Lockdown Relationships

When my 18-year-old came back home from Bangalore within 7 days of going back to his hostel after a mid-semester break, neither him nor I expected it to go beyond 3 months. I, the development sector worker in charge of 96 people working in various parts of the rural India was more worried than him of course but, going by his reactions later, I guess he expected it to last even less than that. He thought he could finally spend his birthday with his friends as his semester dates changed. His birthday always coincides with summer holidays and when I said, “I want to come and spend time with you that weekend!” he had been in two minds about how to politely turn it down. 

The mid-semester break in the first week of March in Delhi with me was spent well. The teenager avoided talking too much with me but we also visited a few restaurants together and went to a jazz performance that we targeted from long ago. We talked a bit about dating. His and mine. I was intrigued by his reflection that South Asian men who were my contemporaries may not find it comfortable being around me. That to them, I came across as too intelligent, too knowledgeable, and "too" on your face. Well!  It does not take much to be a "too much" woman , you see!

Then came the lockdown! Many people told me about how they had an initial excitement, with children back home after many months, no pressure to go to office, “quality time”, new things to learn, hobbies to pursue. Like my friend from the Urdu class, I took last year said, “There was a lot of euphoria! My grown-up children played online ludo with their cousins across continents. They could not gush enough about how were they connecting!” 

My friend said the euphoria died down well within a month. I, on the other hand took the

lockdown pretty bad from the very first day. I was in charge with a large field-based team in a medium sized NGO and the team members feared losing their job and soon started deeply detesting being stuck at home. They started sharing their personal and professional issues and it all started affecting me along with the myriad issues pertaining to people’s plights resulting out of lockdown.  This was even more difficult to take as I started noticing the complete lack of logic around the lockdown and the coronavirus, among people. In the very beginning, a friend cancelled a visit to Lodhi Colony to look at the frescos on 21st March showing the panic at home although going to open areas was advised by doctors till then and I started fearing the lack of scientific logic that would guide decisions from then on. That was my first red flag! Since then, I have heard so many completely illogical statements and panic response starting with “what if” that I have lost count! 

The lockdown was expected but that it was announced in 4 hours felt like a big blow of complete lack of accountability and reason; and as the aftermaths started showing up, all my worst nightmares as a development sector worker started coming true. Migrant workers stuck without food, being sent back from state borders, pregnant women dying on the road, small businesses going down, women stuck in violent homes, girls being trafficked or married off, children dying without treatment or hungry and the mental trauma, illness, stress all on the rise. There was no end. I woke up every morning and afraid of looking at the phone because of the incessant bad news. When I said this to friends, they said, stop looking at the news. I did not look at the news. There is no news channel that I follow. Neither on TV nor on internet. However bad news continued to pour in. It came in the form of calls for help to my inbox every hour and however much I made personal donations, however much I tried to reach out connecting the dots, it all seemed too less in front of the tsunami of the collective grief of losing all that we held dear. I struggled to breathe. Quite literally! I reached out to support when I needed support myself. And badly so. 

Absence of my favorite things to do outside work (read, my distractions) was also a reason that made things even more difficult. I had to cancel a musical evening I had planned at home in March and as the months rolled, I understood I would not only miss the regular outing for Heritage Walks in Delhi and meetings friends in many smaller events of music and poetry but some of the high-points of the year such as Thumri Festival would be missed too. As the summer gave away to monsoon, I looked forward every year to look at the names of the artists in the Thumri Festival and the festival in a way marked the advent of the festival season for me but this year it was not to be! I, an eternal optimist, did not find anything to be optimistic about. Neither inside my heart. Nor outside in the world.

My teenager was in the meanwhile graduating from trying to finish his long pending painting project copying Van Gogh’s  “Bedroom in Arles”, to getting back to practice a bit of his classical singing to completely shifting to metal! It was like he understood it is better to live the life he lives in the hostel at home, as the weeks stretched to months. He and I were in the habit of talking and sharing quite a bit till he had left for his undergrad course in 2019. After that he’d found a new world all together and I was given the highlights from time to time. It was much like the Tagore’s free-bird of the sky which paid regular visits to the caged bird but who feared being trapped if the conversations prolonged(https://www.geetabitan.com/lyrics/rs-k/khnaachar-paakhi-chhilo-english-translation.html). My son was still hoping in March, April and even in May that this would come to an end soon and he would not have to re-build the connection with Ma. He thought he could be in his own world being Zen and Ma would do fine on her own. She did not. She started losing it. She went around telling people to work on long term strategies but as many of her own strategies were based on other people, situations outside her control, they started falling flat. The boat started sailing away. And the boy had to jump in to grab it with all his might. 

On the other hand, my friend Mitra’s daughter came back home from her nursing school in Bhopal, she told me how the girl almost demanded to be entertained and asked for things to do every hour from her. And she wanted to do things with her parents. She needed the proximity. She needed to do things together. Her moods swung up and down on a daily basis. Her mother loved the fact that she was taking care. The girl was around to give a pedicure, a waxing session, treat them to an occasional gourmet dish but it was also exhausting to think for a 22-year-old on what should she do next and being around her without any break. 

