Getting back to the question of Bread and butter!

To all those who work and love their jobs and even those who pretend to do so, how would you like it if you are given a leave of 1 year with all the time in the world to do whatever you like to do?

Well, I am sure many of you would think that it would get boring after few days and that you would desperately miss your work, but trust me, nothing of these happened to me. I was enjoying my life to the hilt during my leave. I was dancing on the head of a sulking neighbour as her roof happened to be my floor. I was merrily driving my husband’s car while he kept his fingers crossed until I returned to his sight with his car in one piece and I was mastering a foreign language and rehearsing hard, enough to take the revenge of the last lost fight him. I was also enjoying this network of young people called toastmasters club of New Delhi, playing late night quizzes and was getting a hang of ‘Pysche’.   

One fine morning of March second week, I received a call from my boss asking about my well-being. I did the customary ‘All is well’ and his next sentence made me a wary woman. He asked if I can rejoin active duty 3 months before the joining date? As you all know, such questions are veiled commands when they come from bosses. Thanks to the 19^th virus from the COVID family that recently took birth. I was asked to let go of 3 months of my Special Leave. To explain, I work for a UN agency – UNICEF.

With this, I started mourning the end of the fun times- the stomping of the neighbor’s roof, the tyranny on the husband’s car, the revenge act with foreign language; I was made to pay for all of that. I started imagining my life after office restarts and trust me didn’t like it at all. I had started delivering mental eulogy to all of my favorite things which to me were even dearer than Maria’s ‘raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, white mettle kettles and warm woollen mittens’. The grief was visible on my face and obviously the husband had to ask. Well, he has been trained in 6 years and how. With utmost empathy on his face while dancing with happiness in his head that God has granted him his wishes, he asked, ‘why do you look sad my dear?’  And I broke down. I said, ‘you see, now I will have to let go of everything that I loved doing during my leave- my dance, driving, Spanish, toastmasters meetings…. I don’t feel good about it. I don’t want to go back to work before the designated date.’ Successfully hiding his glee and simultaneously imagining the good times coming his way, he consoled me as I cried.

Stress clouded my mind starting the evening of 31 March. After long, the sense of going back to school after summer vacations did rounds. In the morning, I didn’t feel like waking up as if I had entered a new era of gloom. With a feeling not less than that of being befooled, I re-joined work on 01 April 2020.

Few calls and zoom meetings down, I thought that coming back to work after a happy break of 1 year wasn’t as bad as I had imagined it to be. Thanks to the lock-down, I was working from home. I attended 5 zoom meetings on COVID-19 on the first day of work and wrote 3 observation notes. Could still had my share of fun by putting husband to work by making him write some of those three. And not only that I also wrote this chronicle the same evening. I went for an evening walk in the society premises successfully evading the spy cameras of the lock-down crusade. At the dinner table, I told my husband. ‘it was a good day’. Tomorrow, I will restart driving.