The New Year Pessimist

& the tragical realism of 2021

Jan 03, 2022

I ended 2021 with a long list of to read, to watch, to check out, to do. All of this, thanks to the barrage of very helpful compilations by diligent people who helped me handpick from their 2021 cart as I checked out of another year in my sleep. I find the relief of 31 December and optimism of 1 January fascinating. It is a testimony to the power of human will that summons up the future with no discernible change in the weather, people, and politics. Since time has changed, something must have changed with it. With COVID marking these years out in neon, this shift of calendars has picked up even more ferocity.

I have never been one to buy into the ritual of the midnight of 31st December, indiscriminately spending all winter nights inside my blanket on my single bed, sipping tea for one, as a year bleeds into the next. If I am feeling left out enough of the new year party scene, I re-watch Jane The Virgin. As far as 2021 goes, I was really in no mood to reflect on or sum up a year I did not understand. With the new variant upon us, who’s to say how often we will scale the lengths between caution and paranoia, and how far we will go before being herded back in? So yeah, I struggled to bid goodbye to the year which seems to have been going on since March 2020. So instead of a clean list with my best of 2021, I am writing this edition of Khwaabghar to share things that happened, but I did not happen to make sense of. These are snippets I picked up through the grief and tragedy of COVID’s second wave in India, melting the distant past and the ongoing future onto the dining table of our locked down house.

A Telenovela: The Tragical Realism of 2021

I did not invoke Jane the Virgin in vain. With a fantastical plot, glowing hearts, dream sequences, and impromptu dances, JTV is one of the most feminist and realistic depiction of emotions, relationships, and insecurities on screen, a tribute to the magical realism of Latin American literature and TV. It is also a show I have watched at least six times over, spending my pain, period, and anxious days navigating Jane’s life and admiring Rafael’s masculinity. For me, it embodies the essence of something I haven’t been able to articulate until now- the utter meaninglessness of everything, amidst which everything is still felt so acutely, so as to produce stomach-aching laughter and heart-ripping sadness.

The second wave of COVID hit India with unparalleled enormity. In the vastness of what happened, the passing of a single life lost its meaning from one day to the next. I remember phone calls made in May to convey the loss of a family member, only to be told of one in return. The rush of broadcasting WhatsApp messages for oxygen cylinders and ICU beds, the preparedness of watching cylinder usage videos even before one was found, the need to keep the oxygen meter on even as it stabilized at 99… there was no right way to behave, no right thing to do, and no right place to be. In the breathlessness of the wave, there wasn’t time to pause and grieve, and once things improved, there was no desire to go back and remember. But towards November, I started hearing of those gone once again, as if loss had retreated to its summer house to find its words and was back with the force of a story.

1. “Ik horr si.” There was another one.

We lost my grandmother’s younger brother to COVID during Diwali 2020. Things in Delhi hospitals were not nearly as bad then as they were in April 2021, but we had not found a bed for 3 days as his oxygen dropped, sentences became shorter, and consciousness receded. When the second wave started making headlines, flashbacks of the hours spent on the phone with hospitals, government helplines, and doctors returned, leaving me very scared of what was to come. I found this note on my Google Keep from April:

“At what moment did we lose Mamaji? Was it on the morning when the news came, when his lungs gave in to the virus? Or was it in 2019, when his heart bypass surgery was done, and ‘co-morbidity’ sat where his heart should have been? Was it in the delay caused in finding the ambulance which had enough oxygen to last all the way from Krishna Nagar to Ashok Vihar? Was it when COVID first came into India and he stopped leaving the house? It could have been when someone forgot to wash their hands after getting the milk, or he could have caught it from the air in the balcony while the jury on COVID being airborne was still out. It isn’t, but it could have been then.
In the months that have quickly passed since his death, I have tried to reconstruct some of the pieces to fight the battle from a new station. I have not found the perfect position yet. The end is a consolation- we did what we could. It doesn’t feel right. I am usually able to justify my actions and find my version of ‘certain times’ amidst the uncertainty. This one’s hard. I sometimes feel we lost Mamaji to a forced, external enemy. COVID, Diwali, overcrowded hospitals, our public health system. Everything which was merely an inconvenience until he was in it. A life, interrupted by the sheer force of a few abstractions colliding.”

