“There was a time when meadow, grove,
and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.”
(William Wordsworth)
They say that one should not begin a
write-up with a quote. But then, these are extraordinary days! The initial
weeks of the pandemic were spent in trying out baking everything from bread to
apple-crumble. A few weeks into the lockdown, and everyone from Agatha Christie
to Vikram Seth found a new lease of life as I passed days and nights in the
company of my books and endless cups of coffee. And after almost a year and a
half, I seem to have reached a modus vivendi with the omnipresent SARS-Cov-2
virus, though I cannot call our liaison cordial. But I do owe a lot to my
invisible partner.
One of the things that this period has
given me is the considerable pleasure of night-walking and the personal
character of it. There was a time when taking the car to the gym, all dressed
up in fluorescent gym-wear complete with a pink sweatband, was the norm for me.
Suddenly that became an impossible feat. I took up walking after the daylight
bade good-bye. To venture into the welcoming thickness of the night, all by
myself, is to feel and see, in a powerful and visceral way, a much broader
world than that which exists during the daytime. It gave me the opportunity to connect
with our surroundings in a profound, intimate way. Initially it was an eerie
experience, walking with masked zombies in a silent world. But slowly, the
routine became familiar. No longer daunted by the penumbra of the dimly-lit
buildings, walking into the night became a refractory act against the
restraints of dissipating the heft of those countless moments having nothing to
do, nowhere to go, of the mundaneness of every day, coming one after the other
with a ‘copy-paste’ precision.
The ‘pandemic days’, as we call it, also
gave us new words and phrases galore. ‘Lockdown’ became a word which came every
day to our breakfast table. Whereas we had come across ‘lock of hair, ‘locking
eyes’, ‘locked godowns’ , ‘picking a lock’, ‘be locked in a time
warp’,
‘in a lip lock’,
etc, the term ‘lockdown’ came heavily upon us in the year 2020. Defining it as
“a security measure in which those inside a building or area are required to
remain confined in it for a time” and “the imposition of stringent restrictions
on travel, social interaction, and access to public spaces”, Collins Dictionary
has declared “lockdown” as the word of the year. ‘Containment zone’, ‘PPE’,
‘home isolation’, ‘WFH’, ‘social distancing’, and many other words and phrases
reinforce the fact that coronacoinages
cannot be shown the door in the near
future. In addition, there are the words which we ‘invented’ during the
pandemic era – ‘coronacut’(bad haircut we give ourselves under lockdown),
‘covidiot’ (a blend of COVID-19 and idiot),
‘quarantini’ (a slang term for a cocktail people
drink at home while under quarantine during and because of the coronavirus) and ‘doomscrolling’ (hypnotic
state of endlessly reading grim internet news) are a few examples. Now, almost
halfway through the year 2021, as we grapple with shortage of oxygen cylinders,
limited supplies of vaccines and regular news of our near ones succumbing to
the disease, the menace of coronavirus
continues to shape our lives and language.
Hobbies, buried in the isolated backyard
of our duties and responsibilities, have suddenly found a new lease of life. A
number of my friends are tending more to their home gardens, and re-decorating
and organizing these spaces. Reconnecting to lost interests in real time is one
of the best things to have happened during this ugly period. Some people
started making storytelling videos, some renewed their love for sewing and
tailoring. Still some others took up cooking and baking with a newfound zeal.
I find myself reminiscing a lot these
days, about my childhood, about school and college, about archived incidents
which had become rusty in the locked cupboard of forgetfulness. I also think of
my kids and their friends who have lost a chunk of their childhood to this
pandemic. Our dreams, our aspirations of the pre-pandemic days, are in sharp
contrast to the outlook we have now. Yes, now though our dreams still touch the
sky, they are measured stringently in cautious parameters. Reckless spontaneous
acts which made us happy are now strictly rationed, and we have reached a stage
in our lives where preserving the self has got priority over claiming the soul.
Turning to relationships, with every
episode of curfew/lockdown, passion and romance surrender to survival. Turning
to a higher presence in whatever religion we might practice has become highly
reassuring. Every morning we wake up feeling grateful for being safe, for being
privileged to be alive. There is no means or time to mourn heartbreaks, because
lives are at stake. Even the sudden covid-related death is not the end of the
road, as a dear friend often says, “Death is death only for the dead”. For
every human being who has lost a dear one, this pandemic has driven home the fact that even death is just a detour in
our lifetime on this extraordinary planet, which, in Carl Sagan’s words, is a
mere ‘mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam’.
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