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Humour by Rehana Munir: Five lost activities to reclaim this summer
From guiltless wandering, attending concerts and performances, to focussed reading, there’s lots to bring back
It’s been two years since we first fell into the void of the pandemic from whose darkness we emerge every now and then, double-vaxxed, more securely masked, yet none the wiser. But it’s summer, and to hope is mandatory. Here’s a look at some activities to reclaim if the ever-mutating virus, the price of fuel and the despots of the world allow us some reprieve.
Travelling
From long-postponed honeymoons in Kashmir to college reunions in Kerala, everyone’s escaping like burnt-out mice jumping off the wheels they’ve been trapped in. My lust for the glorious past (i.e. 2019) has led me to plan a trip involving an overnight train journey, a long road trip, a shorter train journey, and then a flight back home, all in a relatively short time frame. It’s as if the gift of travel is a limited-offer only, with every carriage threatening to turn into a pumpkin if you’re too smug. In personal news, I’m thrilled to have reignited my relationship with the travel agent (yes, they still exist and are still lifesavers), and temporarily suspended the one with the guy from the diagnostic lab.
Socialising
The sharpest of the double-edged swords of the pandemic, the re-entry of socialising in our lives puts each of us to the test. Introvert? You have to go back to those half-hearted smiles and blood-draining conversations that you had finally ejected from your life. Extrovert? The lockdowns had streamlined your many social groups to one easily managed bubble. You’re now weighed down by the burden of choice—which set of friends to meet, where and when. Ambivert? Those carefully executed shuttles between your interior world and the world outside have been hijacked by others. These, of course, are recreational complaints. Walking into my favourite pub over the weekend was a beautiful reminder of my misspent youth, which, poignantly, ended with the pandemic. (Though middle age, I’m starting to discover, is a second adolescence.)
Reading
Attention has been one of the biggest casualties of the pandemic. And you can’t be a serious reader (or lover, or baker, or anything of any value) if you don’t pay the right kind of attention. So much of our collective reading the past two years has involved doomscrolling, cartoon trawling and social media skimming. I for one have been curating my reading list very carefully, afraid of falling deeper into the abyss with any existential or dystopian trigger. That threat seems to have lifted, considering my recent conquests, so intense, so brilliant—Booker-winning novel The Promise by Damon Galgut, detailing a callous white South African family’s decline and fall along psychological and social fault lines; and Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend, a literary meditation on suicide and abandonment, featuring a mourning human and dog. Fun days.
Culture-soaking
From experimental theatre to music concerts, art galleries to heritage walks, the culture calendar is full once again. All those oppressively mirthful Zoom events and Insta Lives with artfully framed faces against fluttering curtains, buffering over rubbish network, can, for the moment, be pushed into the memory bin of the provisional past. Whether you’re immersed in a joyous qawalli at Hazrat Nizamuddin in old Delhi or doing a guided walk around the grim gravestones at St. Thomas Cathedral in old Bombay, there’s nothing quite like the real thing. When we weren’t looking, the elves were at work across our cities, and there’s plenty more art, from public murals to gallery exhibitions, to enjoy. We might be vulnerable to a virus, but we’re never immune to the magic of the imagination.
Improvising
We’re currently free to make spur-of-the-moment decisions without Shakespearean conflicts being set off in our heads. Living without a constant interior monologue—a sombre chorus of What Ifs and Are You Sures?—is a privilege we never thought we’d categorise as one. We’ve been to the end of freedom a few times now and turned back with a fresh stock of hand sanitiser and coping mechanisms. But spontaneity never gets old. So, let this be the summer of last-minute plans and sudden reversals. Of retiring tired old habits and messing up in new ways. Of having aamras for breakfast, forgiving ourselves for not returning phone calls, and giving our sullen neighbours a warm smile. At least the first task is achievable.
Follow @rehana_munir on Twitter and Instagram
From HT Brunch, March 27, 2022
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