4 Legitimate Lessons from the Last Day of Quarantine
It was me who had prayed upon the midnight countdown for a ‘positive’ start to the new year. But, sometimes words end up being funny and making a tragi-comedy of your life. Barely three days into the promising 2022 — the year when we hoped that the century’s pandemic would finally be lifted from the planet — my uncle started coughing. A cough that was casual enough — you know, we all cough. What is the big deal about coughing! Twenty-four hours later my mother, as is customary of hardworking home-making mothers, seemed a little reluctant to announce that she felt feverish. Hell broke loose a few more hours later, when I, the attention-seeking tornado of the house, felt a heavy itch at the deep end of my throat. That was it. We needed RTPCRs ASAP. Father countered my conviction. We had double vaccines and it was just cold after all.
Dipping temperature across the northern half of India was slaving enough on behalf of the virus. It aided and appended people’s conviction — it’s just a cold. And father, just like Monoj Da, our neighborhood grocery guy; Poltu, the vegetable seller; and Binita, our domestic help declared that it was just a cold. All of them too had ‘just a cold’. That night we all slept with just-the-cold. Something inside me was begging to differ.
It felt so unassuming to be bedmates with the bogeyman; one that had given enough horror in the last 2 years. Like, it should have felt so different, so phenomenal. But it was alas, the same!
The same sickness that you had known all your life. The same old sickness in which you had drugged and dragged yourself to appear for school exams and work on your deadlines. Everything felt the same, apart from the next day’s newspaper headlines. “Surge in Covid cases” “Third Wave is upon us” “Omicron is not common cold”, and whatnot.
Uncle gave a damn about these damned newspapers just filling in content space. He cast aside the paper, sneezed once, and called out to mother for his hot bathwater. He had to go to work after all. Mother went about her chores, though with a heavy foot and a dripping nose. Father and I are the current decision-makers of the house — he is the real one. He kept shifting on his greyish-blue socks-covered feet, casting guilty glances at the abandoned newspaper. In his eyes, I saw the journey of light-years between non-acceptance and acceptance, between reaction and action. Moments later he let out a sigh and picked up his phone. A couple of hours later the RTPCR guy was at our door. A local boy making his living out of the extraordinariness of contemporary global fate. He wore a normal mask which looked like it had already seen several wash cycles and usual winter clothes made of browns, blacks, and navy blues. Even the PPE kits from the last two years were gone, it was that much of ‘just-a-cold’. The dexterity and swiftness with which he went about his job was testimony enough of the number of times he had practiced it. I wasn’t sure if I should thank God for that or not.
Nevertheless, seven hours later when the reports arrived on WhatsApp announcing us all to be Covid Positive, it was strange. The deadly pandemic that has rattled the global economy and ruffled international politics, felt so average and indistinct inside our bodies. For the next seven days as we sunk into apparent home quarantine, I tried looking upon it as a watershed moment of life. The moment that would bring me lessons that I could pass on to my future grandchildren and write about them in a book for the benefit of humanity. Life, however, couldn’t have felt more mundane with the cleaning, mopping, gargling, and steaming that summarised my seven days in quarantine. I had to look harder for lessons that at least sounded more profound than, “do gaj ki duri, mask hai zaroori”. After all Winston Churchill had said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” So here is what I arrived at — four legitimate lessons from the last day of the quarantine,
Forwarding memes is a privilege of life, recognise it.
I earn my bread as a content writer. I am often required to write all sorts of things which have previously also included an urgent notice on the office toilet door instructing people to not use the toilet as a seemingly mad dog was found sleeping inside. Yes, I have written it all from scholarly articles on ancient wisdom to those marketing emails spamming your inbox. But never in my wildest imagination had I thought that one day I will be tasked with drafting condolence messages. It was in the middle of the dry and fiery April 2021, as India burnt with the pyres of its sons and daughters who had breathed their last due to what they called the Delta variant. When all of us dreaded every new morning, for you never knew what news it would bring. I hardly know anyone who didn’t lose a friend, family, or acquaintance during the second wave of Covid-19. On one such day in April 2021, I received a message from a senior at work. She called in for my help as she couldn’t bring herself to draft those condolence letters that were to be sent to bereaved family members of colleagues we had lost. Of colleagues, we had argued with in office meetings until yesterday. Eight months later, today, in the middle of the third wave, even as my entire family dealt with the Coronavirus — I found myself doing something drastically different. I was forwarding politically incorrect Covid memes to my friends and sharing a good laugh over it. One of which even had an offer for the daughters-in-law. Herein, for an additional amount they could get a positive report for themselves and a negative report for the husband and mother-in-law so that they could rest while the mother-in-law and husband served them. For a moment it felt sinister and insensitive — so many had lost so much, loved ones and livelihoods due to Covid. But then the next moment it occurred to me that wasn’t it a happy privilege to be in a place to laugh about things. The worst was finally (and hopefully) behind us. Ambulance sirens were no more hastening on the road outside.
Statistics sound like statistics until you become the statistics.
We read statistics every day and that has in many ways dumbed our reception to the gravity of the facts stated in those statistics. Three thousand covid cases reported across the state means nothing to us until the day we have the eerie knowledge that we are one of them. Since the day I found myself in the statistics, I have been trying to understand why any news always feels like it will happen to someone else, that all statistics concern someone else’s life and not mine. Global warming, global pollution, radical terrorism, resource scarcity, political instability, domestic violence will happen to someone else of another class or another country and not me. What is it that makes us feel this invincible? Is it invincibility or insensitivity? Maybe it is time for us all to brush up on our understanding of how this globe is one global organism and how we are each a part of each other. One of us being compromised, means all of us are compromised.
Maybe if like us, humans, even this virus seeks to discover the purpose of its life — it will be to make humanity see collective consciousness behind its being.
Life is like gargling; it doesn’t make sense. Do it anyway.
Before you give me medical sermons, hear me out, please. First of all, I hate gargling. Second, exactly which portion of your throat is the liquid supposed to reach during gargling? I am asking this in all earnestness, for this is something I am yet to understand after 33 years of gargling. I feel soreness at the rear end of the throat, and in none of my gargling adventures has the liquid managed to even touch upon that spot. Third, never in my personal history of gargling have I noticed being cured of cold or coughing with the application of even rigorous amounts of gargling. Hence, I beg your pardon as I proclaim and etch it in the hardest of stones that I have lost my faith in this elusive art. It just does not make sense to me. Yet, I do it. Why? Because it has to be done. That’s it. Just like life — doesn’t make sense. But it has to be done anyway.
Fear is a friend sometimes.
Let us all be afraid, unlike Pico, my nine-year-old fearless nephew. A couple of days ago I got a frustrated call from my cousin in Bengaluru. She had run out of patience and plans to keep her nine-year-old from running outside to play. He didn’t even have friends outside to play with because the other mothers had triumphantly managed to keep their children indoors amidst the Omicron scare. Compassion towards another woman made me give it a try at convincing Pico to play inside. I started, “Pico, see, you are young and strong. But, Dadu is so old. What if something happens to him? What if he gets the virus?” Unwilling to suffer my attempt at guilt-tripping him (I am not even sure if nine-year-olds can be guilt-tripped. Or if it is an exclusive post youth — pre middle age specialty) Pico pulled himself away from the video screen and with only his wrist twisting in front of the camera in a dismissive gesture he said, “I am not scared of the virus” and ran away before I could say another word. Pico was unafraid of the virus. But, Pico is nine years old and no longer afraid of the monsters lurking under the bed. We are not nine, and we do know that there are monsters lurking not just under the bed but everywhere. Let us all be afraid for fear is the friend that will help us keep the monsters away.
