Tanvi Akhauri is a writer and journalist currently associated with for SheThePeople. In this article, she envisions the pandemic as a terrible paradox, one that has coaxed future fortitude from irreparable grief. She asks some interesting questions about the potential of the global pandemic /pause in providing impetus to the human community needs to start afresh, revived with humanity.

We’re living in a pandemic that feels like it came and went a lifetime ago. Disjointed, detached, dissociated – no Oxfords or Merriam Websters could have decoded these experiences better than the past year-and-a-half has done. I stepped back in March 2020 and another woman took my place to fill time till I could resume life as I knew it when the dystopia overturned. Now I realise it never might. And the dummy I thought was absorbing this horror so I could return in peace has actually been me all along. I am a substitute in my own life. 

What are the rules of a game into which the majority of players are pulled unwittingly? Priorities shifted and new perspectives were created to grapple with this new world. They say you only fully understand the value of something when it leaves you. But in the age of the coronavirus, the impending scare of losing a grandparent or a celebrity sitting halfway across the globe to a random design was enough to remind you what matters. 

‘Any day now, any day.’ The scare was there with a pitchfork, prying your eyes open every morning. The hand grabbed the phone first thing, memories flashing and flooding to the beats of a silent prayer in the heart – and I don’t even believe in god – while hope scanned the screen to reassure you of emergency calls that didn’t go missed and lives your sleep didn’t steal. Only then could the rut of a day begin. 

‘What if they were dead tomorrow?’ It’s a sinister way of evoking kindness from each other. But this is where SARS-CoV-2 has left us. Hey, half a loaf is better than none though, right? 

There were emotions more visceral than kindness, however, that were on unabashed display between April and May this year, the months of peak second wave hell. The human instinct for survival tested just what this animal is capable of when the only vision ahead is the ultimate checkpoint: death. From the anguished desperation of breaking the law on a few extra bucks to the priceless million medical sacrifices, the spectrum unfolded in all its glory with a common goal in sight – a life needed saving. 

That kind of mayhem shakes up your sanitised pedestal of morality, of righteousness, of wrongdoing. When love and life are at stake, to what end do the forces of law, order, equity, justice hold weight? Was the son who switched his mother’s empty oxygen cylinder for a full one through the backdoor while a file of other heartbroken people waited their turn (as is fair) wrong? Among the many lives lost that night, one wasn’t. Will every breath she takes hence be branded as sin? Should he have compromised with the incompetence of our political overlords? 

Spending a lot of time alone can chafe you down raw. The thoughts and dreams are brutally real, too honest to confront. It makes you question everything you know about everything. And for someone like me, someone who relishes a good solo deep dive contemplation session when the need arises, having this escape become a habit is dangerous. 

In the thankful absence of personal tragedies during the pandemic, I kept watch on the chaos outside – headlines upon headlines of fires and burning pyres set against corruption and indifference. My self-flagellation was driven in equal parts by disbelief and the requisite of my new, first job as a journalist. And boy, did the world come out in all its naked depravity for the welcome party. 

The mind refuses to acknowledge it, but the body carries stress. I have woken up more than once with a cold sweat and an abnormal pulse, lost weight and hair, felt as terribly tired as I never thought I ever could. Of course, on odd days, the mental breakdowns are worse. 

Maybe it’s resilience that encourages how life can still go on or maybe it’s ennui that discourages how life has to go on, but the Homo sapiens has emerged from pandemics and wars. Scathed but evolved. We have built ourselves back up to get on with a new day and we shall again. That’s cue for the substitute blue woman in her place to cheer up a little. We’ll be alright.