Prema Jayakumar

My nephew’s daughter, all of fourteen months old, screams when she sees the car and driver. With memories of our children, whose favourite person was always the man who drove the car, we were rather surprised until we thought it through. Since she was born just before the lock-down, by the time she could be taken out comfortably, she had only entered the car to go to the hospital for her mandatory shots. The vehicle is associated in her mind with pain and discomfort and the driver was the person who caused it. Our children had associated the vehicle with outings and treats and the driver became the man who had made it all happen. Whoever took them out, most of the time, it was this man’s presence that ensured that they got their excursions.
That sets us thinking about what the children have been deprived of. The little girl has not seen people other than her parents and grandparents, she has not seen a swing or a round-about, a see-saw or a slide, let alone played on any of them. She has not played in the sun or got wet in the rain. She has not played with the neighbour’s child or even seen other children close to. She has not been exposed to the small infections that children who play with other children normally go through. And these small infections are what make for her immunity in later life. It is an entire world with its good and bad that she has been denied because of the pandemic. The world today is rather like a world under siege or facing a war that is going on and on. The world in the tight grip of an emergency with small islands of normal life holding up.
I thought of Shakespeare’s Miranda’s wondering words because a whole group of children is growing up like Miranda, isolated on Prospero’s island, seeing only her father and Caliban, ignorant of the outside world. Of course, it’s not just my nephew’s daughter, but a whole generation of children, who have had to stay cooped up in small spaces, who have had their experience of the outer world circumscribed by concerns of safety, have missed out on all the things we had taken for granted a couple of years back. One wonders how their world-view would have been altered by this deprivation, how their brains would have adapted to this way of living which is not natural to the species.
Even slightly older children who would have gone to pre-school classes, who would have played and fought and been infected with colds and coughs and other childish ailments, are in a strange and isolated world. Not only would they have not developed physical immunity due to this peculiar isolation, they have not developed mental immunity to the discomforts of shared spaces. The teenagers are probably better off because they have lived their lives in cyber-space for quite some time now. The real world as we call it intruded on their lives only sporadically.
As the isolation extends and people not only study on-line, but also work from home, will communication become only through the alphabets on social media? Will we forget to talk, will our voices fail when we try to string sentences together? The telephone is limited in its ability to keep up conversations. Even with conference calls and all the assistance provided by technology, the warmth and the immediate recognition of tones and expressions are lacking. A meeting in cyber space does not provide the instant unspoken feedback that a face-to-face meeting gives.
It is said that being deaf or blind defines the way you sense the world around you. However well-adjusted you are, there is a difference in the way you perceive your surroundings. In a similar way, these young children might arrive at a view of the world that is different from what their parents or even elder siblings have. And yet, what choice is there? Just like civil wars and internal strife define the boundaries of experiences, this pandemic too has set boundaries. The difference is that all of us now experience what the people of war-ridden places have been living with. Will that at least be the good fall out of the enforced isolation and the feeling of being threat? That we shall grow to understand the experience of others who have lived like that for reasons other than a pandemic?