As like anyone else, I never thought that 2020 would be so harsh on me or my family. The word "pandemic" itself was unknown to me. During this time, we lost a lot of things and here I wanted to share some things, maybe later on I will realize that we went through a lot of things already and there is nothing which can break us.
The early days of the pandemic were fine. I remember during February is when I got the news that the there is some virus running through the China and is affecting in a lot of deaths. I thought this will be somehow contained and it won't be an issue as such for other countries. Little did I know that time.
Soon after that, in around mid March is when it started affecting India and our schools, tuition classes were shut down. My father who works at a startup company in Mumbai also had to switch to online mode for the rest of the work. We all were pretty "okay" with the situation at that time and thought that this will last for a month or two and will eventually sort itself out.
The startup company my father worked at saw a lot of drops in sales and started to lay off employees. Unfortunately, he was one of those employees. This was very important for us because we used to live in Mumbai where living in general is very expensive. Also, he was the only earner in the family which means that he would have a lot of financial pressure on him until he finds a new job. The worse part of this whole thing was the company laid off very quickly, and not giving enough time for the employees to find a replacement job. As soon as he told us about it, we were both worried about him and felt like someone from the family could or should help him take some part of the financial pressure off him.
In my family, there's my father, me and my younger brother. We lost our mom pretty early on when I was only 7 years old. There is not much anyone especially after my mom died. Most of the members from her side sort of disappeared after that. We used to have our grandmother who also recently died of age. There are some other people too, but I don't even think they care about any of us.
After looking for some days, fortunately, my dad found a job in some another company in Pune. He got a referral from one of his friends. We quickly started moving out to Pune which of course wasn't that easy due to the restrictions applied to two of the most affected areas, Mumbai and Pune. We still found our way someway or the other and finally moved out to Pune, found out a place on rent and moved all luggage there. There were so many people giving us weird looks since we were the "outsiders".
We all got tested for covid and we all were found negative. These tests that time were only available for government hospitals and there was a huge line for any of these. Not to mention that there are hundreds of other patients too with probably even serious diseases.
Soon, we changed our schools and everything worked out quite well. We started to do the whole online classes thing. Thanks to the low wireless network signals we used to sit outside near the balcony just to be able to access internet properly. Although, thanks to the cheap internet prices in India we didn't face any issues for accessing internet.
My father started working in his new company and everything was quite going well, until... sigh, my father tested positive for covid. So this was around June. We still don't know how and when get got contracted with the virus but it must be because he had to go out to buy veggies and other groceries and stuff. Fortunately, for some reason we both didn't get the virus (which was quite surprising). So at that time you just have to remain in hospital until you test negative, there's basically no treatment for this. You just get isolated from others and that's it. So it was for me who had to manage the house and take care of my brother.
I did quite well manage things. If you expect your neighbors to be friendly in Pune, you're quite wrong. There was this aunty who didn't even talk to us during that time. We were not allowed to go outside, nor was anyone allowed to visit us. Everything was blocked, people feared to even look at us. I was very sad and frustrated at this point to what should I do, and finally decided to do some work.
After spending about two weeks in the hospital, my father tested negative for covid and was allowed to go back home. We all were extremely happy and relieved that it should all go back to normal now. And to some extent, it did. From the month of July, I started working at a shop as a cashier. The person who owns the shop is very poor in handling the computer and I do it for him. He was happy to give me the job for some decent amount of money per day. I really felt happy with the whole situation since I could now help my father financially. Also, I was able to attend all my school classes online with ease too.
In few months, all went back to "normal". I also got an internship at MLH with a need-based stipend which pays a decent amount for an internship of three months. So far it has been going well, and I've also started contributing to open-source now.
Finally, I would say that this situation is not going back to the previous normal. We will always have this new normal. I just hope that everyone who had a really tough time during covid is not suffering from it anymore.
Thanks for reading my blog, it felt nice to write this down. I will surely start writing some posts now.