I recently picked up a stomach bug and put myself into a self-enforced “complete rest” situation — no errands to run, no tidying of the kitchen, no working on long-pending spreadsheets, no worrying over non-completion of half-written articles. In addition, there was that extra attention that my wife gave as she ministered to my needs — bland food supplied at regular intervals, exhortations to just lie down and rest and not bother about anything else.
Though technically retired, I have never really got the ticked-off deadlines and checklists from my life. And, as anyone who has kept checklists will tell you, these lists never get completed; you tick off a few easy ones, only to find a few more getting added and the really tough ones just getting transferred from one list to the next. The result? A feeling of guilt always assails you.
But this small period of quarantine came as a much-needed respite. Day one was a little difficult because of the mild fever, but thereafter it got easy. One just lazed about, picked up and actually completed 100 pages of a long-pending book, thrilled to discover in it the sextet of a sonnet written by Keats which one had committed to memory while in school.
All of this took me back to my school days: you had just got back home from school with a raging fever. Father got home early from office and took you to the doctor, who prescribed some pills and then wrote, “Complete rest for 4 days.” And so there you were — no school, no homework, no errands to run, food at regular intervals, a lot of fussing over by both mum and dad and last but not the least, as many story books to read as you wanted to, brought in for you by sympathetic friends. Here was a situation that was as close as you could get to a state of bliss. With the bonus of the officially sanctioned banishing of a feeling of guilt.
Well, getting back to the present — today is day four of the quarantine period. From tomorrow, I will have to get back to my checklist. Sigh!
srinivasan.bhashyam@gmail.com
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