A week before the country locked down amidst the coronavirus pandemic in March, my brother’s university abruptly shut for a week and my parents immediately flew him back home. Assuming it to be a short trip, he packed precisely a week’s worth of clothes and some electronic essentials he would need to kill time. Two months later, he’s still home and grudgingly spending his summer (one he was eagerly looking forward to) living out of a suitcase.
As we approach the end of May, we’re still unclear about the fate of the pandemic and its long-term impact on us, but one thing is certain - that the entirety of Summer 2020 has been lost to coronavirus.
Practically speaking, the Indian Summer’s a busy time. Both monsoon and winter limit human mobility but Summer - despite the ugly sweating and potential heatstrokes - has a certain kind of freedom to it. Days are longer, the sun sets later, the nights are livelier.
Around this time last year, the internet was busy meme-ing Priyanka Chopra’s Camp-y OOTD at the MET gala, my cricket-obsessed friends were hating on the Indian Premier League (IPL) while still discussing IPL scores, and Deepika was effortlessly serving (multiple) looks at the Cannes Film Festival. Who would have thought that exactly a year later life would turn upside down? Most of these events, including the Olympics, currently either stand postponed or cancelled.
Courtesy COVID-19, our Summer 2020 calendar is marked with such cancellations and postponements of many major events across the globe. And even though most of us would, in a normal scenario, have nothing to do with these art/music/film/culture events, we’re all still mourning the collective loss of the world.
Of course, there’s an economic impact that goes hand-in-hand with the situation and it’s monumental. Even as I write this, countless people are losing employment, others are digging their heels further into their savings. But beyond the economic misfortune that has descended upon us, the COVID-19 crisis has robbed us of unique summer experiences and that's one you can’t go back and fix.
Honestly, this isn’t what our summer is supposed to look like. Whether or not you’re a *big* fan of the season, you’ll agree that summers are romantic, in their own way of course - even Shakespeare knew it. It’s when students graduate and start prepping to fearlessly start new lives in alien cities; it’s when Mumbai’s famous Mohammad Ali road is thronged with crowds waiting to try out Iftar delicacies; it’s when people get to finally go on the summer vacation they’ve been saving up for so long.
We are meant to be living outdoors, not spending most of our hours glued to the bright light of our phone screens as we scroll through COVID-19 updates and think pieces in hope that they’ll help us make some sense of what’s happening and what could happen.
Just the other day my mother caught me marvelling at myself in the mirror. For the first time in forever, my skin is clear AF without the need for an elaborate skincare routine. So while the irony of the situation is quite obvious to me, it’s also the silver lining I’ve been holding on to.
Similarly, I may be deprived of my friends’ physical company but every time I open WhatsApp I am filled with joy as they spam me with their personal progress reports. Some are strumming the guitar and sending me photos of their aching fingers, others are busy honing their cooking skills or admiring their plant babies. No one’s denying the fact that a lot of us are looking the other way for a reason, but hey, at least we have something to look at, right?
In a way, Summer 2020 is a very textbook version of what an ideal one should look like.
We’re staying indoors, we’re watching TV, we’re chilling. Almost feels like garmiyo ki chuttiyaan sometimes, no?
The joys are small, sometimes almost invisible, but it’s forcing us to value the intricacies of life in a whole new way.
Of course, none of that changes the storm right outside the walled chambers of our homes. The Summer of 2020 is all things terrifying - rising death toll, a steadily unfolding economic and humanitarian crisis, loneliness, and lingering uncertainty. And while there’s very little we can actually do about that, here’s hoping the Summer of 2021 can make up for this lost time.
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