Goodbye to 2020.



Begonia and Peace Lilly from the flower gardens of 
 Cape Town, South Africa. Wishing you all a happy and better 2021, from the ever-beautiful city. 

Bidding goodbye 2020 is like feeling the loss of something not owned.  I didn’t own 2020 feeling hunted by some dark stuff sitting beside me trying to grab me and eat me. I couldn’t connect with it emotionally, how would, I didn’t receive anything soothing, tender from it only melancholy and tragedies.   I couldn’t meet our daughters, their husbands, in-laws and friends. No parties, no visiting Kerala that takes rounds with the families and friends there, travel and all such.  (I don’t deny the bitterness and the confrontation extravaganza at the families there at times, Covid or not)

I’m sad, not bitter; we’re all safe not turned statistics to be counted among the millions who have left us, the reward from using masks and the sanitizer.  The dark stuff whenever had set eyes on me gleefully got neutralised by that stuff.  It’s a good idea to use them forever cannot let our guard down.   

I am thrilled that I lived through this history-making year, humbled by the sorrows and sufferings of millions succumbed to the pandemic resisting with the last bit of their vital organs. I’m baffled by the financial, cultural, class, and caste divide between people in the nations boasting cultural and godly, and democratic.  The covid-19 virus has thrown open the case of the vulnerability of poor whose best option is death in the case of a pandemic.

 I recollect the places I frequented during the pre-covid time, market places, the bookshops, malls, restaurants, the beaches, vineyards, shops and the friendly people at the shop's counters who take care to drop an additional plastic cover for detergent products, the meat and the fish I have purchased.  Roads I drove along lined with beautiful houses, trees green fields and colourful gardens.  Shopping was a hobby for me, preferred to walk from aisles to aisles in the supermarkets looking for what is new rather than using a ready-made list.  Even when I got blamed by my husband for taking a day for shopping, I went my way.  A few times I went there during the covid, I strode from isles to isles flaunting a list in my hand to show my husband.  Shortly after, we turned to online shopping for everything including groceries, veggies, fish, meat putting a stop to even the short visits.

 

2020, I’m moving onto 2021.  I’m anxious about what 2020 is keeping in stock for me and others.  A new variant has struck the shores of South Africa and spreading fast, the second wave they call it. We can only hope for the better, not the worst. I see the open sky through my window, in a shade of light blue calm and saintly.  I know there are stars beyond it that I can’t see but imagine their brightness.

I wish you all the same brightness for 2021 beyond the gloom of 2020.