By Anushka Joshi.
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My boyfriend and I met at a party in a bar this November. I am a visiting undergraduate student doing my last year at Oxford and he is a D.Phil in cyber security. This means that on paper he sounds smarter than me, but in reality, he is not. He thinks the best movie ever made is ‘The Minions’. He reads books like ‘Never Split the Difference’. He goes on runs while listening to audio-books and has a Zoom book-club. I once had the dubious treat of listening to him speak to his family in Dutch, which, whilst it is a wonderful language, when he speaks it, sounds like someone gargling to the beat of a vacuum cleaner. He is a fitness freak. When I say that, dismiss in your mind any image of a frat-boy type. He is blessed with an un-obnoxious body. No Steroid six-packs, no ostentatious arm muscles, but something more on the slender lines of those people from Chariots of Fire. He has a butt that could have been sculpted by Michelangelo, if Michelangelo was a little better at sculpting. In short, he can get it. He is getting it. However, his fitness obsession means that he thinks waking up at five thirty in the morning is normal and that staying up after ten pm will prompt a gradual spiral into debauchery. This doesn’t mean he won’t party occasionally. He once did a drunk push-up contest in a tux after a bop. Does he sound like an insufferable white guy after that last sentence?
Well, he isn’t, a white guy, I mean. Our parents are both immigrants: his migrated from southern India to Holland, mine migrated from western India to America and then returned home. His family had a somewhat smooth migration of place and class whereas mine was a more painful one. He has no mental-health issues, I have an alphabet soup of them (OCD and PTSD). He has gone through heartbreak and hasn’t spoken to her in years. I am friends with pretty much everyone I have dated, except that one guy.
And yet we have found some kind of happiness despite the current lockdown. Our relationship increasingly resembles a successful arranged marriage. As I mentioned above, we are both from India, so we are allowed to say that whereas you cannot. Our relationship is like an arranged marriage because we had had only a couple of meetings to get to know each before being forced to move in together. Both of us love our families fiercely. However, we know that more than two weeks spent living with them would escalate quickly from the simmering, but civil resentments of an Arthur Miller play to the full-scale bloodbaths of Ancient Greek tragedies.
I hate doing chores and will procrastinate on my laundry till the heap of clothes begins to resemble the trash dump I grew up next to. As I said before, I didn’t have a smooth migration. He has a spice rack in his kitchen. I have novel ways of expressing my irritation at him when he seems surprised or upset by something I do or forget to do. I recently heard myself say: “Stop looking like a startled fawn.” Would we have been together if there hadn’t been a lockdown? I don’t know. As the daughter of parents who should have gotten divorced sometime around the third day of their honeymoon, I am jittery in relationships. Nothing is ever the last straw for me, I’m usually out at the first straw.
I ended up being quarantined with my boyfriend because I decided not to go home, not even when India imposed a travel ban. Before the lockdown (ah those days) I would spend a few days at his place and a few in college housing. When the lockdown began, we were faced with the prospect of being separated even though we were living in the same town. We realized we would only be able to meet for (illegal) walks outside, and so decided to move in together. We had only a day to make the call.
There are downsides to living at his place. If his landlord found out I was living here, I could be thrown out, since my name isn’t on the lease. This means that I had to hide when our fridge broke and someone came to look at it. It was frustrating because I couldn’t thank the man who helped us. When we were still in the middle of making the decision, I biked over to my college housing, stuffed some clothes into a Blackwell’s tote and biked back, feeling confused and close to tears the whole time. A few days later, after letting my supervisor and college housing manager know that I was leaving, I moved out.
India has imposed a lockdown that will last until early May at the very least, and the travel ban may be in place much longer than that. As for now, I have nowhere else to go. I am aware that many are left with people they would otherwise not want to be left with. There are children from unhappy and violent homes who no longer have the escape which school or extracurricular activities usually offer. I understand their pain because I was one of them. On the other hand, I do not understand their pain because I always had escape routes I could take but these would ultimately end up making me feel worse (creeepy flasher guy and every kid who made school hell I’m talking to you). I wish I could say to them, as well as to my younger self, that it gets better. You do eventually find someone, the unlikeliest someone, at the strangest of times, with whom you can make the kind of home you wish you were raised in. Who knows how permanent this home will be? Who knows how permanent anything will be, now?
It’s like everything has sped up, as if this pandemic has compressed time. We said, “I love you,” a short while ago and have since progressed to the much more mundane “love you!” without the “I”, thrown over a shoulder while one of us takes out the trash or makes the newly fraught grocery run or when he goes running along the Thames, where people are self-isolating on moored boats or when I go on bike rides amongst the beautiful gothic buildings of a town that seems like it’s always been deserted.
I remember the first day reality began to dismantle for me. It was when they announced the four-hundred-year-old Bodleian library would be closed for the “foreseeable future.” Those words would pop up on the windows of all the cafes and restaurants my boyfriend and I had gone to. These were mostly places like Chozen Noodle and the Covered Market. There was also one time at Raoul’s, an out-of-our-budget bar in Jericho where I had TMI’d the hell out of him by telling him my life story just because a feeling I had a gut feeling that told me I was safe. The future has always had that word, “foreseeable”, before it. It is just that we are only noticing it more now. So no, I don’t know how long we’ll be together, but I think I can say that we will be for the foreseeable future: the future I see and the future he sees. Some things may throw us off, but some might just, against some pretty strong odds, prove us right.
The Quarantine Times 