This week marks three years since India and more or less the rest of the world shut down due to COVID-19. On Facebook and Twitter, memes were doing the rounds, asking people to share how their lives have changed in the past three years. Some of the answers were shocking. People moved out of cities, some lost jobs but found better ones, some found the love of their life, some moved out of existing relationships, and some used this time to transition gender.
But, missing in all these memories is an account of how the lockdown made itself felt. Perhaps because nothing significant changed in my life in the last three years, that first lockdown is etched in my memory as time suspended in itself. It felt like the rules we were following had become irrelevant and we had to find new ways to do everything, especially everyday things, on the fly. For a generation spoiled by search engines, where every question had a possible answer that someone somewhere had imagined and recorded, lockdown was a frustratingly intriguing time. We have to think on our feet not knowing how any of these parameters are going to work? How do we do it?
when our issues seemed small
We did this by writing on earthly aspects in the New Testament. We left our packages untouched for three days. We washed the plastic bags in which our groceries were wrapped. We masked up and showered and used our elbows to press the elevator buttons. For the more important aspects, we threw out the rulebook entirely. In my case, my daughter came back home from boarding school and my ex-husband and I decided to throw together a lot to take on this new enemy. In a callback to an earlier life, we divided up our chores, divided up television time, and went out of our way to try not to annoy the other person.
To be honest, it was one of the best “family times” we’ve ever experienced. News about the epidemic was so scant and sources of verified information so scarce that it was best to unite your forces against this common enemy rather than turn their guns on each other. It was also a time when we could no longer ignore the reality of our own mortality, and all our issues seemed small when, in fact, it was a question of life and death. New traditions started, most prominently the zoom calls. Family calls, cousin calls, friends from first job calls. It seemed like everyone was reaching out to everyone they knew, trying to cram everything they’ve always wanted to do but never could.
Then we come back, more angrier, more greedy
For those of us privileged enough to have a place to live and a job, the early days of lockdown brought with them certain childlike qualities, like pizza for breakfast or bedtime with friends, it seemed It was when all the rules were suspended, our priorities shifted and we started thinking about the little things that made us happy. Air pollution subsided, news reports talked about dolphin sightings in the Bosporus and cougars roaming Santiago. Nature is healing, we laughed at ourselves, and we should laugh too. This was all the more appealing because it had a perceived temporality, and perhaps a realization that either we would die or we would have to return to our previous “normal” lives.
Now, three years later, we are still on the ‘revenge’ tour. Revenge travel, revenge marriage, revenge food. It’s as if as soon as we were let out of our cages, we ran after everything we felt was denied us. There are no small joys in living in the moment for us to be able to appreciate what we have. At best, some of those Zoom calls have survived the pandemic of the past two years. For the rest, we’re back, greedy as ever, angry as ever, trying to do everything and finding joy in nothing. Nature may have recovered for a minute there, but we, we managed to escape. Why!
The author is the author of ‘Independence Day: A People’s History’.