It took me a while to figure out how the back pockets of my shorts were filled with sand, but once I did, everything made sense.
The last time I wore these shorts was two years ago. In what now seems like another world, I was spending the week in Goa with friends who were like family, intoxicating myself from the minute I woke up, up until my body collapsed out of exhaustion (and borderline alcohol poisoning). We danced and sang and swam and tanned like that’s all there was to life. We were fresh out of college; bright-eyed and ambitious. Some of us had definite plans for the future, others didn’t. We were excited about all there was too see and all there was to do, hardly worried about the things that could go wrong on the way. It was another time – we hugged often, we shared meals, we got sick, but nothing was the end of the world.
Fast forward two years and it’s all we can think about – the end of the world. It’s been 110 days since I’ve been living within the confines of my house, and so to change things up, I dug out these pair of shorts from the back end of the closet where they’d been buried for two years and wore them. I shoved my phone in my pocket and proceeded to make very healthy, very gluten-free, very sugar-free pancakes. One scrumptious breakfast later, I took my phone out of my pocket and found it covered in sand.
I emptied my pockets and collected all the sand, and it smelt just like summer two years ago. It reminded me of life before the pandemic, a life I was trying hard not to think of. The thing is, nostalgia is a dangerous thing, it keeps you thinking about what could’ve been and what should’ve been. To think about what you can do and what you should do in times like these is an exercise in futility, because while you’re knee-deep in crises with your life and future at stake, oddly enough, it’s not your crisis to solve. If the world hadn’t turned on its heels a couple of months ago, I would probably be in Goa right now, rolling in the same sand that I found in the back pocket of my shorts, but this was as close as I was going to get to reminiscing that summer getaway.
The early morning beach walks had altered their path and become a route encircling my building in Mumbai. Deep restful breaths had transformed into short gasps behind protective masks. Nothing was the same but wearing these shorts was my ticket to go back into time. For today, “going to work” meant rolling out of bed and crawling ten steps to my makeshift desk. I no longer had an hour’s worth of travel time to pull myself together and the quarantine sleep deprivation didn’t help either. Coffee break conversations were now held over video call while each of us individually brewed our stimulant of choice. Lunch was non-existent (there’s only so many tea cakes and cups of coffee you can ingest before realising that lunch is a bad idea). Every hour, I would move around my apartment in a bid to avoid the oncoming power nap. At 6pm, I would reach my windowsill and while I scrambled to reach deadlines, I would notice the sky turn a reddish pink from the corner of my eye.
Usually, I would continue to work until I looked up and saw dark skies, but today I did something different. In an attempt to make peace with the crazy unfolding of life in quarantine, I shut my laptop. I squeezed myself between my plants and the windowsill (balconies don’t get any bigger than that in Bombay), wore my sand covered shorts and read A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara while soaking up the summer sunset.
Summer for me has always meant travelling, being away from home, doing things I’ve never done before. I’ve always had vivid memories of summer every year, memories that define most of the year for me. Last year, it was backpacking across Europe all by myself and the year before that, it was spending the happiest week in Goa after successfully earning a Bachelor’s degree.
This year, things are different, yet weirdly similar. I’m in the most familiar of settings, yet there is a newness to how I’ve been living. I’ve been slowing down, taking care of myself, trying to figure out what I want to be left with after all of this spills over. So, today, when I found sandy shorts in my closet, I decided that it was going to be my summer memory – wearing them while watching the sunset from my balcony with a book in my hand. It’s not ideal, but I’m not complaining.
okay chalo 