Two years ago (or, was it two-and-a-half?), my mornings used to be quiet.

I’d wake up to chirping birds outside my window with temperatures hovering at a shade shy of 20 degree Celsius. I could imagine the thick fog curtaining the street three floors below; the occasional motorbike shattering the lethargic morning silence with its violent roar; the voice of the wastepaper collector asking people to trade old newspapers for a few rupees; and the whistle of the garbage collector forcing people to hurry down the stairways with twisted and tied plastic bags.

Mornings that guaranteed me full consciousness, perfect weather, lots of silence and plenty of time to think and write.

And yes, mornings that my ungrateful self thought as boring and uneventful.

May be god heard that; may be it was my own smug, careless self wishing for interesting disasters. I’m not quite sure what it was, but it seems the pandemic was life’s way of throwing the monkey on my heavenly sandcastle. Now, with each passing year and each passing winter, that life looks more distant, blurred by tears and unplugged, at least momentarily, from consciousness by the immediate issues of survival and pain.

In all, when I think of life before March 2020, the only thing I can say is how one global health disaster has changed my life beyond any recognition.

The dreaded coronavirus has left its brutal impact in all spheres of a persons’ life, as if the way it messed up a person’s health system wasn’t enough.

Some days ago, I was scrolling through the history of my region that once saw a serious battle of Arcot. The Nawab of Arcot was away on a campaign when the British East India Company soldiers captured his fort and made sure he could never return home.

Actually, the pandemic had become my own battle of Arcot. On March 16, 2020, when I was away from my then home to attend a private business with my family, the deadly virus began spreading like wildfire, forcing a sudden lockdown and the opportunity to work from home. It kept locked me out of the place I thought as home, an apartment I bought in 2015 where I lived with contentment. To this very day, it’s gathering dust. Things I left back largely remain the way it was on March 15, 2020. I organized cleaning of the flat twice, but those were months ago.

In these intervening years, I lost my aunt who maintained the apartment and ensured I had warm tea in the morning and carried dinner to my office. Among many good things I did was not to tell her when the food was bland, probably grateful that someone goes to the trouble of preparing something for me when all they were getting in return was a warm corner in a narrow hall.

It has been close to a year and ten months since Aunt Uma had passed. ‘Had things been any different if she had stayed alive?’ I used to ask myself when time had mercy to leave me from the clutches of nursing my own pain or feeling it while watching someone else’s.

Aunt Uma wasn’t a celebrity chef, the superstar facility manager, an intellectual heavyweight who would’ve engaged my boring mind with logic and reasoning. Truth be told, she wasn’t even capable of shielding my barrage of enraged questions about things being kept in undesignated places. She wasn’t even strong enough to stand up to my unkindness in such moments. Yet, her loss had left such a deep dent in me that it still feels unreal.

There’re nights when I wake up all so suddenly and ask myself if she was really gone? ‘Really?’

And at that moment, it wouldn’t matter to me if Aunt Uma’s survival had taken me back to my heavenly home, guaranteed the hot morning tea with the right proportion of milk and sugarless sweetener.

Nothing would’ve mattered to me. Just the assurance that Aunt Uma was right there at the warm corner of the narrow hall. I would’ve rushed to my mother’s room at the other corner and told her that Umakka was alive. “Yes mother…it’s just a nightmare. Thank god it’s a nightmare. She’s there. She’s alive.’

Alas…I can’t say that. When consciousness dawns like dark heat and reality pricks each hole of my skin, I know it. I know that my aunt is not alive. I might find strength to restore many things in my life…things the coronavirus had robbed from me, but I know strongly that I cannot bring my aunt alive.