Days without names

Have you gone through a day recently without knowing whether it is a Tuesday or a Saturday? You would know, if you really needed to,  but what is the point? They are virtually all alike. You wake up, go through the same basic routines at home or in the neighbourhood and retire to wait for […]

Have you gone through a day recently without knowing whether it is a Tuesday or a Saturday? You would know, if you really needed to,  but what is the point? They are virtually all alike. You wake up, go through the same basic routines at home or in the neighbourhood and retire to wait for the next day. A few weeks ago, Sundays and Fridays had special significance. Mondays were either eagerly awaited or dreaded. Week days had characters, weekends had attractions. Months ended with wages and began with debts. There was rhythm and substance to days and weeks. These days, they bear such boring and depressing drudgery that nights are only a relief to the degree that they draw the lines between days and nights.

Below this routine drudgery, however, is a vortex of stresses and tensions as the old normal is made to make way to another normal that may or may not be the new normal. All our lives are changing, in more ways than we realise. This is not the type of change you were prepared in life to expect. It has a scale and a dynamic that unsettle you completely. It is a movement from the known to the unknown, with rules that have to be made as you go, or with multiple rules that have problematic enforcement manuals. Our reactions to new realities are as varied as our individual DNAs, but we are all parts of basic patterns of life that shape how we live and earned a living and most of our relationships. Years down the road, or perhaps even as we speak, research will be published on the effects of this pandemic on social relationships and psychology of groups and individuals. People will read them for curiosity; professionals will pore over them for evidence of new disorders, and everyone will likely think they will be purely academic as the world is never likely to witness another pandemic of this nature.

Based purely on my role as victim and co-head of a family that has been under lockdown for the last four weeks (and living in a part of a city that takes stay-home-orders as seriously as it is possible and practicable), I would say children and young people are the hardest hit by circumstances that no one can help them over. Which parent has not been asked when this pandemic will ‘finish’, and children can go back to school and resume life as children? How does one explain to a child that you not only do not know, but in truth, these circumstances could subsist for months or a year or two? Most children and the young have settled down to an unknown, but there are no solutions to the massive stores of energies that cannot be burnt as they did in the past. Adjusting to limited physical space, restrictions to sources of entertainment and relations with non-relatives, unending fights, huge fortunes spent on data, arguments over everything and the removal of  familiar living  patterns test the young and adults who have to live with them. I have always respected teachers, but I have never valued the schooling system the way I do now.

Parents fight their own battles adjusting to new circumstances,  so designing days that reduce the stresses of managing the young just adds to the burden of managing families. Bored children who do not go have schools, homework and sleeping times find new ways to be entertained, most of which will be disapproved by most parents. They watch too much of the wrong  TV, tax you more a lot of money for data and raid the store and kitchen like an invading army. Fathers lay down rules that they sleep through, sulking at their own impotence to change the basic circumstances under which everyone shares the home in thoroughly unsatisfactory manners. These could have been great moments for enhancing romantic bonds and filial relationships, but most men have easily exhaustible store of romance in the home, and the tendency to leave important matters like managing the home, keeping the children on the fairly straight and narrow and making sure they are not disturbed is left to wives.

Wives and mothers are the heroes of these trying times. They have to manage moody and irritable husbands and scarcities that arise frequently even with the money to solve them. In many instances, they have to live and/or manage absence or insufficient food and other basic essentials, bear the brunt of breadwinners who have perfected the refrain, ’what do you want me to do?’ They have the tough task of explaining to children why there is not enough, or there is none at all. Many sleep on empty stomach to make sure children have something in their belly. They separate fights; fetch, switch everything on and off, and fix everything for laid-back husbands; they do everything former house helps did, and risk resentment and hostility when they ask daughters used to watching TV to do the washing up, and young boys to wash their clothing.

If wives are not so busy holding up the heavy end of the stick, they will agonize over what this lockdown is doing to the men. Starting from those with jobs or businesses that allowed them to follow a productive routine and support families, now you have men tied to the bedroom, trying to shut out domestic irritants and the more worrying uncertainties over whether they will still be useful to their families in future, any future. Others consigned to earning food by the day only when they leave home now deal with the ultimate humiliation any serious family head will have to go through: the inability to put food, any type or quality of food, before his family. Stay-at home orders make no sense, and choices between feeding the family and getting arrested or getting infected are easily settled by children crying for food and wives looking at them in strange ways.

On the whole, our future is suspended. Deals, plans and arrangements are no longer worth even thinking about. You cannot reschedule anything. You do not know if you can survive this pandemic, and if you do, if you would have the means to live. Children have stopped asking, ‘when?’. Adults do not care what day of the week it is. We had a past. We live today. But the future is not ours to anticipate or plan.