In hospitals, time and space expand and contract until we feel ourselves residents of a different tube-lit planet echoing with murmurs, footsteps, beeps. Existence becomes pared down. Questions are short and unadorned: did the patient eat? Puke? Pass wind? Conversations have a geometrical economy. Sleep is bite-sized. The remnants of kajal in your eyes make themselves scarce. Messages are answered precisely, even effusion folded into neat phrases: thank you for being so helpful, so kind, for coming, for checking in. Anxiety is compacted into a pellet, forbidden from taking up too much space. Whatever is unessential is switched off. I felt all this while in hospital with my mother all last week.

In the sci-fi sparse landscape, intimacy with strangers drips steadily through the days. Not of sharing stories, but of sharing physical space. Sharing a room with another patient, we become tolerant of the body's natural functions. Burps, farts, retching, moans—all are exposed and accepted with equanimity. On the next bed was a young woman whose fever remained undiagnosed for a month. The rhythm of her anxiety, checking and re-checking her temperature, intertwined with mine as my mother's temperature, sugar and blood pressure were monitored. Neither commented on the other but both knew the other knew. Annoyance with someone who talks too loudly on the phone, or watches too much cricket, seems to have contrasting political opinions, subsides into co-existence, even empathy. We are bodies, and illness is a leveller of sorts (though access to healthcare is not, of course).