A Pleasant Lockdown Labyrinth
I suspect that our family must be given equity, for all that we have spent on Amazon over the last six months of the Covid-19 era. Every day, dusk is marked by my mum angrily exclaiming “Am I an OTP machine or what?!” and dawn is announced, not by a rooster, but by my mum groaning about getting calls from the front gate to approve delivery executives. To avoid exposure as much as possible, all of our purchases have moved to the digital realm, and yes of course, an idle mind is the devil’s workshop. ‘Teal and magenta towels, soaps and loofahs for just 299/-?!’, clickity-click-click, and it’s ordered. You can almost hear the faint sigh of Sir Isaac Newton wishing he didn’t discover the colour spectrum. Since we have some extra time on our hands, we’ve been getting repairs done around the house, from the sumps to the light bulbs, they’re all getting their well-deserved attention.
All this free-time has yielded some good outcomes as well though. After many years of never spending more than a week under the same roof thanks to work, school and college, all five of us are finally home and spending quality time together. My mother, father, sister, and I have spent most of our time fawning over our ten-year-old beagle Amigo. I’m fairly certain that once this is all over, he will walk out of the balcony on his hind legs, with a white towel wrapped around his head, a mimosa between his paws, claiming he needs a spa session and some ‘alone time’ to decompress. He and my grandparents enjoy a silvers’ club siesta in the living room every day. It’s come to be known as the ‘70,80 and 88 nap time’.
Since of course, eating loads of daal for dinner isn’t conducive to 8 people living under the same roof, unless we plan to challenge GAIL (The largest state-owned natural gas processing and distribution company); Every night, we set out masked for a walk inside the community. Until lockdown began, we never ventured out at night for leisurely strolls, which allow for a glimpse into the lives of those living with us in the same space. The path is lined with houses with kitchen windows facing the road. A mother, visibly tired, toils away cleaning up the kitchen as her son and husband sit at the table seemingly incapable of lending a helping hand or a shoulder for shared responsibility. A teenager walks around speaking on the phone in hushed tones, momentarily free of the prying eyes and ears back home. TV serials are blaring through some windows with their characteristic wails of an empty cooker being put on the gas.
As we walk along we notice the ‘cat cages’. It is a known fact that when people have nothing constructive to do with their time, the most trivial non-issues become monolithic challenges. Such is the case of the apparent ‘cat infestation’ in the community. There has been a sudden surge of residents not understanding the fact that although they belong to the same family, house cats and tigers are indeed different. I wonder whether each of them grew up in a world devoid of the terror of house-cats. Juxtaposing the traps were the terracotta pots in the background painted by the residents, each pot being adopted by one family for its painting and upkeep. The combination of the two beautifully represents the boons and banes of community living.
The long walks under the not-so-starry skies seemed to evoke the philosophical side of us all and I would often be in a pensive state thereafter. It seemed natural to observe who wore and who didn’t wear a mask outside and why it was so. In the initial days of the lockdown, every resident in the locality seemed to be on high-alert and followed the safety norms to the ‘t’. Fear was an important catalyst of civic sense. It goes to show that in any human society, the only effective path to decorous community living has been through the path of incentivizing people at the individual level through fear — be it in the early societies using a fear of God, in modern societies, fear of law enforcement, and by far the most powerful — a fear of losing your life, as demonstrated through the COVID-19 pandemic. However, India’s conundrum has always been a dichotomy between forgetting but never forgiving. As the days of lockdown went on, civic sense specific to the pandemic was forgotten but the hate for China among the general public intensified with each passing day. We must rekindle this forgotten fear. A fear not negative, but a fear which instigates negative reinforcement. The fear of losing someone dear to you. Unfortunately, instilling a sense of civic responsibility without any personal gain goes against the fabric of being of our species. No matter how much we’d like it to be so, we are not altruistic by nature. My argument is summarised beautifully by a section of a quote by Sir Adam Smith (1776, An Enquiry Into the Nature and Causes of Wealth of Nations)
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.”
In this new COVID-19 era where being ‘negative’ is the new positive, we experienced the fear of being primary contact to an individual who tested positive. My mother seemed to have symptoms and was in isolation for two days until her test results came back. Seeing as my father is severely diabetic and asthmatic, our fear was understandable. Luckily, within a few days, the doctor informed us that we were in the clear. The most amusing aspect of it all was Amigo’s visible confusion and concern for my mother; Not because he was afraid for her health but because she was cordoned off in a room which is otherwise his ‘punishment room’. He sat outside her door day and night, wondering what she could have done wrong that we ‘kept’ her there for two whole days. He seemed to make a mental note to ask her this once she’s out so that he may never commit the same offense.
As the days go on, this routine seems to repeat itself every day. I write this short account of the lockdown labyrinth as I sit in our living room. Amigo has just decided to leave a pile of poop in front of my grandmother sitting on the sofa as she screeches and yells at my aged grandfather to stay indoors because there are AO Smith technicians walking around the house. The technicians holding a big heavy geyser don’t notice the pile and kick a small piece across the hall. My mother is on an important WebEx call in the next room maintaining a professional demeanour with shrieks coming from the living room. ‘Ding dong!’, well of course — it’s Jeff Bezos himself.
