It isn’t every day you see a man with a dead body on his back. Not even in this troubled time.

The sardar watches the thin man’s slow steps as he carries his burden towards the quiet main road. The hard lockdown has halted traffic outside. Where there should be clamour is only silence. At any other time, in any other situation, he would have been thankful for this calm in the middle of what should be a working day in summery New Delhi.

But this moment is anything but normal.

He turns into the dim staircase that runs up to his old home. He, Shamsher Singh, Sammy to his friends. He is tall, slim, his erect carriage giving the lie to his 60 circuits of the sun. His slow pace up the stairs is in no way due to his age, but rather because he is in no rush. Where does he have to be?

Unless you are dead, or almost there, or your business is in any way connected with either of those two states, where does anyone have to go these days?

The staircase is broad and deep. The sun doesn’t reach all the way in. It is blessedly cool. The banister has been worn to a gloss by generations of hands, by Sammy’s own people. Sometimes, he has felt them as he made his way to and from his home. But Sammy self-consciously avoids the banister now, even in this season when what anybody wants, more than anything else, is another’s touch. The sickness lurks everywhere, even on old friends like this support he has known all his life.

He could have taken the lift, the one his neighbour across the stairwell installed a year ago, as a crutch against his own advancing years. But lifts need opening, buttons need pressing, the air trapped inside is freighted with microbes that will penetrate the best-fitting mask.

Sammy’s mask isn’t well-fitted. He is a Sikh. His beard, well-groomed and tightly tied – even though he has nowhere to go – makes it impossible for his mask to fit as its makers intended. His turban puts pressure on the straps tthat he designer wouldn’t, couldn’t have taken into account. He knows all this. Every Sikh knows this. It is yet another reminder that their observances may be archaic and worthy of reconsideration.

Archaic as myself, he thinks mordantly. Fuck it. He pulls the little bit of fabric off completely. Who am I going to see?

Naturally, a door opens to the landing as he walks past. He wants to hurry by, as you do, these days. But the habits of years past are hard to break and so he looks up and in.

“Sammy!” He stops courteously. The woman hailing him has been like an elder sister to him his entire life. Even as he stands in the dim illumination of his own twilight, the few years she had on him when they were both children still carry weight. When she beckons, even if it is a pain, he obeys. Her voice has been honed by a lifetime of command.

“Do you have any plasma?” She is urgent.

“Don’t we all?”

She shakes her head impatiently. This is a habit he knows her to have. She starts conversations where she expects the other person to already be.

“I’m no doctor, but…”

“Don’t be an asshole. You know what I mean.”

Oh, right. “Someone you know?”

“Everyone I fucking know, Sammy. This bloody Delta wave.”

“Plasma won’t help.”

“Says who?”

“Doctors who’ve wasted actual time studying this stuff.”

“They can go jump in a lake. I’m talking about a friend.”

Sammy nods gravely. He too has been besieged by frantic calls for help; people he knows who want Ivermectin or blood plasma, even though they know neither discredited cure will help. Who wouldn’t go looking for a magic bullet, when someone they love is at death’s door?

“I may be able to help with oxygen,” he says slowly. “If they need it.”

“No, they’re fine with that. So far.”

“Of course. Your friend – ”

That “friend” has her own hospital, one with the foresight to have put in its own oxygen generators. Now that the previously mundane gas is currency, beds there are almost beyond price. Even though the “friend” herself has fled the country on a private jet to avoid the flood of phone calls beseeching, pleading, ordering her for space. In this capital city, who isn’t a VIP?

“Doesn’t the Air Force have a scheme? You can withdraw a bag of plasma from their blood bank, if you commit to replacing it?”

“They’ve asked. They’re on the waiting list. Everyone needs plasma right now.”

They are standing about ten feet apart. She is just inside her front door, he on the landing outside. She is dressed carelessly, in clothes she probably slept in. What need does this formerly impeccably dressed woman have to present her best face right now? Especially to him, an intimate of six decades.

A young man walks up deferentially behind the woman. He is carrying something on a tray. She looks at him, then into the glass. She waves him away distractedly.

“Bloody moron can’t get anything right.”

Sammy nods as sympathetically as he can. It would be rude to point out that she is lucky to have any help at all. This last lockdown caught them all by surprise. The bulwark of her household, an old beedi-smoking gentleman she inherited from her father, is marooned in her home in the hills. Along with her husband, her two elder children and various members of their own families, and six other servants. In short, everyone else she would normally require for the functioning of her bustling extended household.

Now that it is just her and her only son, this young man she considers incompetent must suffice. And a single maid. She doesn’t even have a chauffeur anymore. He can’t come to her home, and she can’t leave. So why bother?

“Does Sewa Singh have a curfew pass?” she asks abruptly.

Sammy looks through the arch cut into the landing, out on the cars and the park below. He sees the burly figure of his driver sitting under a tree. He may already be asleep, having shaken off the shock of a dead body in the morning.

He nods. Sewa Singh does have a curfew pass. His work at the neighbourhood gurdwara, which the government knows is dispensing oxygen and food to the afflicted, has entitled him to one. Those on the frontlines need free movement, no matter how non-formal their work.

“Can he pick something up for me?”

Sammy raises an eyebrow.

“Two cases of wine, Sammy. I’m completely out.”

“You found a bootlegger who still has wine?”

“So he says. But he can’t deliver it.”

“It’s probably vinegar.”

“I’ll drink it. Can he pick it up?”

Sammy knows what it is to be parched. He is down to his last few bottles of whisky, the lovingly hoarded bottles falling one by one against the slow empty hours of the pandemic. “Will you ask him if he has whisky?”

“I’ll give you his number. Just bring me my wine.”

Crossing this woman is more trouble than it is worth, Sammy knows. She lives too close.

“Sammy.”

He looks at her enquiringly. Suddenly, she is hesitant. Unsure of herself. It is sufficiently out of the ordinary that he is concerned. “What is it?”

She is looking at her feet now. She shakes her head. She could be in tears.

He sees, now, the top of her head, where the grey of her years has escaped the expensive net spread against it by her now-absent stylist. The marks of her mortality spiderweb across her scalp like so many brittle memento mori. A lifetime of having all the answers, thinks Sammy, yet a virus turns her head to ash.

He takes a step towards her before he catches himself. Hugs carry contagion. Even between lifelong friends.

“What is it?” he asks again, gentler than before.

“I… I don’t even know if you can help.”

“All you have to do is ask.”

“It’s my son.”

“Farid?”

“He won’t talk to me.”

“He’s young.”

“We fought.”

She looks up. Her eyes are red. Sammy wants to tell her that this, too, is predictable. Grown men who live with their mothers will fight with them. Even in India. And she is the fighting type. Always has been.

“What did you say to him?”

She is crying silently, as women of her class do in this city. To make a fuss is unseemly. The tears roll down her face as he watches from ten feet away.

“I need him, Sammy. He’s all I have right now. I can’t have him shrinking away from me. Not when the whole world is doing the same.”

He is quiet.

“I need him to touch me, Sammy. I have nobody else.”

“I’ll call him. Would that help?”

“You can talk to him in person.”

“Where?”

“You know where.”

Sammy thinks for a moment. He does know where. He’ll go up once the sun sets, when he knows the young man will be there too.

He blows the woman in the doorway a kiss. She opens a palm to catch it and presses it to her heart.

He knows she is watching as he resumes his steady progress up the stairs.

Excerpted with permission from The Pretenders, Avtar Singh, Simon and Schuster India.

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