He was a screenwriter, the assignments had always been few and far between, now they were just few.
Illustration/Uday Mohite
It was closing in on 15 months.They’d had enough, the four of them, in varying degrees: the claustrophobia of being boxed in a 700 sqft flat, fully ‘pakaoed’ was an understatement. He was young, in his ‘slog like a dog’ years, WFH made no sense because the work had dried up, being stuck at home was killing him—especially with three unemployed maniacs around; two of the four had been sacked and one of them had had his salary cut in half. So, their angst was understandable but distracting.
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He was a screenwriter, the assignments had always been few and far between, now they were just few.
He realised he was immune to ‘lockdowns’ since he was locked down in the head, it had all become a blur, the first wave, the second wave, the notional third wave, the first jab, the second jab, the 84-day gap, every day was a new chapter in the legend and life story of this vicious little virus. It was all white noise for him now. The Black fungus, seemed to merge into this vast spreadsheet of blackness. This damn mask that he wore even at home, was suffocating. Mumbai was still a face-to-face city, here he was faced on Google meet, with masked expressionless faces.
Frankly, it wasn’t like he was unable to get out of bed. He’d heard that that was a sure sign of the big ‘D’. His roommate Chintu couldn’t get out of bed most days, classic ‘depression’, pretending he was messaging, slopping around in his kurta pyjama.
He was nowhere near that. This wasn’t something he could talk to the guys about, alpha males still had to show a brave front, all four of them were going through multiple issues, but no one was talking.
Everyone in a state of limbo.
In some ways, there had been something definite about getting Covid-19: you lost taste, then smell, the bones felt brittle, and then fatigue—man, the fatigue—when you least expected it, breathlessness even when the oxymeter suggested normalcy.
“Don’t worry, you now have antibodies to fight the enemy,” he was told. Sure, how did that explain his landlord dying after taking both jabs? It was just mad, sheer Mad Max territory.
It’s true, depression wasn’t hush hush, anymore. Well, it was still taboo, a broken arm still more legitimate than a damaged mind, but what he had was weird.
The new buzzword in emotional psychological lingo was a state called languishing.
His own symptoms—he’d lost momentum, he’d sit in front of that laptop, nothing, no thought, no ideas, this wasn’t the equivalent of indifference, just a ‘blah-ness’. This was deeper, more devastating, than anything he’d experienced—nestled between flourishing and depression, is how Wikipedia defined it, not close to mental illness, but a definite shaking of one’s mental well-being, incomplete mental health, just short of requiring counselling. It had seeped into the pores of inactivity, aspiration had taken a massive beating, this feeling of ‘blah’.
“What are your dreams, beta?” a visiting chacha asked him.
Every part of him wanted to scream, “None at the moment, I’m just trying to survive the day, got it?”
Instead, he said simply, “Montu Chacha, I am working on my first feature film for Disney-Hotstar.”
Would the world ever open up, he wondered. When would the flourishing phase begin, or would he forever be languishing?
Rahul daCunha is an adman, theatre director/playwright, photographer and traveller. Reach him at rahul.dacunha@mid-day.com
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