A new interest in Rajinder Singh Bedi (1915-84), among the founding authors of Urdu short fiction with Premchand, Manto and Krishan Chander, appeared in print and electronic media over 2020-22. But that was not for his Partition stories or for his contribution to cinema. Rather, the cloud of Covid-19 that had spread over India in 2020 led to a series of thoughtful publications on Indian literary works that represented past epidemic outbreaks—notably, of plague, cholera, smallpox and Spanish Flu. This included plain surveys, scholarly readings and translations into English. The work which got most prominence in these retrospectives was ‗Quarantine‘[1] by Bedi. While other Indian authors framed epidemics in terms of effects on interpersonal relations, or as metaphor for superstition, caste inequality, modernity, and so forth, Bedi foregrounds (a) protagonists as public health professionals (doctors, nurses and sanitation workers who work as cogs driven by a public health policy directed at the population of an urban centre), (b) a technical language au courant with the state of play in epidemiology and epidemic management and (c) an awareness that epidemics put into crisis the relation between states and peoples.