No doubt we are going through very challenging times ; the lock-down days are going to be talked about for a long long time.
As I write this, we have just completed 21 days of quarantine period and have moved on to the extension period of another 21 days.
What do I miss the most? May be the morning walk and of course the assurance that God is heaven and all is well on Earth and that I could take a leisurely stroll around Mhow whenever I wanted. Now there is so much uncertainty about the future what with the daily or hourly reports coming through TV and Social media. In reality, nothing much has changed for an introvert retiree like me.
The first time I heard about the term quarantine was way back in 1968, in school.
It all started like this. We had just come back after a long vacation. It was arts period ; a time for a bunch of ten year-olds to play around with crayons .
We had drawing benches or Art donkey bench as they were called. These days I don’t see such furniture in schools. Most of the kids were more interested in his neighbour’s board than in his own and we were in peeping distance or should we say pinching distance.
One of the boys saw a nice juicy looking pimple on his neighbour’s cheek and decided to explore. It was the classic, pink, fluid filled blister , a definite sign of chicken pox. One pinch and the blister broke leaving a gooey stuff on his hands. He must have cleaned it as a kid would normally do; on his clothes or more likely on another boy’s shirt.
The chain of infection started. Before you could say Chakroborty Rajagopalachari, four boys had been identified with chicken pox. The “Patient 0” then, is an internationally known author – publisher today.
We were about 55 boys in Class V and all of us were boarding in two blocks called feeder houses. On hindsight , I can now visualize, the school authorities must have been greatly concerned about the disease spreading to boys of other classes and to the whole school.
It happened suddenly; the next morning we were told to just stay put in our hostels; and it was for an indefinite period. We had a system of keeping our text books and note books in our school desks ; so we didn’t even have any study materials; a happy state indeed. Activities for the older boys , class VI upwards went on as usual while we were isolated.
Every morning , we lined up for inspection by matrons for signs of chicken pox. Of the two blocks in the feeder house, one was earmarked for active cases and the other for the unaffected and recovered. Every day, some boys were moved to the active block on detection of symptoms and some moved back to the healthy block after recovery. It went on for about two months. About 50% of us were affected. Why only 50% and not all ? There were people like me who had gone through the ordeal, much earlier in life. Those were the days when you could hardly find any kids not baptized by fire; who had not been through chicken pox /measles /mumps etc.
My memory of those two months is rather weak. I remember playing a lot of Carrom and ludo. Though I could play chess, there were hardly any partners. Droughts and a game called jumping jack were popular. Monopoly was played with improvised currency notes and sale deeds. There were many other games played with paper and pencil and even buttons. As I was good at carrom, time really flashed by between breakfast and lunch. The meal times were something to look forward to. There were no tables or chairs; we sat in long lines on the floor making a lot of ruckus.
In the evening , what used to be called prep during working days , we were kept busy with spelling competitions and singing film songs.
I remember some boys were exceptionally good at telling stories. Of course, all film-stories were narrated scene by scene in great details . It helped that die-hard MGR/Sivaji fans saw their hero’s films a number of times; sometimes even 4-5 times. And there were kids who could make up their own stories. Some names that come to mind are Sundar and Kumar. They were always sought after for the story sessions; you could see groups of 8-10 boys perched in close groups, generally on two cots pulled close to each other.
I really don’t remember , ever getting bored; nor do I remember how we coped up with the academics we had missed.
Today, as I look back ,it was a very very responsible and courageous action on the part of school administration to have taken up looking after 50 odd ten year- olds during an epidemic. They could have just sent the whole class back home with a rejoin-date. But they didn’t. During subsequent years in the school, there were some boys isolated for chicken pox ,about 4-5 boys at a time; but there were none from our batch as we all had been fully immunized for good.
That was part of our class ..stuck for two months in quarantine.
