COVID-19 | LOCKDOWN DIARIES

My journey through the pandemic. Disappointment and hope.

(what did we learn, and where to go from here)

We experienced our arrival in the safety of Singapore, mid-Covid, as a liberation — flaleman 2021

March 20, 2020. We were in Belgium, with all our paperwork and passports and visa at the Indian Embassy.

I was at the bus stop, picking up my daughter from her last day of school before we were scheduled to fly to India. The radio was on. All the news was about Italy. Where people kept dying. But Italy was far away.

Then the program was interrupted — for a news broadcast that I had never imagined I would ever hear in my life. It came with a bang. Was this really happening? Everything got disrupted. The world changed.

And we had never even heard of Zoom.

One of the most iconic photos of the Covid apocalypse in India— New Delhi, April 26, 2021, Jewel Samad/AFP, via Getty Images

We’ve had three years of great suffering since. Millions of people got displaced. Many got stuck for months far away from home. In India alone, in the first few weeks of the pandemic, with no notice at all, an estimated 20 to 30 million of migrant workers were sent away from their employers, only to embark on a walk home, some for thousands of kilometers, penniless and treated like Untermenschen, spreading…