Abhishek Shintre is the author of A Pandemic Wedding. An avid diary writer himself, it was his observations at a wedding that have been penned in the story. The characters, the setting, and the plot are all part real and part fictional. He is confident that real life itself has material that one’s imagination isn’t able to concoct.
Personally, marriages have always been bittersweet for him. Being privy to only betrothal and exodus of women be it, sisters or other acquaintances. And they're the only social gatherings he's catapulted into without an option to back out.
The pandemic, whose every aspect, every implication has been discussed ad nauseam is much more than just an arbitrary backdrop of choice for the novella. Abhishek considers himself to be very taciturn, and the N95 mask has not only helped him deflect germs but also conversations. You wear one and you become quite unapproachable. To him, it is a superpower. And it helps the protagonist to stay closed off, to have a zip lock on her lips.
He regards the whole pandemic phase, the two years it has unfortunately stretched to be very pivotal. Working in a multi-specialty hospital that also housed an abortion centre, gave him the chance to witness abortions, deliveries, C-sections, circumcisions, and a variety of other nondescript maladies. Even though he was meticulous in his work, he was an aberration, who did not fit in. And most of his time there was spent reading. And he read voraciously.
But things took a drastic turn during the second wave of the pandemic when he joined a Covid centre. And, ironically, his job in a hospital encompassed waiting for patients to die. Abhishek believes that it has sensitised him in a way that Cinema and literature have failed to. Not that these details are carried over in the book but the helplessness, the vulnerability, and the sensitivity do pervade throughout the novella.
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