Today was a sweetish day. Lost my cool only twice but otherwise managed to hold it together.
Met up with a friend for coffee and dinner. We, umm, unwillingly pub-hopped. Finally, we went to the terrace of a restaurant where friend enjoyed chicken lollipop and I got shitake and spinach mushrooms. We talked about books, stuff she has watched, her plans, 2020, and it felt good.
Mellow fairy lights around us. Pretty people smiling and greeting each other. Guys smelling nice. Girls charming in heels and silk. It felt good, nourishing, in fact, to be out with a friend enjoying a meal, talking about a little bit of the life that we survived.
We both were talking about our favourite restaurants in Bombay...and we were describing it as eras in our lives. Like the way Candies near Aamir Khan's house was an era of my school days. There was the era of Zenzi. Then both of us...or most women our age who started working and earning well around the time we did...spent a lot of time in Colaba. So there was the era of Moshe's that introduced us to fondue, Rubois tea, different kinds of cheesecakes, and the like. There was the era of Oven Fresh. There was the era of Shiv Sagar. There was the era of Mondegar (Mondies) for the jukebox and triple Schezwan rice.
I think it has the making of a book.
For me, 2020 was really not that bad. Or if it was harrowing, I don't remember it that way. I just recall being shaken...even now I feel unsettled...when I think about the first sightings in the news of the migrants walking home during Covid. Children, old people, pregnant women...tying up their entire life's belongings and returning home at such risk. And we let them. In the blazing sun, on rough roads, with so little...we let them. In fact, even that didn't disturb me as much as one statement issued by the government later that they didn't have data on how many migrants died. I think something collapsed in me then.
To matter in India - to even be counted as living, you had to be young and rich.
Earlier that day I had gone out to buy an ice-cream for my father. We had all had it rough but I wanted him to have a small treat. It was raining hard. There was no auto. I was soaking wet. My specs were slipping from my face and there were open potholes. I wasn't carrying enough cash to rick it back. There weren't too many of them plying anyway. No buses because public transport had stopped.
I tripped and the icecream fell. I couldn't buy him another one. And I was still quite a distance away from home. That time, I felt very unsupported and overwhelmed. If anything happened to my brother or me, l wondered how my dad would manage. We weren't a society anymore that looked out for the vulnerable. It was an 'each person for himself or herself' country.
If you aren't young or rich in India, what do you do? You are part of an invisible database where your existence doesn't even count.
Whatever internal shifts that people say Covid has brought within us...I am not sure. Something like this will happen again and we will forget.
A collective amnesia is more conducive to survival than a collective memory.
I think that's why I write a little bit about my life every day, whether in a blog or my diary. It's my way of telling the slipping sand in the hourglass..."Hey! I see you."
From that tiny bit of noticing comes my own sense of dignity. Lord knows that it can and does get eroded every day. One has to do what one can to keep the sanity.
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