The Quarantine Diary

Just like for every huge natural or political disaster, we all have our stories of how we spent the quarantined days during the COVID-19 pandemic. I thought of transporting mine from my diary to here as I now find them quite interesting.

In the last week of Jan 2020, I flew from my home in San Diego to India for some legal paperwork and to meet my parents whom I had not seen for a year and a half. Little did I know that I wouldn’t be able to return until the last quarter of the year, that this quick trip was going to turn into a seven-month vacation. Little did I know that the world was going to change and leave a lasting memory that I, and everyone else, were going to remember until our last days.

A week before I was supposed to return home, the US banned incoming flights from Europe. I had a transit in the UK, so I couldn’t fly. Two weeks later, there was a historical Lockdown in India and all modes of transportation were disabled.

And thus began, what I can only call, the beginning of a distinctive era.

The citizens of the world went from being social animals to being confined among four walls. My situation, although, was a bit different. In the past decade, I’ve mostly lived a secluded life. Except for when I was at university and working. Even then, I spent most of my time alone at home. I loved that aspect of my life. I thoroughly enjoyed it, actually. But when my husband and I got stranded in India at our parents’ house, so did my sister and her husband, and so did my youngest sister for a while. I went from living a quarantine-like life to living a social one with six other individuals in a small house. In my world, that’s nothing short of living in the house of Big Brother.

Now that I am back home, I look back to those days. They feel like a whole different dimension, like an odd movie you watch before sleeping and then seeing traces of it in your dream. I maintained a brief journal during the quarantine months (March to August).

Here are some snippets of those oddball days-

Day 1: We played cricket in the house after learning that our flight was canceled.

Day 3: I spent my birthday in quarantine with an old-school celebration. No fancy gifts, no cake, no outings. My sister gifted me crayons and pencils that she dangerously scored from a local store. My brother-in-law gifted me a towel! My mom made me Puran-Poli (something she made on all my birthdays as a kid). We ended the day with dance, music, and glow sticks on our building terrace.

Day 5: My mom taught us yoga.

Day 6: We sat together to have the evening tea and discussed Parle G for twenty minutes.

Day 7: I learned to play a song on dad’s harmonium.

Day 8: I cut half the tip of my finger while cutting cabbage. We all went into panic mode.

Day 13: I woke up late to my sister teasing me with “Now toh you are gone!” (threatening me with mom’s wrath for waking up late). It emotionally reminded me of my childhood days when I shared my room with her.

Day 14: We befriended a stray female dog and her six puppies.

Day 15: We celebrated my brother-in-law’s birthday for whom I wrote a short story as a gift.

Day 17: A stricter Lockdown was placed. Total curfew.

Day 18: We played board games. Nonstop. Actually, this went on for months. A total of 66 rounds of Ticket to Ride were played.

Day 19: My sister went around and asked all of us our favorite movies, songs, etc. to note on her whiteboard. This went on for a few days, to all our annoyance.

Day 20: A monkey invaded our neighborhood out of nowhere.

Day 21: We talked about Dalgona Coffee the whole week but never made it.

Day 23: My sisters and I tried to learn some viral dance moves that were floating around.

Day 25: I watched Gandalf say, “you shall not pass” in Hindi on TV.

Day 30: I borrowed colors from the neighbor’s kid and painted moon, planets, and galaxies

Day 34: I submitted my final work to my agent!

Day 46: On this hot, soundless, apocalyptic noon, I saw a stray calf moaning and mooing and running up and down the street to search for her lost mother. This will remain as one of my most haunted memories of the quarantine.

Day 52: I lost it. The unkind politics around the world and lack of alone time drained me. I stopped feeling like myself. My anger seeped through my social media posts. Therefore, I stayed in a room like a hermit until it got better in the head.

Day 53: I wrote a lot, including my 4th Lockdown poetry.

Day 54: I read the entire day.

Day 55: We celebrated my parents’ 35th anniversary.

Day 57: Someone we know was tested positive for COVID-19.

Day 61: We sat together to have the evening tea and discussed Parle G again for twenty minutes

Day 66: My parents taught us their childhood game of cards and marbles (read gambling).

Day 70: I went out of the house for the 3rd time since the Lockdown (to get groceries).

Day 90: We lost the second last remaining stray puppy to a road accident.

Day 91: The last remaining puppy cried all night in pain and misery. I will never forget its moaning.

Day 97: Someone we know passed away due to the virus.

Day 103: We enjoyed the year’s first rain.

Day 120: I finally started a workout regime.

Day 128: A pigeon flew inside our house, sat on the nightstand for a while, then flew and shat all around the room before leaving. The most WTF moment of the quarantine.

Day 139: We found out we would be able to return home and booked our tickets. It was one of my saddest days.

Day 143: Dad sang a lengthy WhatsApp forward on Corona to the tune of a song.

Day 152: We packed our bags.

And after what felt like a journey to Mars, I was home.

These are just the highlights because it would be hard to fit in the seven months’ worth of unbelievable happiness, laughter, music, games, scrumptious homemade food, sunsets, solid memories, and endless cups of tea in a single post. I’d been wandering from one city and country to another after I finished high school. This was the first time I got to spend this much time at home and with my parents since I was 17. I got the chance to see the life my parents live outside of my usual vacation days with them and you can only understand the importance of this if you’ve ever lived oceans away from your elderly parents.

But most of all, this period for me was the time of learning

When I flew to India in Jan, I was not in a good mental place. I thought after an extremely social and hectic year, that was 2019, I needed more solitude. But my benevolent husband urged me to see my parents instead, and I am so glad I did. For someone who has an untamable need for privacy and independence, this decision was life-changing. In the past seven months, I learned what it means to have a wholesome support system inside the four walls when the world outside is unpredictable and dangerous. I understood the importance of having a commune (and you’d think, as an Indian, I’d already know that).

I am not going to lie. It was difficult for a staunch loner like me. Some days I just wanted to lock myself in a room so I didn’t have to face anyone. Or wear headphones all day so I could read and write. Or shut my brain off so I didn’t have to sit through that fifth viewing of the same Kapil Sharma episode. But to my biggest surprise, all those annoying aspects were just about 5% of my experience. For most parts, I wanted to give up my solitude to spend time with the family. In all my constant experiments with my life, this is one of my most valuable discoveries.

I also met face to face with a lot of my privileges, which I actually never shy away from. Hot meals, a comfortable shelter, being surrounded by loved ones, and the knowledge that any government rule won’t put me in financial or physical jeopardy was unbelievably comforting. My soul trembles for the people who have lost their lives or their loved ones, for people who lost the roof over their heads, for people who lost their jobs, for people who are going hungry, for people who are facing abuse inside the four walls, and for every single soul who is suffering mentally and emotionally. I have a constant feeling of ‘survivor’s guilt’ from the time I open my well-stocked fridge to the time I get inside my warm bed. All my happy memories from the quarantine time will always be accompanied by the darkness that surrounded this period and the people who endured it. It will fuel my want to make this world a better place to live in.

I don’t know what stands next, but I will look back to these wonderful days with my family if or when the future won’t hold better things.

Right now as I sit in my home here in the US, I miss that chatter. My hands that are parched from gallons of sanitizer during the 35-hour journey, long for the embrace of my siblings, my heart yearns for those voices. Hell, I’ll even take the 6th viewing of that same Kapil Sharma episode. I wish I could teleport just to have that last cup of extra tea that my mom would keep aside for me, or hear my dad talk about his constant Bhajiya craving.

This might be an entry in my Quarantine Diary, but to me, those days were a bestselling, full-length novel.