ROUTINE EXAMINATION

What does a schedule mean in these unbounded, slow-moving times?

Time was when the clock was an ally, hurrying you on here, slowing you down there, like a caring coach. Now it’s that annoying thing on your phone screen, behaving like a temperamental teen: it’s never what you expect it to be and is cheeky to boot. In the long lists of lockdown tips (the second-worst scourge of our times), we regularly find advice on how to plan our days. But to those of us who have lived a relatively unstructured life so far, the challenge is, well, more challenging.

POPPING THE SOAP BUBBLE

Even for the biggest proponent of free living, schedules inevitably creep into one’s day. There is usually a time of day for thinking and writing. Another for napping and idling. Yet another for going forth into the outside world, breaking bread, clinking glasses and sharing scandalous stories. Lockdown has taken all these independent activities and thrown them into an unforgiving blender. What comes out when you take off the lid is a sticky mess of cherished routines, pleasant escapes and the many unnameable bits of which regular days are constituted. What to do with this gloop? I’ve been trying to separate these glutinous ingredients and label them carefully, with the rigour of a chemistry student in love with her indifferent professor.

This is what I’ve found. It’s great to start your day with some ritual, preferably functional. This could be dish-washing or machineloading, bottle-filling or bookshelf dusting. Communing with scrubs and detergent first thing in the morning has a calming effect on me. But it doesn’t take long for the soap bubble to burst. What can be centering 14 days in a row can drive you to insanity on the 15th. It’s safe to conclude, the very reliability of routine makes it unsustainable.

BITTERSWEET SYMPHONY

So where’s the surprise in that? You might ask. Build breaks into the routine. All work and no play, etc. A-ha. Here’s where the plot sickens. If you, like most of humanity, are isolating in company, your inner commands cannot be your master. To cohabit with any degree of success, one has to quell that inner voice and stick to routines that work for everyone. You cannot not make the bed before noon and get away with it, for instance. Or give in to the impulse that postpones the cooking of lunch to dinner time.

This medley featuring psychology and sociology is playing on my mental stereo on loop, like a poorly-produced mash-up. “Don’t step out, for the

HERE’S WHERE THE PLOT SICKENS: IF YOU, LIKE MOST OF HUMANITY, ARE ISOLATING IN COMPANY, YOUR INNER COMMANDS CANNOT BE

YOUR MASTER

greater good.” “But if I don’t step out, I’ll lose my mind.” “Don’t go out anyway.” And so on. I’m planning to give my inner voices some vocal training. Maybe even familiarise them with harmonies. Oooh – perhaps I can do a house concert on Insta Live, joining the scores of performers whose pixellating images serve as an apt metaphor for lockdown minds.

WHATEVER WORKS

Routines are to a day what character is to an individual: you’re expected to stay within the boundaries. It would all be very well if living people operated like people in fiction. There the author imbues a character with traits and motives that work like a tag team. Monica Geller, for instance, would never allow her sink to overflow with dishes. She’s a stickler and so she must clean. But every so often in real life, every stickler has her messy moods, every planner slacks off and every routine wears itself out over time.

That’s when the Whatever Works philosophy shines like a neon sign over a Vegas casino. There’s merit in planning one’s day, and merit in upsetting the schedule. In meticulously ordering the hours and unthinkingly rearranging them. In respecting sequence and giving in to spontaneity. As if it weren’t enough to be the perfect employee, mother or artist, there is now the pressure of being the perfect employee, mother or artist in lockdown. Of neatly separating work from life, like flour through a sieve for that banana bread recipe.

The good news is, there is no perfect lockdown recipe. We’re all winging it, and failing a lot of the time. The voices in my head are screaming themselves hoarse in agreement. I better find any arty backdrop for my upcoming online concert.

It’s peculiar, but ever since we’ve had the rug pulled out from under us, the enormity of what has happened hits me every day. It’s as if the same piece of bad news finds me again and again in my very own land of the midnight sun, where day slips into night and back into day and holds me in its unblinking stare of despair, then hovers like a spectre somewhere amidst the indifferent clouds where from down below, I can only regard it mutely till it visits again.

TOTALLY INSANE

Is the pandemic affecting my sanity, you ask? Why wouldn’t it? Have any of us ever been 60 days indoors? And what have we done with ourselves during this unnerving interlude? Have we learned anything that will equip us to navigate the untested times awaiting us? There might be some benefits (hidden thus far) of lying in bed, staring into quiet, cavernous nights, ruminating on all we’d promised ourselves if we’d just had the time, but humans are crafty and we make sure we find ways of dealing with stillness that asks uncomfortable questions of us.

And so I’m aware the lockdown has brought hordes of bakers, real and faux, out of the woodwork. I applaud anyone with an understanding of cinnamon and keen nasal passages, and I sure as hell appreciate the meditative qualities of cooking; the same qualities that some, like me, find in writing.

I’m grateful for small mercies like script deadlines and endless material online that constantly beckons us. Across the world, social media has drawn us into its seductive arms; heck, my own thoughtfully curated Instagram feed informs me, rejuvenates me, makes me laugh and shatters me. It brings me the beauty of art, and most importantly, at a time when we are watching history being made from within our walls, it carves a window through, which I can gaze into this large world of ours, which is in grave trouble and doing the best it can. Not too long back, living without the Internet for a couple of hours was a nuisance. Now it has become a full-blown impossibility.

VOICE OF FRIENDSHIP

We’ve also been chatting remarkably more with each other, haven’t we?

Not through reams of messages, but with our naturalborn voices that carry with them emotion, a sense of history, a world and a nuance. Often, the conversations are long and deep. Some could be arguments that last the night; at times, there could be a declaration of love or possibly the ending of it. Maybe relationships weren’t ever meant to be simple or quickly formed, and maybe digitally encrypted, abbreviated words or cutesy symbols have been trying to make them so. Maybe affection thrives truly if it’s weather-beaten, if it has stood witness to how troublesome we can be, and what a beautiful mess each of us is.

When I recently spoke to my wonderful colleague Konkona Sen Sharma about this, she let out a long groan. Her days have been utterly crammed, but even so, she’s had to squeeze out evenings for calls with loved ones. Which didn’t take away anything from her parallel-parking skills (apparently perfected during the lockdown) but video calls are where she would’ve liked to draw the line. She caved and made those too.

I understand her impatience. Video calls require one to remain within frame, so to speak, whereas with the help of the humble earphone, one can walk around, lounge, eat, paint, if one so fancies, and the voice on the other side stays close, expressive, full of the ebb and flow of life.

During our confinement, we’ve all had our fair share of conference calls for work, and blessed are they for keeping our minds ticking and our ambition resilient, but it’s the handful of friends we’ve been reaching out to regularly, to talk about dire issues or about nothing at all who have brought us comfort and made us feel safe when uncertainty is in the very air we breathe.

For we know only too well, as an 18th century poem said, ‘the best-laid schemes of mice and men/go oft awry/and leave us only grief and pain/for promised joy!’

HUMANS ARE CRAFTY AND WE MAKE SURE WE FIND WAYS OF DEALING WITH STILLNESS THAT ASKS UNCOMFORTABLE

QUESTIONS OF US

WONDERS OF WARMTH Filmmaker Tanuja Chandra with her aunts while shooting her documentary Aunty Sudha Aunty Radha