Lockdown Musings

Today would have been yet another hectic day at work.

Meetings. Page discussions. Client Calls. Client escalations.

The usual trip to the cafeteria at 10.30 am or so and again around 5pm when hunger pangs struck.

The gupshup around cups of steaming hot tea and maybe deep fried samosas or aloochaat or whatever was the day’s special that our cafeteria guy had whipped up for us.

The usual cribbing and grumbling about the workload but an inward prayer as well that at least we had a job to grumble about.

By evening, there would have been the usual mad scramble to wrap up the day’s work, give some final instructions to the team, check for any pending emails and urgent messages.

Then the booking of the cab for the ride home. If it was peak hour, there would be an impatient wait stretching into several minutes with probably several canceled rides in between.

The ride home, weaving through the rush hour traffic, giving the usual directions to the Uber driver, checking Whatsapp messages, getting a call from the cook at home and giving her instructions for the night’s dinner. Watching the setting sun paint the sky in a blaze of colours. And wondering when would this mad race come to a halt…when would the day come when a relaxed rhythm would replace this frenetic one. 

Reaching home to the same old routine…either tick off my teen for being too much on the mobile (as usual) or not studying much, rest a bit, then desultorily pass the time with some mindless Whatsapp surfing and messaging, eat dinner, unwind with my favourite Agatha Christie episode on YouTube, and then hit the snooze button. Drowsily planning for the next day already…… 

For me, personally, the enforced lockdown of the past few months had been a cause for celebration. It was as though my very soul was pining for this rest, this relaxed pace of life, this complete doing away with the outside noises….for such a long, long time. The mother in me had been anguished for months, for years, that my son was growing up eating only a maid’s cooking and not his mother’s cooking. As a working mother with a hugely demanding work schedule, time was the one thing I was always short on. Living out my dream life seemed utopian at best. 

But now here I am…into this on and off lockdown, working like a beaver from morning till night, and yet reveling in it. By some miracle, my culinary skills seem to have blossomed as though after lying dormant for so long they were thrilling in being exposed to the world at last. Best of all, my finicky teen has loved every single dish I have prepared, whether it is rajma chawal, Maharashtrian masala bhaath, idli sambhar, Adai dosa with kara chutney, lemon pepper chicken or paneer ka paratha. 

Our lives as we knew it have forever changed. And will be the stuff of bed time stories for our grand kids, that is, if this tiny microbe doesn’t play any more nasty tricks on suffering humanity.