Note: These incidents are from March and April of 2020.
Well, let’s accept none of us was ready for complete isolation.
Some background to the relationship
Back then I had a girlfriend of about 5 months, and we had overcome a rough patch just a month ago when the lockdown was announced, things were back to normal, and more than anything else, we loved hanging out with each other.
We would spend hours at cafes, under the bridges, on river banks, or taking long walks, we were really into each other and we used to meet almost every day (yes, we used to make a lot of time for each other).
And of course the long phone calls, I think we used to talk more than the topics we had to talk about. We used to talk about 5 hours every single day + the time we spent together.
And then the Lockdown started
With lockdown came a whole lot of problems, of course we couldn’t meet, but that’s not it.
With the families at home, communication was difficult, and like any other Indian family, she was asked to help with household chores which used to keep her busy all day long.
Slowly, the communication dwindled to almost 30 mins a day by the end of first week of the lockdown, and going from almost 8 hours of someone’s attention to just 30 mins can be really daunting.
By this time, her parents started suspecting she had a boyfriend and would take her phone away for hours, or sometimes the entire day, and that was becoming a problem, yes, it’s 2020, and we are adults, but Indian parents do that shit.
But my girl was damn smart, she had saved my contact with one of her female friend’s names and would call me while she was helping her family with chores.
But all of this was beyond my understanding back then, my family was quite liberal and would never bug me from talking to anyone, well, my mom even knew about her.
My insecure ass, fearing that I would lose her, kept pushing her to make more time for us and that started taking a toll on her, which often resulted in both of us being grumpy.
But leaving all of this aside, we knew we wanted this, we were in love and wanted to put in all the effort we could.
Since her family would take her phone away at night (yes, this happens in India, especially with females), she started talking to me from her sibling’s feature phone (yes, the dabba phone), thanks to Vodafone, the network would swing in and out and we would still talk all night.
Things were settling until her dad found her talking to me one day, she resolved the issue by saying “wrong number tha” (translation: it was a wrong number), but I knew we weren’t risking this anymore.
And were at square one again, but I would continue seeing her from her bedroom’s window as and when I could.
The good part
There were days when I would really miss her and so I would tell my family that I was going out for groceries/medicines/helping a friend with his stalled bike and move out, I would keep a bottle of mom’s thyroid meds to show cops I was out to buy meds incase they caught me.
I would wait outside her apartment and wait for her to wave from her bedroom window, 10 stories high, and 200mtrs away.
It would just be a silhouette of her and something like a hand waving at me, but that would make a whole lot of difference and would make both of us really happy.
On one of the occasions, she went out to see a doctor because she had flu-like symptoms, she asked me to come to her place, and then we would go to the doctor, this way we would at least get to be with each other.
My stupid ass miscalculated the time she had left by the time I reached her building, I called her phone and her sibling picked up the call. she had forgotten her phone, but I really wanted to see her, so I called on the phone again and asked for the doctor’s address, while he told me the approximate location, I really didn’t know what the actual clinic was.
I reached there and went to every single clinic in 300 mtrs and there were about 5. When I was finally losing hope of seeing her, I spotted another small clinic, and there she was, she looked at me and smiled, yes I guessed it, her mask was on.
When she came out and we chatted on the way home, she told me that she knew I would find her somehow, she was really happy to see me after so long, and so was I. I couldn’t stop smiling all the while and she couldn’t stop being shy all the while.
“Staying away from someone you love actually brings you closer to them”
