Weeks into the pandemic, I lie on my bed at midday, listless. Outside, the fig leaves glow in the sun, electric-green mittens, all thumbs. Bees hang suspended in the garden. Yesterday I rearranged the furniture. Side tables shoved across the room, pictures removed. Nail spikes await my decisions about what to rehang, where. Does any of it matter? Upstairs, my son sorts Legos: warm colors, cool colors, translucents, dark grays, light grays. For weeks, room-bound, he inventories, the way Nepali women in the house where I lived so long ago sifted riceโthe same soft, rhythmic raking; the same immersion in work that never ends.
Such activities fit this newly elastic time. Hours balloon only to constrict into suffocating rubber necks. Like a lump of salt dough, time, once a pinched pot, now shapeshifts into a heavy-winged dragon, a sad cat, a leaf etched with veins.
Plenty to do, nowhere to go. Also, an actual mound of salt dough molders in the fridge, until I force my children to sculpt something so we can take photos to upload, attach to their e-learning pages, and send to the art teacher all of which takes an extraordinary amount of time. My daughter, in five seconds, forms that simplest shape, a ring. And people are hungry? During a bandh , heavy metal garage doors surged over storefronts, students stayed home, government offices closed.
In other words, lower your expectations. How lovely to have a little leeway, to get nothing done, to subsist and claim victory. In memory, that looseness takes on a velvety nap, a lush spot where the pattern changes. I charted intense bouts of productivity and futility, phases that were meaningless to anyone else or their expectations of me, which hardly existed.
I set my own milestones: one hundred books, each title dutifully recorded on journal pages rippled from the damp heat. The six-month anniversary of my post-mate leaving. A year in-country. Then two years.
