Week 23

I remember the childhood experience of watching a flood in Kolkata. The street had become a river. A man with a boat would come with essential supplies. My grandmother would negotiate from the balcony, a bag tied to a rope would go down with the requisite cash and come up with the bread, eggs and other miscellaneous stuff. It was pretty exciting for us.

We were safe on the first floor but the grown-ups would still look down and frown. The water level was still rising! It must have entered the garage. Another hour of rain and it will flood the car’s engine. There would be lots of hypothesis and predictions about how much damage it would have been caused, when the water would start receding, what the government should be doing and when would life get back to normal?

I don’t remember but I’m sure my mother and aunts would have stretched to keep the house running ‘as usual’ even though supplies were limited and unpredictable, the maids had no way of coming and the waters were still rising.

I am the grown-up now.

The house is running as usual but outside the numbers are still rising ominously and we have no idea when it will end.

When the virus scare started, I was just thankful that everyone had reached home safely. I was excited about having the family together and not having to commute to office everyday. Not having help for cooking and cleaning would be tough, but between the four of us that was one inconvenience we could manage.

None of that has changed.
Just that excitement is changing into exhaustion with each passing day. The adventure has become blasé and the newness has become routine.

From trying new recipes and competing on social media, it is becoming a task to even think about what to cook for the next meal. Is it just because I am missing my house-help so much? Partly, yes. Office work has scaled considerably as everyone has adapted to the work-from-routine. Now we are expected to be online all the time since we are working from home and we are at home all the time. Trust the corporate world to twist the logic every single time.

The kids’ school and college have adapted to working online-and they are inundated with online classes, assignments and of course the miscellaneous things that take up your time when you have access to your own laptop and Wi-Fi.

So the time for housework and the interest level have dipped considerably. The amount of work remains stubbornly unchanged and each week I end up feeling more tired than the previous week. And hope that the next week will come with some good news.