CHENNAI: Ariyanayaki and Alex first met in 1991 when Alex would visit his cousin’s house in Pallavan Salai, Gandhi Nagar. Soon he was visiting his cousin’s house far more often than what family upkeep could have called for. What followed was a love story that ended in marriage after three years of waiting for Nayaki’s family to accept Alex. They have three daughters together.
In the wee hours of May 14, Ariyanayaki, who was at home with her family, suddenly developed breathlessness and fell unconscious. The Government Royapettah Hospital declared her as brought dead. On May 16, her samples came back positive for Covid-19. She was only 43.
Ariyanayaki or Nayaki as she is called, was a permanent conservancy worker with the Chennai Corporation. She had been working in Anna Nagar Zone where she is believed to have contracted the infection. Alex said he has felt lost since she died.
“I’m only learning how to deal with things in a house with three daughters. As you can imagine, they were much closer to their mother than they were to me,” he said.
Nayaki, according to her family, was a force to be reckoned with. There was little that could frighten her and even less that could make her sad. However, if anyone sought help, she would go out of her way to do it. She had never once let her family feel bad that she picked up waste for a living, they said.
“I asked her so many times not to go to work (after the outbreak). She would say ‘what virus can get me when my husband is with me’,” said Alex, a painter now out of work.
Resigned to their fate, Alex had to draw comfort from dropping and picking her up from work everyday. When she developed a fever, Nayaki was taken to the Rajiv Gandhi Government General Hospital. The family said she was asked to go back home as she didn’t seem to have the virus.
“I was so relieved. She just loved me so much that I would sometimes ask her why she was acting like a giggly teenager with me even after giving birth to three daughters. But two days later, she just collapsed at home. After she died, they told us she has Covid,” he said.
He claimed to have received Rs 25,000 from the Corporation after her death but there had been no call or follow up since.
However, they wouldn’t be able to put a price on her beef biryani.
“You ask any of our neighbours. She made the best biryani in the neighbourhood. For any neighbourhood celebration, they’d ask her to come and cook,” said her 20-year-old daughter Preethi, who studies in a government college in Triplicane.
“Ever since she died, my sisters and I have been struggling to cook. Our neighbours would make fun of us saying that in a house with three daughters, not one knows how to cook. But we really don’t know. She never let us do anything around the house,” she said.
Just a few months ago, she would run to her mother for help picking out what clothes to wear to college. Now, she understands she has bigger problems.
“It may sound funny to you but I hope no one ever loses their mother.”