Lockdown Phases

moomal shekhawat

We at SEA believe that the pandemic has a granularity of meta, non-linear narratives that become useful in making sense of the relational complexities of the pandemic and society. Thus, we set out to collect stories of fears, joys, agilities, fragilities, friendships, networks, collectives, home, work, infrastructures, entrepreneurship, privileges, marginalizations, migrations, desperation, gender, equity, etc. The glossary as a method became useful to reflect on this granularity of experiences and account for slippages during these times. These spatio-temporal stories, when read together or as individual instances produce a new sense of the emergent contemporary. This framework also allows us to speculate on the kind of world we will inhabit once the storm has passed. We draw on multiple readings to bring out the nuances and patterns of social life produced in a pandemic. This we hope would allow us to collectively reflect on the restructured ideas of the self, the collective, society, space, and time. Individual micro-curated expositions are linked together for www.covidglossary.net in order to generate non-linear readings of the pandemic.

Initial lockdown phase:

Lockdown made me realized that before this pandemic I have never really lived in my house. The house was just a place where I used to come back to, usually tired and exhausted most of the time, just rest and eat. Most of my life happened outside at the school where I study in or with my classmates. Ever since lockdown doomed on us, all of these activities that happened outside found its way into the home, one of the major shifts was that of the work. Work started happening in the house and it demanded a special or a space dedicated to the activity as it was not only my work that started happening in the home but also that of my dad and sister.

A 2bhk flat which was sufficient before for a family of 4 now started to seem quite inadequate. Each corner of the house was now discovered and claimed by different members of the family as theirs. Everybody started locating themselves in the house with respect to their needs which was basically work driven. A place besides the switch board but with enough natural light and some view at the same time not at all noisy to attend work calls peacefully with the best Wi-Fi connection spot. Now to this work factor another thing called the house chores got added as the house helpers which were once available went back to their hometown and also it was now super risky to let a third person enter the house. House became a total of private space.

Stepping out of the house wasn’t same as before. There was a whole new practice that I have to follow once I step back in house.I had to go straight to the bathroom take a hot water shower, later drink warm water, also take steam and have ‘kaadha’ and only then come in contact with other family members . All this is done to make sure I don’t pass it on to the family members even if contracted the virus, as my mom is a diabetic and a blood pressure patient. We are very scared of she contracting the virus because of the complications it brings.This makes me not step out of the house until extremely necessary.I miss how we could carefreely step out of the house, eat wherever we want, hug whomever we want, sit wherever we can and still come back home without having to go through a cleansing process.

The doorbell almost lost it sense of existence as no one now visited us, it felt ages to have heard a doorbell. On the contrary, the cell phone started ringing almost throughout the day, work calls, normal social calls, and the list goes on. This demand of constant being available on phone drained me a lot. I couldn’t quite adjust to this change where everything starts happening at the click of your finger, yes it’s convenient for most people as it cuts shorts the travel time, travel expenses but I feel it freezes your mind and everything feels so stagnant. Do everyone have the kind of environment one needs to work at home? And is it just fixing your Wi-Fi connection to have a better work experience, honestly no. I know people who live in a 1bhk home with 5-6 people in it and they don’t even have a spot for themselves in the house to work continuously and find their peace

Brought us close as Family: The family members who usually claims to know each other the best started discovering new things about each other. All of us got a closer view and started understanding each others routines, what work schedule looks like. This space was usually taken by a friend at work or someone from school before COVID-19 as they were the one we spent are entire days with and. We started connecting with each other better than before at least that was the case with me, shared a lot of my experience, secrets while helping mom with chopping vegetables, assisting her with cooking and almost made her my best friend living under the same roof. While growing up I have always missed this feeling of a family the most, we couldn’t make it to more holiday trips because of our clashing work / school schedules or sometimes health problems of my mom. Movie nights with friends turned to movie nights with family, an outing turned to a play and lunch time with them

Intermediate Phase:

When things started getting little liberal and people started going out on streets, what I noticed was there were more men on the streets than there were women or girls out there .Say it was only the men of the house who got the essentials of the house, or maybe that’s not even the reason, and that they could just not stay any longer inside their home.

I started travelling to Khar towards end of the month of October and as I was travelling I saw that the streets were filled with men and so were the corners and tea stall had gangs of men standing and chatting and I could barely spot 10 women on that street which made me feel so unsafe in that area and a little uncomfortable. This makes me question why are there never gangs of women found at a small tea stall on a street or pan walla bhaiya ? Women don’t have tea or pan is it?. One day there was absolutely not a single women at the Khar station in the evening around 7:30 ish which made me wonder where are the women of the city? What makes them disappear and stay inside the house than the men?

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