Unlock Diaries: Covid19 and me by Priyanka Pathak- Narain

I’m all too familiar with the panic of a four am alarm.

Get up now! Flight to catch!

Bag, check.

Passport, check.

Wallet, check.

Phone, check.

Emergency meds, check.

Boarding pass, not checked.

Oh no! Fire up the computer, shove paper into the printer, and off we go!

The virile, masculine construct of going-to-work meant a rush out the door to the ride that would get my husband to the airport to a flight to another ride to a conference room.

There, surrounded by reports, graphs, charts and serious faces, he would crunch nothing but numbers, bland biscuits that taste like sawdust and wash them down with cups of weak coffee. Only when he arrived at his hotel room in the evening to order room service and set a new alarm for another god-awful wake-up call, would he remember the rest of his life. Wife, two kids, home.

My husband, a finance guy who ran a global private equity firm’s India offices, did this on a loop for years, slept on flights, sometimes covering more than five cities in two or three countries in under a week and often forgot which one he was waking up in. When he returned, the home geared up to make his stay comfortable, meals meant his favourite dishes, and the kids played around him all day long.

For the three of us, sending him out the door marked the beginning of our ‘other’ life, one that had its own rhythm and dynamic, its own little trials and tribulations, one that he could not fully inhabit during the brief interludes that his work allowed.

Meanwhile, I worked from home in a feminine construct where a line between professional and personal simply did not exist.

While I interviewed sources over the phone and typed their words furiously into my computer, the two most important humans in my life were no more than steps away – a three-year-old played under my desk and a one-year-old slept fitfully in the next room. When they woke up or got fed up, I’d have to stop to change, feed, cuddle, or play with them. There would be other distractions – doctors to be visited with kids or parents, vendors to be paid at the door, meals to be arranged for guests staying over, and friends of my kids would stream through my house to jump on my couches.

Between the demands of employers and family, I was left with no time for myself. To friends I half-joked exhaustedly, ‘I’m a single mom of two.’

Covid19 has changed this.

My husband, now stuck at home with no flights to catch, does the next best thing. He gets on incessant zoom chats with promoters, colleagues, bankers, and investors around the world.

When he emerges from the room though, he is present in our world – chasing our daughters around, helping with their homework, goading them to get more exercise, pulling out his dusty sitar to play for them. The novelty of him peering into the fridge to tell me - ‘We are running out of milk. Give me a list of whatever else we need – I’ll order it?’ – is starting to fade and feel normal.

And as he expands his footprint in my world, he talks to me about his own. Although the intricacies of it may escape me, I am still more clued into his world than ever before. As we do this, we understand the pulls and pressures of each other’s lives. He understands that working from home is challenging in unique, logic-defying ways and I know that jet-setting to conference rooms and five star hotels isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. For the first time in a long time, instead of independent silos working in tandem, our marriage feels like a real partnership.

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Every day, when he brings me my morning cup of coffee, I delight in the elusive sense of normalcy that I’ve long longed for. We chat with friends from all around the world, reconnect with people who have always been dear to us, but the stomping pace of life had left no room for.

‘There is more to life than increasing its speed,’ Gandhi had famously said.

Covid19, despite its disastrous implications on human life and economy, is bringing home the wisdom of his words to me. As the lockdown loosens its stranglehold and the deadly impact of this virus becomes more heartbreaking each day, I mean to take hope from my experience.

I see it as a possible reset -- an opportunity for old models of masculine and feminine work-life balance to converge into something new, something more balanced, something more equal.