When India's first COVID-19 wave arrived, Dr. Prashant Nayak was an Associate Professor at AIIMS Raipur, among the country's leading medical institutions, and suddenly one of its frontlines. Quarantine protocols meant he could not go home. For months, he treated patients while separated from his family, relatives, and the ordinary markers of a life outside the hospital.
This memoir does not frame that period as heroism. Nayak is direct about the loneliness, the emotional and physical cost of sustained frontline work, and the smaller acts that kept him stable: writing and singing, old passions he returned to in the hours when the hospital day was done. The account that closes the book, his attempt to cross an interstate border to reach his hometown, cuts through any abstraction about what pandemic protocols meant on the ground. The obstacles he encountered were not extraordinary; that is precisely the point.
As a document of what the first wave actually felt like from inside a major medical institution, written by the person who was there, this is specific in ways that retrospective accounts rarely are.
The book lays out the touching and insightful experiences of the author while he was working as an Associate Professor at AIIMS, Raipur, during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in India. Very vividly, he describes his encounter with the pandemic as a frontline COVID warrior. On one hand, he was struggling with loneliness, unable to meet his family, relatives, friends and others due to quarantine protocols; on the other hand, he was working tirelessly for the patients in the hospital. Dr. Prashant Nayak also narrates how he went through this very difficult phase of his life, being affected both emotionally and physically, keeping himself engaged with his work for patients, while rediscovering his old passions-writing and singing. The climax of the book is indeed heart-rending, where he unfolds the series of obstacles he faced while trying to travel to his hometown across the interstate border.
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