Smell of Coffee

The Beginning

The year 2020 started with celebration of brother in law’s marriage. With laughter and shopping in full swing. Trying the twinning outfits with wife and son unaware of whats going to strike us in near future.

4days = 4 months

At the end of February myself and my mom went to my home town Dharwad to finish off a long pending site registration. Mom thought of staying in Dharwad for 4 more days to complete some civil work of our Dharwad house. Leakage from roof is a well known issue in Dharwad. Soon I cam back from Dharwad, the lockdown game started. Mom who wanted to stay in Dharwad for 4 days, had to stay there for 4 months in one of our relative's house. With more stringent restrictions on travel and with less knowledge on corona, she had to stay there.

Cleaning and more cleaning

With son on my side I enjoyed cleaning the house. My First job in the morning was to clean the house. Started with sweeping and wiping the floors on daily basis to wiping the floor twice in a week. My son added more variants to cleaning activity as he used to walk front, wipe the floor and move forward leaving his footsteps and occasionally slipping on the floor.

Arrival of Angel

In all this busy life, our new bundle of joy Pari arrived to fill the small vacuum in our life which I used for playing mobile games and watching movies. With her cutest smile to my son's joyous laugh, life went on.

The bachelors

After a challenging but yet joyful 8 months of household work and some office work too we some 8-9 friends thought of going some place for vacation for 3-4 days. The place we decided was Sakaleshpur. We planned the days in such a way that we all will be bachelors in that week. Most of us sent our wife too their mother place and even they went joyfully. What else we need,  drank like fish.

Smell of Coffee

Soon after coming from Sakaleshpur 3 of us witnessed some Covid-19 symptoms. One fellow was on bed for 2 days as he was feeling weak, 1 lost the smell and I got a fever. I don’t recall my body hitting 103.x degree celsius. We all 3 shifted to one of my friend who had shown the symptom very first. All 3 of had lost the smell. To regain senses back we used to inhale Vicks on regular basis. Enjoyed the 5 days laughing our asses out and cursing covid-19. One of the friend wanted to go back to Dharwad for his daughter birthday so wanted to take test to complete the government said quarantine period officially. My badluck I tested positive on the swab test itself and other 2 got the result 5 days later. I decided to shift back to my home and to be in isolation. Though we all knew that all 3 of us are infected but thought of  spreadind the disease to others was much painful. So I came back to my home to enjoy the isolation period. With zero knowledge on the cooking I started my 10 days of isolation. Told the fellow apartment members. Surprisingly they all supported me with good wishes and I became the first official covid-19 patient in our apartment. Got a chance to taste different variety of food. On 8th day I even asked for cigarette along with food and the neighbour uncle gave even that with a smile and even asked whether I need alcohol or not. The daily routine was to smell the bottle of coffee to check whether I regained the smell or not. Daily video call with wife while cooking the food was such a happy moment. That will remain for lifelong. Prepared egg fried rice, dal kichdi and my favorite pulivagare. I still remember the day I got the smell of coffee, I called wife and informed her the news as if I climbed mount Everest.

Promotion

The challenging year ended with me getting promoted to next band. Initially I thought I deserve it but later started questioning myself on what did I do to deserve that kind of a promotion. Still trying hard to do justice to that role.