Loneliness as default
Have you experienced loneliness? Of course you have. But I don’t mean feeling lonely sometimes. No, I mean when loneliness is the default position and everything else like social interactions, work, hobbies and a life that most people don’t even stop to think about but are just part of, becomes an exception. My question is not whether you are alone because being alone with one’s thoughts is a necessary and much desired state, often a luxury that busy, harassed people (more women living in relative poverty in a specific context) crave. I cherish my alone moments or what my cousin, single and living in the same house as his elderly mother, calls ‘me time’. And I am also not talking about the loneliness that accompanies depression and other forms of mental unwellness; I am talking about loneliness the default position which one tries actively to live with.
I live this default position. I can now understand somewhat what my mother meant when she told me and my friend Sanku that if she could, she would have thrown herself over the balcony, although that is certainly not my default position. At the time I kept dismissing these disturbing images and told her instead all the ways in which she was fortunate (she wanted for nothing materially) and tried to ‘fix’ her life because it compensated for what I could not give her which was a social life with me. As she sat there increasingly immobile in her favourite position on the couch in her living room facing the television, which was on all day, she tried to maintain social contacts via the telephone, less frequently as her peers died and younger relatives and my friends grew busier, or by talking to the household staff. There was a period when she kept employing people to come at different parts of the day ostensibly to ‘clean’ because Kolkata was so dusty. My mother was paranoid about cleanliness and when she was still mobile, she cleaned after the cleaner left; but even for her this was an act of desperation. The world which had given her life meaning had simply disappeared. For a busy active woman who loved walking and travelling, was very social keeping in touch with friends and relatives, was admired for her culinary skills and her housekeeping, and was good looking, a person whose whole life had been other people, her home had become an island cast adrift with her being marooned.
It always surprises me that I can now in hindsight make this forensic analysis of what my mother went through and did not then. I did not then, not because I didn’t feel it in my bones but because I felt powerless to mend the social fabric of her life. And that’s really what the essence of loneliness is - the loss of social interaction, the loss of a world where even though one is alone most of the time (at least for some of us) one is nevertheless in and with others.
Readers of my blog may be wondering why suddenly I have switched from writing about politics with a small ‘p’ to talking about what would seem an intensely personal issue. But I have always maintained that the personal is political and this piece is no exception because loneliness is not just personal, it’s to do with the society of which we are a part. Our lives are nourished by everyday social interactions, nothing special nothing out of the way, just plain old everyday often irritating mostly mundane social interactions. But social rules do set a limit to when and with whom one can interact on a regular basis, rules that privilege certain kinds of relationships as for example family relationships. So those of us who live in family relationships either conjugal and/or with children, interaction is a necessity even though it is often so irksome that you want to escape but nevertheless take for granted. But if you are single, older and with practically no family in the vicinity you don’t have access to that which other people take for granted, which is being part of a social group where you just belong. I am not naïve enough to pretend that the family and kinship is trouble free. Having done gender all my adult life I know that the ‘family’ is not just a site of caring and sharing but also of conflict, and competition for resources and power. The home for many women can be a living hell and for some a death sentence. I know of many friends involved in increasingly bitter blood feuds. I also know of friends, mostly here in the west, who have broken off their family relations. I had bitter battles with my mother but she was there to battle with. But for most of us somehow these relations make for unquestioning belongingness.
Governing the self and policing others: pandemic generated anti-social practices
Which is why the anti-social practices that came into existence because of the pandemic have played havoc with our social selves. I think most people would agree that it was a difficult time and continues to be so; for those who lost family members it has been tragic. For those of us who survived but were taken ill, the lasting effects are for some still visible. The way in which the pandemic was governed with many of our states turning rogue appropriating coercive instruments of rule which had nothing whatsoever to do with mitigating the worst effects of the pandemic but had instead everything to do with controlling the people, left an imprint on our souls. The more authoritarian the governing practices were the more we governed ourselves to conform; the more we became dependant on authority figures, doctors, the expert virologists, the television talk shows all of whom were clueless about the virus but refused to say so. And the more we condoned the strict measures that kept us ‘safe’ the less we thought of older people living in care homes cut off and cast out of the world. I am not in any way condoning the conspiracy theorists who stormed the streets as lockdowns were partially lifted accompanied by their right-wing neo-Nazi friends which in ‘liberal’ Europe became a trend. That was morbid individualism (borrowed from Amitabh Ghose’s, The Nutmeg’s Curse) also part of the anti-social practices I am talking about.