Navtej and I on the other hand, struggled with our wards’ weird sleep cycle. Like my friend Navtej, I could not stop complaining to all and sundry how much my funny haired teenager slept. Oh yeah! The hair was growing but he was of course not happy with the rate at which it did and lamented all the waking-up hours. And I had a different perspective all together. I am okay with long hair so far you take care of it, but “Freedom” (as the hair was named) was not to be taken care of. I had to then start planning on how I drill the fact into the inaccessible head of my teenager that freedom is generally hard earned and harder kept! And the examples from all over the world, on how authoritarianism spreads if you are not aware and how your freedom is taken away in the name of “protection”, helped.

Housework was one of the major issues in almost all the households and I realized it was almost never equally shared. Not in my home and not in the other homes that I could get details from. Many of us fell into the initial trap of “Oh! our children do not get to laze as much in the hostel!”, I, the least so among my acquaintances. Because I am always worried whether my son is being lazy or it is his “male privilege”. I am mortally scared of my son growing up to be a man as non-caring as men generally are in this sub-continent. I therefore, constantly remind him, he has to care. He has to think what others need. He has to think beyond himself in the family because if you look around there are a lot of men who think about and care for what is happening to the minority of the country, to the poverty affected, to the children of country. They are fine thinking about these and showing care because these do not push them enough to make any changes in their own lives. They do not have to wake up early, go to sleep late, eat last, do physical labor at home, every day if they worry about these. However, if they care for the ones they claim they love, they will have to push themselves. They therefore take a carefully chosen “care-break” there and rarely go beyond agreeing they do not do house-work and like my father, blame it in on their mothers and age. 

On the household chores, some of us parents were less bothered than others as we took it easy on ourselves too. Masooma, a recently separated mom from Kolkata told me, she knows her girl is a bit lazy and one of the standard conversations in the household is her daughter saying, “Do you need any help?” and Masooma saying with mock agitation, “Let me give you the list today… Let this happen finally!” and they both laugh. Talking to many of them I understood it is about what one focused on at which point in time. If home was a priority for the duo, it worked in one way, if office work was, it worked another way, and if love life was the main priority, it worked in a completely different way. Coming back to these young adults’ and late-teens’ sleeping schedule, they can shame the proverbial Kumbhakarna from Ramayana, but then many of us parents were also constantly compromising with our sleeping deadlines. Navtej told me she was going to sleep well past 2 am although she constantly told her daughter to wake up at least before noon. I did not say much. I could see how I was doing the same. 

Love in the time of Corona was almost the only thing that kept a large number of us going. A few
words of love, a quick glimpse from afar, a short meeting at a park kept us sane. I was so pleasantly surprised to talk to many of these friends about love. We have indeed come a long way. Many single moms were encouraged to date or to go out and meet the loved ones by their grown-up children. The wards helped create online profiles, ordered new clothes, taught using eye-liner and they also showed interest in meeting these significant others when things moved beyond casual talking. “Life begins at 50!” a friend’s gift from her children read! She found essentials for her dating days nicely packed in a box. The mothers, in Lucknow, Kolkata, and Delhi, on the other hand, were also immensely supportive in the love-life of their children. From sneaking a daughter out at early morning to meet her boyfriend during the harsher periods of lockdown to getting support from a psychologist to help go through a break-up, my friends filled me with amazing anecdotes! The “mother-child” world has changed quite a lot it seems! The camaraderie, the bonding was amazing there and mostly in deeds. 

My boy agreed to show me some love himself as I started falling apart with immense disappointments that I suffered from human beings, given the terrible disregard they showed towards other humans. He became my human connection, my source of warmth, as I cried my heart out asking those whys! As I started looking at my therapist with the same amount of disdain that a child shows towards a nurse with an injection, my generally-tongue-in-cheek-teenager decided he needed to be out of his cave in regular intervals! He hugged me  and gave me my 20 second dose of endorphin! The fact that I can mock my psychologist with him and laugh, only to come back later for a serious discussion on reflections, his complete lack of judgement towards me (if I could agree to disregard the mischievous smiles) help a lot. When I look at him and hear these stories from my friends, I think we have probably finally been able to break away from the pedestal of parenthood. 

We are all now looking at a horizon of 2021*. We are hoping that the new year will bring back some amount of reason and not the complete lack of logic around “I followed the lockdown and did not meet anyone, so I will now meet relatives, and friends! What’s more I will attend that marriage party that was pending!” The lockdown period has extracted a terrible price at the personal level. The world has turned upside down for many of us. It was falling apart for every conscious citizen of this world for some time, the corona-virus lockdown concentrated that acid to a very high number of parts per million and left a horrible taste in our mouths if not lungs! And it is not as frivolous a reason as not being able to party, or meeting friends casually but it has brought it clearly forth who would stand by logic even when the whole world is swaying otherwise and who would not. Who would look for ways to be with you and for whom are you dispensable? Who was claiming to be your friend, your family but only needed you for himself or herself and did not feel any responsibility towards your needs? Who left in a hurry as the world kept crumbling around you? Like Navtej said, “I still sit late at night with my peg of scotch alone after a hard day at work. My son used to sit with me in the beginning but now he does not want to do so any more. It is okay! He has gone back to his own world. If one thing that this lockdown has taught me, it is only you who is there for you!” Be your best buddy! Be there for yourself! 

* As you have figured out by now, it is an old article that never saw the light of the day!