Hidden from all the bustle, right where no routine visitor might stop for a second glance, a Ganesha shrine lords over the oxygen cylinders.

Who amongst these receptionists, attenders, doctors, nurses, handymen and guards are believers? Who are not? Who ensures the garland for a God stay afresh each day?

I never saw a visibly decaying flower in all my visits. Never. They were always freshly plucked.

Death and decay came only upstairs, in the endless wards.