It’s a busy day at work. The store is frothing with far too many customers. Social distancing, that’s a joke in our store. We workers (our title: associates) have no choice. The customers don’t care either. The seniors, who are the vulnerable ones, believe they are invincible—the audacity of misplaced hope in pandemic times.
It’s a hard day; I start limping halfway through my shift. When done for the day, I’m just relieved.
I am approaching home. I’m almost there.
I get down from my car. I have stiff legs. I’m hobbling, the excruciating pain centered around my heels. I start walking on my toes.
I gently push the door open. Seeing me, my twins shriek together. Every day, my appearance at that very moment when I enter the apartment after coming back from work seems to astonish them.
I sometimes think whether the boys view my vanishing in front of them and then reappearing after a few hours as some magical performance.
“Baaa…baaa”, “Maaa, Baba. “Baaa…baaa”, “Maaa, Baba. See Baba is here.”
With my left arm resting on the forlorn wall, I lift and then bend my legs (one at a time) at the knee to untie my shoelaces. With the pain almost humming now, this balancing act feels precarious.
My wife is in the kitchen. She is whirling up some ominous-sounding—almost like crushing pieces of glass—concoction in the blender. It hurts my ears.
I settle on the gray, single sofa. I am so drained after work and the hour-long drive back that on some days, like today, I cannot drag myself to the bathroom. It is just a few steps away. I ought to wash my hands at least with soap and water before I incline on the sofa. But I don’t.
The Covid-19 scare is still around. It’s mid-December 2020, and talk of another round of lockdown is looming upon us. Yet we don’t have the most essential of safeguards at home—a bottle of hand sanitizer. Please don’t ask me why. I know it’s reckless. And I feel guilty and sorry.
The boys run toward me. I raise my right hand. I draw out my five fingers toward them.
I exclaim, “No touch.”
They are well aware of this phrase of their father. They stop. They are just two to three feet away. Too bad we are not six feet apart. I am now behaving like the seniors.
And then crystalline echoes of “Baba, hasho (smile),” “Baba, hasho,” “Baba, hasho na,” “Baba, hasho na please,” fill the air.
It’s my younger (younger by a minute) twin’s soft, endearing entreaty. There is resonance in the timber of his voice.
I obey, breaking into a smile. It’s a subdued one. It’s hardly a smile. I’m too tired to entertain anything more than what I could muster. I feel terrible.
He is not impressed. He stares at me for a few seconds before he turns his back to join his brother, who is playing with a white ambulance with red lights. Cars, trucks, buses, trains, motorcycles lie scattered in one corner of the carpet. The living room carpet is the territory of their kingdom. It’s only before they retire for the night they clean it up.
