June — The month of change
Death
There is a purpose to inertia
The safest place to be is in limbo
Is it okay that I am moving
when the world stays still…
It is time for my month note and while things have happened over the month, the things that have happened over the last week have smudged any memory from the rest of the month and all I am left with are some blurred shapes.
I keep trying to think about how I felt last month, but my senses are dulled, I cant really tell…I don’t know if this is my body coping with loss. My uncle passed away this week. It happened very quickly in about 10 days, One day he was complaining about slight vertigo and the next he is gone. Until this happened, while I was taking the necessary precaution and keeping track of the progression of the disease in different Indian states, I don’t think I fully understood it— viscerally. Just like our youth is filled with this feeling of immortality, I did not actually think this would affect my monkey-sphere. But now I am irrationally scared and paranoid for all the older and more vulnerable members of my family, and for the city they live in. I feel guilty that I can’t be with them. I wish I could take them away from there. He was my fathers older brother and he died alone when so many people wanted to be around him. My sister had to take care of everything, being the only young and fit, person in the area. It hurt me that she went through that alone. Someone told me that this disease and this year would creation of generation of people with PTSD, all the survivors who have loved and who have to stand helplessly on the sidelines while losing people, they cannot see ever again. I am tired and I am scared. I don’t really feel like writing a month note.
I had put down thoughts as they happened over the month and I’ll just leave them here for me to see later.
We decided to move to Jammu toward the end of last month. A lot of factors played a role in this: mainly our incomes, the very expensive home-stay we were still staying in. Our friend and her family live in Jammu and they had an apartment which they were okay with us renting. We would get to hang out with familiar and friendly faces for a little while and when we had to go to Canada, we had a place we could leave our many things at.
So this was decided and in early June we packed all our belongings and took a cab across two state borders. Jammu of course has the added issue of being a place in conflict so we had to go through ~5 police/army check-posts, each asking us for a pass and to download the state mandated surveillance app. WE got into Jammu in the middle of the afternoon, very travel sick and sent into institutional paid quarantine in a hotel of our choice.
The next day, we had to go to the government hospital to get tested. There was a long queue and the idea of social distancing was treated more like a ritual than a logical option to avoid the spread of the disease. As long as there were circles demarcating where people had to stand, it was followed and as soon as the circles ended, we were all standing uncomfortably close to one another again. We had to wade through a sea of gloves littering the premises. The many police officers around the hospital in charge of maintaining order during this time were casually disposing their older gloves on any available surface every few minutes as things heated up under the sweltering sun. The healthcare workers however sat in a tiny space with half a table fan between four of them in full PPE gear taking down the names and numbers of the countless people coming through to get tested.
I saw a closed coffin marked COVID-19 and wondered when they got that painted. And finally, I saw a prisoner come in chains with many guards around him to get tested. Everyone suddenly felt the need to socially distance from him. He looked dazed, had a torn mask that was falling off his face and a wounded arm. It was all very surreal especially after spending four months in a village in Himachal with very few people around.
After our institutional quarantine stint and the negative results, we went to our friends house where we were going to stay until the essentials (internet) was working in our place. Pops house is in the outskirts of Jammu and it is big and green and has fruit laden trees all over the yard. This of course meant, we were host to various species of birds: Lapwing, Brown Headed Barbet, Golden Oriole, Green Bee-Eater, Kite, Brown Rock-Chat, Yellow Vented Bulbul, Parakeet, Spotted Dove, Purple Sunbird, and a lot more that I am still trying to identify with my novice skills. I even had the honor of catching a glimpse of a monitor lizard fighting with a couple of lapwings near a drain. They have a swimming pool and puppies and we were quite happy being an imposition for a few weeks. Pop’s mum and dad took great care of us and we ate a lot.
Because I was not doing much else (no exercise, no cooking, no cleaning), I worked a lot over the month. I am working on a study mapping the FOSS ecosystem in India; which requires a lot of interviewing. I am also working on a few other public health related projects, specifically on
a) COVID-19 related spending and
b)Mental health during this pandemic
Sadly with all of this change, my studying has completely discontinued and I hope to get that back next month along with a semblance of a routine which includes exercise.
Books Read this Past Month
A burning — Megha Majumdar
The Memory Police — Yoko Ogawa
Normal People — Sally Rooney
My Sister, the Serial Killer — Oyinkan Braitwaite
Vicious — V.E.Schwab
The painting in the beginning is by Egon Schiele, it was painted in early 1918 and it depicts him, his ‘then’ pregnant wife and their yet to be born son. By the end of that year before the painting could be finished, both Egon Schiele and his pregnant wife would die from the Spanish Flu.
