Like coronavirus, life and relationships are a mystery

Life in the time of COVID-19 has highlighted everything that we may tend to take for granted in the normal course. Two unrelated facts: I'm a vegetarian; I'm single.

Which means, I tend to eat out often. Since late January, I've direly felt the absence of two neighborhood restaurants in my life. They are yet to reopen.

How I miss their friendly workers, especially the chefs! I've been a loyal customer for more than four years. We don't even know each other's names, but we know each other, in a sense. The chefs know exactly how to customize Chinese meals with my homemade mix of Indian spices. Hope they are safe wherever they are. I can't wait for their return.

The office canteen staff have been angels. The rare presence of some colleagues forced by recent circumstances to eat in the canteen, underscores how critical food, food supplies, food staff and food facilities are to our urban life.

So are the apartment maintenance staff. On one occasion, lights conked out. The water heating system malfunctioned next. Real scares, given the virus-winter. Might replacement and repair services be a problem?

Within minutes of reporting the problems, the handymen, wearing face masks, materialized and did the needful. Huge relief, just like the delivery of drinking water jars on no more than a one-line WeChat text.

Maids have been disallowed entry into residential buildings. I double up as a homemaker now. I realize what a big help she has been all this time.

Familiar sights and sounds are integral to our experience of everyday life. For instance, the busy-busy bakery-cafe across our office street has reopened, but it's no longer crowded like before. Some residents have begun walking their pets, particularly dogs, but the mostly deserted sidewalks appear to be messier now.

In the pre-COVID-19 time, female university scholars and young professionals in the 20-35 age group were relatively more chirpy, chummy－uninhibitedly clasping hands, touching heads, leaning on each other, hugging, or pecking on the cheek.

My interpretation was that this newfound young female physical contact (and the laughs and happy sounds it used to produce) is a celebration of emancipation, the evolution of same-gender friendship, some sort of freedom (from/to what I know not). Now, I wonder if this touch-feel female bonding would ever return in the post-virus phase.

Grandparents no longer bring their little grandchildren in strollers to the neighborhood university campus. It's been a while since I noticed the impressive and unbelievably formal change-of-guard drill of building security guards, and the loud end-of-business-day team-gatherings of salon workers outside their shops.

But it's not all gloom and doom. On the brighter side, the epidemic created time for reflections on existential issues. In this cosmos, we homo sapiens are perhaps insignificant?

We can catapult satellites beyond the solar system, build mega-structures in a jiffy, invent designer lifeforms like xenobots, swim or sprint unimaginably; but, we still don't quite understand viruses. Nor can we manufacture vaccines overnight, even when our very existence could be at stake.

COVID-19 has reinforced the importance of humility, and the need to restrain ourselves from getting ahead of ourselves. Online images of disaster dishes that some urban working women prepared in their kitchens (after being forced by the rampant virus to stay indoors) were hilarious, and raise a question: have some of us lost survival-related abilities like cooking? Are we spoiled by e-commerce and the services sector?

Strangely, those we consider loved ones, bosom pals, childhood chums and close colleagues may go off radar when we would expect them to enquire about our well-being. But equally hearteningly, others we seldom keep in touch with fade into our lives suddenly, miraculously, full of concern, well-meaning advice and love.

Much like the novel coronavirus, life and relationships are a deep mystery indeed.

Contact the writer at siva@chinadaily.com.cn