In late 2021, my grandmother (badi mummy) thought of Mamaji again. Her sister and family were visiting, and I had spent the day asking the sisters to help me make a family tree as far as they could remember. This was my latest obsession as COVID threw a mix of feelings about family history, love, and belonging. It was then that badi mumma told me something I had never known, a story that would change my knowing of her, our family, and the lightness with which loss is carried across time.

“Ik horr si.” There was another one.

“Ki?” What?

“Ik horr si iss tohn pehle. Bhot sohna.” There was another brother before him, a very beautiful boy.

This was a story I did not know, but I was going to ask.

My great grandmother, (Chhaiji), was her mother’s only surviving child. All the children born before her were boys, and she was the only one who had made it through. This was not hard for me to believe. As a student of international development, I understood infant mortality and survival. The fact that she was a girl was a detail I noticed, but didn’t make much of. Married at 14, Chhaiji went on to have children of her own, her first being a boy and then badi mummy after him. After her second boy was born, Chhaiji had visited her mother’s house as was customary, and someone had remarked on her good luck in having two boys, when her mother hadn’t managed even one. Once she came back to her husband’s house, the first boy got a fever, and passed away within a matter of days. Badi Mumma remembers watching his body being taken away from a window somewhere upstairs, possibly from a neighbour’s house. Chhaiji had two more daughters after that, with a total of six male grandchildren. For years to come, no matter how much they begged, Chhaiji never took two of them out together even to the closest shop. “Koi ikk hi chalega. Dasso.” Only one will go, you tell me which one.

Badi mumma blames this on ‘nazar’, the evil eye, and tells me this story with an ease that escapes me. The loss of her kid brother to COVID in 2020, and an older brother who was just a kid, to ‘nazar’ before the Partition, merges in her universe. Both equally sad, both equally valid.

2. “Tab tak jungle me hi rakha.” We kept her in the jungle until then.

In December 2021, I had taken an Uber Auto from somewhere in Gurgaon to somewhere else, and Omicron had just started to make news. My auto driver was confused and was looking to supplement rumour with information. After having discussed variants, global spread, and vaccination, he concluded that I was in more danger of getting sick than him, because he had braved tougher living conditions and thus had more immunity. I didn’t argue with that, but laughed and asked him to keep an eye out for himself anyway, mentioning the havoc of the second wave in passing.

“Humare bi chale gaye madam.” We also lost a few people.

I did not know how to respond to that, being unsure of how much he wanted to share, and if he had meant to let that out at all. But I didn’t have to make a decision, words made their way as easily as his auto through late Gurgaon streets.

Bhaiya ji was summoned home on the death of his grandfather in April 2021. His grandfather had had a good life, and was 93 when he passed away. In his village, this was a cause for celebration, not mourning. After the prayers and the last rites, a feast for 600+ people was in order, with the entire village flocking around his house to partake. It was during the lunch hour that another news made its way to bhaiya ji. His chachi (aunt) had just passed away in the same house. She had had fever. They did not know if it was COVID. Chacha ji (uncle) had started crying. Bhaiya ji did what he knew was right in that moment- he took out an auto and took his aunt’s body, his uncle, and a few other people who were likely to cry, and drove to the nearest jungle.

“Yahan pe ro lo.” Cry here.

The auto returned after nightfall, and the death was announced. Letting the news get out in the afternoon would have halted the feast, laying food for 600 people to waste. “Jo hona tha wo to hogaya.” What’s done is done. I didn’t argue with that either.

2021 left me different kinds of tired, as 2022 possibly also will. I attended a wedding in November, and despite having an unending appetite for Punjabi music, people, and food, three days of sustained conversation with three dimensional people left me exhausted. I just wasn’t used to it anymore. I forgot to congratulate a pregnant woman who was telling me about how her life will change, I grew tired of playing with a child, I started lying about what I did for a living as the number of strangers multiplied. I lost my social senses somewhere in the distancing, and felt myself changing as the year went by. And that, possibly, is the function of calendars. They help you establish a timeline of who you are becoming as the earth moves and the virus mutates.

I know it will take me some time to make meaning out of the bizarre stories that have always surrounded us, but I will try to remember that most of them won’t yield. They will be fantastical tales pressed out of stressful times, true stories of a fairy land, belief systems to hold nervous systems in place. If all goes as it has until now, I will still be back in my blanket in December 2022, having tea for one on my single bed. The Earth goes around in circles after all.