Lockdown Rhapsody

“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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