I have a love hate relation with the rain. I am not deemed to be a romantic by people around me, quite the opposite actually. But there is something about the romanticism of rain that calls to me. I utterly hate getting stranded in the rain. Yet the preparation nature lays out preceding makes it worth getting drenched!
My nieces have been getting bored stuck inside the house all the time with the lock down. So this weekend I decided to take them out on a drive to the cantonment (military base). It's just a 10 minute drive and the place is quite peaceful, with very few people around. The way military bases are.
We armed ourselves with our masks. The kids' eagerness to put on masks is something many of the so called grown ups of my neighborhood would do well to take note of. I have had the craziest answers when asked why they were not wearing masks and I admired my kid nieces even more!
While we walked the polished roads of the cantonment with beautifully measured green on both sides, the skies darkened. We breathed in the calm breeze with our masks on. We managed to walk around for some time before the drops decided to join our stroll, which soon turned into a sprint as we didn't want the little ones getting drenched! We took shelter in the car, locked down again!
After the rain withered off, it was slightly cooler to walk around. Much more pleasant, breezy. The kids played around and we all took some pictures. Felt quite funny to me, taking pictures with the masks on. But everyone else was doing it. Me putting up a feeble protest against taking picture with my mask kinda made me the odd one out! Strangers looked at me like I was being some kind of jerk, so I shut up and reluctantly snapped a few pics.
I totally forgot about it, until later in the evening, that very same day, when I felt like an odd one out again. I had to go to the pharmacy to refill some of my mom's medications. I'm usually pretty vigilant about masks, yet I was almost outside my neighborhood when I realized I don't have a mask on. A rickshaw puller on the other side of the road was bargaining the fare with his passenger, words getting muffled under their masks. The tea stall under the corner lamppost was chattering with masked silhouettes. I was the odd one out, again. A picture my sister shared from earlier that day peeped into my mind. Everyone in our masks, caption : The New Normal.
As I walked into the nearest shop to buy myself a mask and blend in with the normal peeps, I wondered, is this really the new normal? Everyone seems to have accepted it, why am I having such a hard time to stop thinking constantly things will return to normal.
Earlier this week, we had our wifi line cut off and it was taking ages to fix. My sister was in the middle of an online class, a concept quite alien and something I'm not a fan of. I had to repeatedly call and shout at them, throw in a few threats to pull some strings to get it fixed before her next class started. This is not normal, not to me. I'd much rather bury myself in a book when I'm disconnected. But that is what is expected of me, because apparently online classes are a serious thing now.
The world pretends to moves on with the pandemic. The new normal is a denial of the fear that lurks within the shadows. I walked past the neon lights of a street cafe. Living in fear can not be a norm. Let the world be afraid, I thought, as I clutched on to the hope of a day when things will return to normal. For if we do not hold on to hope, what is left of pandora's box?
