Stay at Home Ramblings #1

It’s 7:00 in the morning on a barmy summer day. I’m sitting in my designated home workspace, which is next to a window overlooking my balcony, sipping hot tea as my laptop comes to life.

As I skim through my Inbox, I look out the balcony into the empty plot nearby. The plot has a huge tamarind tree; summer has filled its branches with brown pulpy fruit. It covers a lot of space in the empty lot, with its branches bending with the weight of its fruits—imagine Arnold Schwarzenegger standing in his biceps pose and 20 children hanging from each hand. The tree reminds me also of Dhritarashtra from the Mahabharata—someone who stood tall once upon and a time and then was forced to bend and suffer because of the burden of the acts of his many children.

At night, in the cool hazy light of the moon, the tree is very scary to look at—mythology is full of how the tamarind tree is home to spirits and ghosts, how tamarind trees are a staple in all cemeteries, and how witches have always been nailed to tamarind trees. In short, there is enough material to inspire rich legends. But morning brings the Sun and with it courage. To me, this is very interesting—associating courage with the Sun. Whatever images the night brings, however scary those might be, the Sun dismisses all of them with disdain. We become brave souls again, laughing off the previous night’s scares as a load of imaginary rubbish, waste crops sowed and harvested in a fertile mind.

The Sun is slowly making his way up and in the tree’s shade, a dog is trying to nap—her 4 puppies doing their best not to let her sleep. They jump over her and over each other—their enthusiasm and joy a reflection of their obliviousness of life’s hardships. The dog looks oblivious as well—at least of the Corona madness that has engulfed the world. We say world, but it’s just humans, right? There are about 4 trillion fish in our oceans, 400 billion birds in the world, 100 quadrillion ants, 900 million dogs, 600 million cats, and so on and so forth who remain unaffected—but if it involves us in any way, then it has to be a “world problem”, right? Because our souls and our lives are in some way more valuable and more precious than all the other 8 million species that inhabit the Earth. Anyway, I am digressing; that is a post by itself.

The dog seems very content. The puppies have moved away from their mother and are now playing in a bush of wild yellow flowers. The bush is at some distance from the tree and is a haven for dragonflies and butterflies. The puppies have destroyed their peace—but they don’t seem to mind; “Children will be children,” they seem to say to each other. It’s not like I haven’t seen all these before as well. I have been staying in my house for almost 14 years now; so there’s nothing new in what I’m seeing—the newness is in how I’m seeing it. In other words, now there is time for some perspective, there is more time to find joy in small things, there is more time to live life as it should be lived, and I’m thankful for social distancing for that.

The house is quiet and my tea is getting cold. I can hear my younger daughter getting up and walking around the house. She ambles over to where I am sitting and lazily cuddles next to me. I don’t say anything, she doesn’t either. It’s nice when it’s quiet and we enjoy the silence—both of us looking at my Inbox and seeing very different things, thinking very different thoughts, but enjoying the very same thing. There is no social distancing here, just the contentment and pride deep within me that I can give my daughter a sense of security as a father, even if it’s fleeting, even if it’s an illusion, in these difficult times. COVID 19 or Ebola, she believes she is safe in that cuddle. Somewhere, in some unseen depths of my cynical mind, I want her to believe that forever.

The difficulty of these times is not only the difficulty brought on by disease—it is also one brought on by proximity. I have more of my family and my family has more of me in our lives. Sometimes, there’s peace and sometimes there’s war—but I believe, that it’s all good. We have all our meals together now—watching movies together in bits and pieces. Bedtime stories have become more like novels now. I can write an email or think about some issue at work and still help my younger daughter with a puzzle or my elder one with the meaning of a Malayalam phrase in her book. In short, a new normal is slowly getting created—a new world where there is work and family in equal measure side by side and I feel like I can get very much used to this new way of life.

As the work from home enters the second year, we are beginning to be different in the way we see the world and think about life. When we return after the virus has finished its deadly dance, let’s learn lessons from what has happened, let’s make more informed choices, let our dreams be different, and let’s be kinder.

These thoughts might be random and even might sound more like rambling—but I feel that chimps to man maybe is just one way of nature’s evolution; giving us a much-needed wake-up call and perspective through viruses like COVID 19 might just be another.