I am feeling Keatsian today. My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense. You might easily assume that like the poet I had run into a nightingale on my morning walk. But the truth is more prosaic. The drowsy numbness comes from the first jab of the COVID-19 vaccine. The drowsiness since I barely slept last night excited at what was to come today. And the numbness, brief and gone, following that jab.
And what of the aching heart you ask? Well, I put it in there for effect. Poetic licence, I believe it is called.
We were told the rules early: You had to be over 60 or over 45 and the proud possessor of a morbidity to get to the head of the queue. Soon the phone calls started.
“I have two morbidities, but I need only one; can I interest you in the other?” a friend of a friend who thought I was 45 and needed help called with the offer. Another had a different proposition. “Can I give you my diabetes and hypertension,” he asked, claiming he qualified on age but was married to someone who – unfortunately, under the circumstances – was some years yet from the mark and didn’t have a morbidity to speak of. He was willing to wait till she turned 60 or discovered a morbidity, whichever came first. Love is about sacrifice, after all. And herd mentalities.
Suddenly, however briefly, to be young and healthy is not an aspiration. I hear of people who revise their age upwards, and whiten their hair where they used to blacken it. Sixty is the new thirty.
As I wait for my second jab, I feel like a decathlete who has completed half his events. Soon I will be allowed to drive into the neighbouring states, won’t have to work from home or keep away from weddings. Not sure if that will change too many things, though. I don’t drive, I have been working from home for years now, and I keep away from weddings anyway. It was all they could do to convince me to attend my own.
“What is the first thing you will do when this is all over and you won’t have to wear a mask any more?” someone asked.
I suspect I would have grown so used to the mask that I shall miss it and go back to wearing it again. Like Linus’s security blanket in the comic strip, I might need to keep on my security mask. It also means that I won’t have to shave regularly, or smile at people I don’t like.
There might be a problem, though, if I went to my bank wearing a mask. It is disconcerting to have the tellers put their hands in the air and give you the money.
But the future can take care of itself. Meanwhile I ask, like Keats: Was it a vision or a waking nightmare? Fled is that virus – Do I wake or sleep?
(Suresh Menon is Contributing Editor, The Hindu)
