It is still day five.
I get up from the unsettling dream and inspect my torso for evidence of vomit or sweat or saliva and to my delight, I find none there. Then I rush to the bathroom because I’m feeling dreadfully sick. I support myself by resting my left hand on the wall facing the wash basin, slouch forward and basically stare absentmindedly into the sink. I make up my mind that I would be taking the test-to-release. This is a test that can be done on the fifth day of isolation, to release me to go out peacefully. I am sure I can’t take any more of this. I rinse my face and brush my teeth and then head back to the living room.
My plan is to pick up my novel, read a little bit of it and complete 3 modules of my e-learning courses but I end up scrolling through my phone and catching up on messages instead. As I head back to the couch which undoubtedly has become my favourite spot in this house, I notice that every joint in my body is audibly popping and for once I find the sounds grating. Like, I’m sort of alarmed. It’s as though all my joints are arthritic and are registering their displeasure that I even bother to attempt to move. Could this prolonged inactivity and immobility somehow account for arthritis in the elderly? I wonder.
Sometime during the reading process, I sleep off and my sleep is mercifully more restful, free of haunting dreams.
“Abiola”.
That’s the sound of my mom’s voice and it is accompanied by the creaking of the door which signifies she is trying to enter the room to access me. I roll my internal eyes because my sleep is actually sweet and restful and I don’t want it to end. She says, “They have come to look for us. Get your passport and mask and come downstairs”.
If it were someone else waking me up with those words, I would have considered it a prank or a rude joke and I would have just turned my back and gone back to sleep. But this is not someone else, this is my mom. My mom that’s famous for jinxing my attempt to sneak out to exercise because she does not “like breaking rules”.
So I get up, collect my mask and passport from where I have them stashed and go upstairs to wake my aunty. When we get downstairs, there is this government official outside, wearing a yellow, high visibility jacket, waiting for us.
He looks like a mix of Indian and Pakistani but his accent is hard to place. He is holding a smart device which has our names and phone numbers propped up on the screen. He asks my mom for her passport and what day of our self isolation we are on. Then he asks when exactly we arrived into the country. He has quite a bit of challenge pronouncing my moms name and apologises for it. The apology is “nice” and accepted but the name really isn’t that hard bro, especially given that there is an international celebrity who bears the same name.
After attending to my mom, he checks my document and leaves. All through this encounter, my aunt is watching from the window upstairs. We walk back inside the house and I roll my eyes, knowing that I’m not going to hear the end of this.
“You know I told you so. My friends were telling me they may have installed a CCTV to monitor us ……..” I zone out.
Like I said earlier. I already know I’m not going to hear the end of this.
Day 8 – Monitoring Spirits Alert
For some reason, guilt or maybe sensitivity has got the best of me. On day 5, I finally decided to take the test to release, because all the nightmares have haunted me enough to know that I would not last ten days in isolation. Test to release is basically taking an additional test on the fifth day os isolation so that you can be allowed to come out of the house without being considered to have violated isolation rules.
My test says I am negative and that means I am now finally free to roam the streets and interact with the outside world. But something keeps me indoors. Maybe it is guilt that my mom did not take the test and is still bound by the isolation rules, or maybe its me merely being sensitive and not wanting to rub my new found freedom all in her face. Or it could be that the outside world has suddenly lost its allure now that my freedom has technically been restored, you know! They say stolen meat is the sweetest, but now that the meat of my freedom is legally mine, I don’t feel drawn to stealing it. So I stay indoors and start to enjoy watching TV again. Talk about being a couch potato.
Its night time and my phone starts to buzz. First of all, I get an email saying someone on my flight tested positive to Covid 19 and so this means I have to isolate. (Guys, Laugh with me please). The first thing I do is to mark the message as “Unread” and archive it straightaway, I even dramatically look over my shoulder as I am doing it, because I am convincing myself that it technically doesn’t concern me. I am already 8 long dreary days into the prison sentence, I’m not about to start all over again. Secondly, my additional day-5 test has released me and there is no going back. So, it does not concern me. Amen.
Then my phone buzzes again and this time, a strange international number is calling me – In-The-Dead-Of-The-Night.
I pick up and its a government official calling to ensure that have gotten the email, the same email that I chose to ignore. He is also calling to tell me that all my negative COVID tests no longer count and my test-to-release is basically down the drain as I have to complete my isolation INDOORS for the 10 days. How sweetly convenient. How convenient it is, to wait until I have done a test-to-release, and felt the bliss of freedom, even if only fleetingly, to then call me and tell me that same freedom is being taken away because someone who I am very strongly sure I didn’t come into contact with on the Boeing seven-oh-seven has got the virus. How convenient!!!
