I should have been in Canada right about now, soaking in the local friendliness and bright blue summer skies. Instead, I’m logging in my fourth straight month of solitary home confinement in the Covid-19 lockdown.
Cabin fever came and went a long time ago. Now, it is a different type of ennui – a slow, thrumming numbness. A permanent sense of stuckness. I know all too well where the paint is chipping on each wall. I can move with my eyes closed between the rooms because I have walked the same short path a thousand times by now. I know when the crows will start cawing, when they will quiet down, and when the parrots will start shrieking.
The monotony is leaching the joy in my soul. At such a time, music has become my refuge. Listening to 80s music, like Madonna and A-Ha, I leave behind this narrow, unimaginative existence and pass through gilded gates into the innocence of school dances and house parties. Cheb Mami and Cheb Khaled conjure good times with friends, terrace parties and long-drawn dinners with foreign accents, political debates and youthful flirting flying into each other. Kishori Amonkar and Ravi Shankar take me to pristine dawns by the river, divinity unfolding. And then, MHD and Aya Nakamura throw me into Afropop crowds, brimming with fun.
Music reminds me that life is more than the limited, physical boundaries within which I find myself. Victor Frankl wrote of how a piece of classical music played in a concentration camp revived one’s sense of dignity, one’s humanity. I am getting a sense of what he meant.
I am more than the small confines of my home. The world is bigger than this, life is more than the humdrum of survival. I am more than the repetitive motions that define my days.
Life is joy. I am thankful to music for reminding me of this.
Archana and more 
“A permanent sense of stuckness” – so true!