THE DARK CORONA

On January 31, as a special Air India flight evacuated 324 Indians from Wuhan, Monika Sethuraman, 31, broke down in tears realising that she wouldn’t be on the plane. “I couldn’t breathe for a few seconds...I am stuck here in the city, and it’s now turned into a huge prison,” she says over the phone from her one-room dormitory. The doctoral scholar in international relations at Wuhan’s Central China Normal University had been instrumental in contacting the Indian embassy and arranging the evacuation of fellow Indians following an outbreak of the new novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV).

For Sethuraman herself, leaving Wuhan won’t be easy now. “I didn’t go to the airport because I knew I would not be cleared for the flight out. Even if I recover from the cold, once you are on the blacklist, you will not be allowed to fly out,” she laments. Since the transport lockdown on January 23, Sethuraman has stocked