Day 1: Sunday, March 22, 2020

Reaching home well past midnight, I walked past my parents and straight into the shower. In calling me home, they thought we would all be safe together and they could rest easy. Little did they know, we would be spending the next 14 days locked up together, away from all human contact but our own.

My mom is a happy introvert like me. She wouldn’t break a sweat at the thought of staying in for two weeks. Dad, on the other hand, was going to have a tough time – something we’d share with him until he was convinced of its importance. This was especially ironic since not a day before, I, myself, hadn’t been too bothered by the pandemic. A combination of willful ignorance and vulgar privilege had kept me at a ‘safe’ distance from the insanity that was unfolding before all of us. Now here I was, nobly taking up the cause of staying indoors, having returned to our spacious home, all stocked up with good food and free Wi-Fi.

With April 4 fixed as our last day in self quarantine, we prepared ourselves for two weeks of cleaning our own dishes, putting our own clothes in the washing machine and finding ways to entertain each other. Thinking of the next two weeks ahead, it was extremely tempting to sleep through half the day and binge-watch through the rest of it. After all, that had been my life before this, as I shamelessly waltzed past deadlines, knowing well that I would face practically no real-world consequences.

Fighting my usual lethargy was half the battle, as I realized my options were limited. Books and movies seemed tempting, but I was hoping to avoid anything that involved butt-to-bed contact since that has always been my natural state. The result – I will now be cooking at least one meal a day for all of us, the dishes will be my responsibility throughout the quarantine and my thoughts and experiences will be organised and blogged every day until the end of the quarantine.

We did end the day with a movie; one especially relevant today. I picked Contagion for obvious reasons and it did not disappoint. Even as the opening scenes felt eerily similar to our situation, it was hard not to wonder if our greed and desperation could really materialise as it did in the movie if worst comes to worst. However, the real question is, can we truly put humanity before ourselves in times of crisis? How many among us today are genuinely thinking about their social responsibility and staying completely quarantined, without sneaking out for a brief meet and greet, a task from work, or even a quick smoke? It’s a question I have to first answer for myself, but in a situation like this, surely none of us are getting away easy? For my part, I’ll just hope the next few days will answer that question, as this strange roller-coaster gets underway.