The fear of Covid had snatched away the parameters of life. But as time passed I found a new meaning, a new vision and an ability to override the fear and a confined life
Freedom is the greatest song of life! Freedom to be free, freedom to life, freedom from fear is the eternal quest of humanity. Let me detail a bit my loss of freedom to Covid and how I regained it while being confined. To revisit the sweet whispers of immensely happy times in sun-kissed landscapes of Aix-en-Provence, exquisite art in the Louvre, Musée d’Orsay etc in Paris, scintillating beaches of Nice, Marseille and the soft sensuality of the spoken French, I decided to learn the language in Chennai — the jasmine capital of Tamil Nadu. All was well. I was on a song in L’Alliance Francaise de Madras after completing the first level of French and had joined the next. Then suddenly lightening struck. Covid the dreaded addition to the vocabulary of fear had arrived!
Initially I assuaged my agitated mind thinking that this confinement is temporary. But as days went by, the figures of infections, the number of deaths, the ‘Long March’ by migrants all took away any hope of freedom from confinement. It was a life I had never experienced, or thought of other than if put behind bars.
What was the State of my inner being? I was like a character from the stream of consciousness novels of Virginia wolf or James Joyce. Thoughts ran riot unconnected, memories good and bad coursed on the Autobahn, absurd irrationalism surmounted, and to wrap it all the fear of dying struck like a sledge-hammer.
The ghost of Covid had snatched away the parameters of life. But then as time passed I found a new meaning, a new vision and an ability to override the fear and the confined life. Maybe I was changing…metamorphosing into a Gregor Samsa of Franz Kafka! No more the salesman caught in an annoying routine of life, rather maybe like Samsa I had become a giant spider stuck on a wall in a room! I now had time to look at the sky to see its changing chromes, its variable moods; I smelled the cool sea air that blew in the morning and evening, I observed the birds who sang on the trees in joy and for first time in life I enjoyed the silence even while being in a big Indian city. The initial fear of Covid that had seized me gave way to an inner light. I practiced more intensely the Vipassna meditation. The ego, the bubble that so meticulously we build through life, burst. For there was no one to impress your thoughts on, your cleverness and your intelligence. You were in an uncertain, isolated space internally as well as externally. The fragility, the ephemeral, the ‘passing’ of all the existence never appeared so real, so magnified, and so imminent. The Buddhist compassion which is essential for deconstructing a preoccupied self became more clear to me in living all the time in a 20 ft X15 ft room. People who need help in these difficult times must be helped by me, I thought.
The value of money got demoted in my mind. I cooked on an electric cooker and needed little food. You had no need to dress for the world. Meanwhile my French classes became online, a virtual world as near as my imaginary world that I mostly inhabited. A small imaginative paragraph that I wrote in French to a friend got misdirected to the WhatsApp group of my class. When I realised the mistake I hurriedly deleted. But damage was already done. Other classmates including my indubitable professor had read it. Well I was ripe for punishment for a little romantic foray into the extremely romantic language French. My professor demanded that I write everyday a paragraph of a serialised story for the next three months.
With all types of bizarre and shameful mistakes of syntax and grammar I wrote a romantic tale of a Paris ballerina and an artist every day as part of my obligatory promise. Gracefully my professor never pointed out my mistakes and I had to go on writing. Thus at B1 i.e. third level of French language studies, I looked forward each day to carry forward the French romance between two artists in my devastatingly poor French. But the good was that all the autumn brown evenings that I had spent in Paris by the Seine rushed back to me, the paintings of Modigliani laced me with a great feminine charm, the expressive sculptures of Rodin overwhelmed my soul and I relived the fragrance of France in my little romantic tale. This was another creative gift that my Covid-19 confinement bestowed on me.
I would telephone my boyhood friend in Delhi in the evenings to share news normally negative and depressive in the stressful atmosphere. The world around me transformed and got lost in the haze of missed aroma and taste of life. Like Marcel Proust’s evocative aroma of Madeleine dipped in tea I missed the smell of coffee in the café at L’Alliance Francaise du Madras and with it the great joy of the wobbly words and sentences in French. How suddenly the small joys that you miss out become so precious! How random choices the virus makes! We do not know who will suddenly be stuck and then survive or be deprived of life.
I spent six month in this new world that I created around me in that room which I occupied in Chennai. Then with air space opened for flights and with positive encouraging words from my friend, I took a flight to Delhi. It was a great realisation and discovery anew of the people, the things and the feelings that I had hitherto taken for granted.
(The writer is a painter, author, director and curator, India Asia, European Artists Association Velbert Essen Germany. The views expressed are personal.)
