2 years of the pandemic | Dear COVID. Un-happy birthday to you!

(Representational image) For a child, two years is a long time. Covid babies are tots now, and many adolescents have crossed over into their teens. (Photo: Kelly Sikkema via Unsplash)

“Did you also have a pandemic when you were growing up, mamma?”, my son Re asked me, a few weeks into the first lockdown of March 2020, when we were still coming to grips with our new way of being. Or not.

I replied we hadn’t and I was trying to think of something of as much magnitude that we had been through but couldn’t think of anything. Except the arrival of television in our home.

In the bleakness of the pandemic skyline in the initial months which of course, roused the birds and made them chirpier, we were still birds in cages in high rises. While the upheaval meant stress, it also meant slowing down, getting closer, becoming more adaptable, picking up things you never noticed. Like birdsong.

Soon, my son and I started talking about mental health, about self-care. About gratitude and vulnerability. We had divided the household chores – I cooked, he cleaned; I did the laundry, he put out the garbage; I did jhadoo and he did pocha. After a few insta stories of “look how we are winging it”, it stopped being cute.

As someone who easily adapts to change, I was excited about the idea of orchestrating this new normal – setting guidelines and new rules. But then I realized I didn’t even have clearly delineated old rules. Soon, weeks rolled into months and building societies morphed into mafia gangs and everyone looked at everyone suspiciously, their eyes revealing nothing, their body language saying it all. “Mostly, people don’t talk with their eyes so you don’t know what’s going on behind the mask,” said Re.

We had become experts in listening to what was not being said.

I was already bemoaning the loss of the one wretched park in the neighbourhood where we could breathe some new oxygen. Sure we had a trampoline and my yoga class turned online, but it was all too weird.

“You are so lucky you never had to do online school,” mamma, Re said, a month into the pandemic. He already had dark circles and looked tired and listless. I hugged him as he was the only person in my life who was not wary of hugs.

I feel like a zombie mamma, said Re, as he plonked beside me. I will homeschool him, I thought to myself. But where was the fodder?

Was there another way to live? A more humane way?

COVID became an adjective. Covid marriages. Covid babies. Covid dating. Covid relationships. Covid parenting.

Zoom became a verb.

Soon, the uncertainty about whether my son's school would ever reopen weighed on me. The feeling was heavy. The buildings and streets of Mumbai looked like a scene from Pied Piper and the Hamelin, post the Piper’s visit. Children stopped sneezing. There were no children to be seen. It was bizarre. My child was not getting to do the things that made him a child. It broke my heart.

My other worry was whether I could keep the meter running. I was a single mother with a freelancer’s income and my limited means now had gotten even more limited. I started creative writing and mentoring sessions. Surprisingly there were many takers.

But then, something weird happened. Parents began to un-see the fatigue and discomfort of online school and began to see some rather disturbing silver linings. “She actually loves it, because she never liked going to school anyway,” said one. “She doesn’t like playing with the building kids because they are all princessy. She is happier being at home,” justified another.

To what end? At what cost? I wondered.

A few weeks later, we decided to go down and play. It had been two months and we were fed up. And then as luck would have it, I broke my leg cycling.

It was a hard time. It just got harder.

As I stared at my plastered leg in a cast every day, I began to see how bleak it all was. And then the worst happened. Re and I both had COVID, one after the other. It was like a personal failure, almost a moral failure.

He was up and running in four days but I lay in bed, debilitated for most of the month, while he did the chores, made breakfast, fetched the dabbas that kind friends delivered to us at the building gate. I found myself thinking: If I survive this, I want to live someplace else. Somewhere normal. Where we can breathe, where my son and I can go for a walk without being stared at. Where we can cycle, perhaps swim too.

I started weighing, if the situation was not going to change quickly— and I could see it wasn’t— what am I willing to add to my life that I think is valuable? What do I owe my child and myself?

I didn’t want to accept “the new normal”. Hell, I will change my normal, I said to myself. Adapting my child to the online life was not up to me. Giving him at least a part of his own life was what I wanted to do.

As adults we adapt and make sense of things but play is still a dispensable entity for us. But how can you interrupt childhood for two years? For a child, that’s a life time. It’s the time between being a child and being a teen. It is a universe apart.

A few weeks after my COVID recovery, we went to Goa for a two week holiday (our longest in two years) and we found ourselves breathing, loosening up, finding play. I found a little school that was operational. Re asked me if we could live there. Like not go back. And suddenly, I found myself saying – why not? So, unlike parents who had moved to live the online life in prettier places, we began to live the offline life in a prettier place. We moved to Goa. Re started going to school. He made new friends IRL. We became members of the Bookworm community library. We still have to say “real school” for people to believe us but we are getting used to it.

But it was more than that….we began to talk to neighbours. Pet their animals.  Share food. Walk. Eat out. Watch sunsets without feeling it was a crime

So you moved bori bistar? How do you do these things, people asked me.

Just like I do most things in life, I said. I just do them.

I realised I had done the right thing, when we started having house guests (everyone wants to visit when you are in Goa) from Mumbai a few months ago.  Families who visited us had led a completely indoor, online school/work life for the last two years. The children were grumpy, listless, fidgety, disinterested and seemed to be almost simmering silently, making zero eye contact. The parents had developed a blind spot, but I could sense that something had been permanently altered. It’s like they were so used to living virtually that now real life was awkward. Their childhood had been paused for so long that it had evaporated.

Scientists say the deep seated effects of the pandemic on children will show in the young population five years from now – but it was already there, right in front of me.

I know things are slowly returning to normal (whatever that means) but now normal feels like work to most. One friend is actually upset that she will have to send her daughter to school and said, “Z is so not a morning person and neither am I, so this pandemic thing was actually great for us.”

But given that it’s been two years since COVID struck, I am just happy to be alive. Scratch that. I am happy to have truly lived these past two years, making it count.

I love the new space we created for ourselves not just physically but also emotionally. I love that I don’t see a sea of people when I step out on the road. I love that I can finally drive my car. I love that where I live, people make eye contact, and sometimes they hug too. I am grateful to the pandemic because it made me curious about human beings all over again.