The ghosts of normalcy still haunt me 3 years later. Blessings, they say, count them. But then, I risk knowledge being gained at a time when bliss is in such short supply even though ignorance, in general, is rising.
The first vacation ruined, before most vacations were ruined, was my own. In February 2020, a few friends and I debated the merits of taking a trip to the mountains in the following month. Yes, we heard the news, it came from China. Yes, we knew we were going to the Himalayas which bordered China. Yet, we knew that there was no turning back after almost a year of preparation for this trip. I was most excited to see the mountains. The highest I had ever gone was to a hilltop fort.
Our plans would not be halted. We went. I saw snow. I ate so many parathas and momos. A bakery became a sweet refuge for a week. I experienced a temperature below 0°C. But then, it came crashing down. The Prime Sinister of the country called for a sudden and total closure of the entire country. His own knowledge of an impending virus didn’t stop him meeting with the president of the United Fates a month prior to calling for a closure.
Buses weren’t available anymore. They were asked to stop immediately. Not just buses, everyone had to stop without any time to slow down and make adjustments. Imagine being in a car with the best brakes in the world but it was driven by a madman who slammed on them so hard that you went flying into the windscreen. That’s what it felt like when my companions ran around in the middle of the night willing to spend far too much money while begging for someone to take us to the airport. Our old tickets home had to be discarded anyway. New tickets, emergency tickets, expensive tickets had to be booked. We were in a country that was in panic mode.
After paying far too much for a man to drive us, far too much for a plane ticket back home and after spending a night in an airport, I returned to my city as I had never seen it before. Quiet as a mouse. Every shop closed. Every vehicle parked. Everyone hiding in their homes except for the police who were roaming around to remind people to go back into their homes.
It was sheer luck that I managed to hire a rickshaw driver who was willing to take me home along totally deserted streets. He risked the ire of the police by plying his vehicle. He said that he risked getting beaten up. But he explained that some people needed him for emergencies. This would become another moment where I paid too much for transportation but now, with silent streets, it felt the most justified.
I would return to my house into a changed world. A world that crippled livelihoods, that made us wear masks, that asked us to isolate, that asked us to make banana bread and play Scrabble or Ludo. It became a world that forced us to ignore the world. A world that I could, luckily again, still work and live in.
Video conferencing, avoiding physical contact, cancelling gatherings, stigmatization over getting a virus, pushing the limits of how long you can be around the people you live with, all of this was well within the realm of normal. It’s just absurd that this is the only normal.
As of writing this, I, like you, like so many others, knew that our old normal was far from perfect but if we could, I think most of us would trade this absurd version of normal for any time before March 2020.
