Another death, this time of someone very close and dear to me. My friend of college days, Abid Shaikh, expired on July 31. He was just a year older than I am, and would have been 78 years old in September. The poor chap suffered for two years, spending much money on hospitals and doctors, but no one was able to find out why he used to have fever most of the time.
He tested negative for Covid at least twice, but when they took him to hospital a day before his death, they said he was infected by the dreaded corona virus. He must have consulted at least thirty specialists in and out of the country over the past forty years, when he first contracted psoriasis, the disease for which there is no cure. It was only the last specialist that he went to, a lady, who told him he was suffering from psoriasis. His face was covered with bleeding spores, and I had not been able to meet him after February 2020, after the virus became rampant. Last week, I told him I'd like to visit him during the Eid holidays, but he declined, due to his recurrent fever.
A few months back, when my friend Wahid Seth fell down and broke his hands and legs a couple of times, I told Abid he should engage a man servant to be with him day and night, but he didn't agree. And just as I feared, when he didn't open the door and it was forced open (along with his bedroom door), he was found lying on the ground, bleeding profusely after apparently suffering a heart attack. He kept requesting his nephew not to take him to hospital, saying that he would be okay. He apparently didn't realize he had only a day or so before dying. And the only hospital that would admit him was OMI, and that too because his brother knew someone in charge there. And that was when they found he'd been infected, probably by the Delta virus, even though he'd received both doses of the Chinese vaccine at the Aga Khan hospital.
So now I have one less friend and I'll miss my weekly phone calls to him every Sunday, when he would tell me many things that I didn't know. I wanted to tell him about the Netflix series "Versailles" that I'm seeing nowadays, as he had studied French, but due before I could do so, he had gone.
Rest in peace, my friend.
Post a Comment