Lockdown became a living hell for me especially in 2020 when we were first introduced to it and did not know what the future would be. As everybody retreated into the safety of their homes, I was one of those for whom the home became an isolation cell except that it was much bigger. Social distancing became the credo of the years 2020-21. Most people around me here in Germany were rigorous in its practice making up more and more rules. We met outdoors in the bitter cold; friends bought outside heaters so we could meet in the open on the terrace. We even had Christmas drinks outside in my garden with our winter coats on. Social distancing reinforced the exclusivity of European nuclear families and lifestyles; if you were not family you didn’t belong.
Alone with myself in my house in small town Germany I did my best to pass the days following a routine. I was fortunate that my best friend adopted me as part of her family. Since her daughter and grandson had come to stay making it easier for the daughter to work from home while my friend did schoolwork with the grand son, I became a key attraction for the boy. My time with them was of course rationed since they were busy, and I was not, but nevertheless the contact for a couple of hours a day twice or three times a week kept me sane. The little boy when taught about social distancing (we were all learning new rules, new codes of behaviour) firmly declared that with Maitrayee he did not have to socially distance because she was family!
WhatsApp and zoom became essential as we kept regular contact over distances and across time zones. My Bread and Roses group and the Calcutta group became my regular source of companionship. I managed to renew old contacts. The remote contact widened my network of close friends and kept me functioning. Conversations always began with corona news, how the virus was progressing, whether anybody was sick, who among our mutual acquaintances had died and……how. I noticed in these interactions a trend towards ghoulishness as also schadenfreude. Accompanied unfortunately by a sort of smug sense that we had followed the rules and others who got sick had not. So often when somebody got infected despite the litany of corona rules they had followed, the first question was how did you get it? And of course, for some from India the fault lay along class and caste lines! It must have been the maid or the driver because the working classes are the vectors of disease. Here again as in many previous occasions we rehearsed a secular, liberal upper-class version of the Indian understanding of race, namely, caste laying down the boundary between who belongs and who does not, who is pure and who is not.
Policing older people became a justified practice. Here in Europe the governments recommended that older people (above 60) in the family should be ‘protected’ meaning that their children and especially grandchildren should not be visiting them and especially not in close quarters in a room. Whereas this made sense the practice was incredibly painful leaving my best friends Ina in Germany and Marguerite in the Netherlands with no other alternative but to say that come what may they were not going to ‘socially distance’ from their grandchildren.
But even more severe was the authority that adult children, some in residence and others remotely, exercised on the everyday life of their parents in south Asia most of whom were completely independent and self-supporting. In a reversal of roles they infantilised their parents with everyday phone calls warning of dire consequences, suggesting more and more stringent measures of social distancing, masking, and keeping oneself ‘safe’. And some parents I know saw this as proof of their children’s love. Since I don’t have children, I can’t judge. Naila travelled back to Bangladesh to spend time with her aunt now in her twilight years only to be confronted by the rules of social distancing imposed by the daughter apparently on the orders of the family physician. These included sitting at a larger than safe distance in the open veranda, visiting for not more than half an hour a day and so forth and so on. As Naila said goodbye to return to the UK she saw and felt the sadness in her aunt’s eyes; one can never be sure at that age if one will meet again.
The pandemic generated a practice that I call anticipatory bullying which was meted out when an acquaintance/ friend/ somebody with whom you regularly interact ticked you off in anticipation of a misdemeanour you might have committed or seen to have committed. It involved friends and acquaintances policing each other about the new norms of behaviour generated by the pandemic. I was very vulnerable to this since friends could ‘unfriend’ me and cite my so-called aberrant behaviour as the reason. On one occasion I was with a friend at her place for dinner who later tested positive for corona. She informed me immediately. So I got myself tested on Day 3 with a negative result and yet again on Day 5 with yet another negative test result. Two days later which was by now seven days since the dinner, I was invited by my friend Ina to her place. Knowing that I was negative and that I had scrupulously avoided her house for seven days I didn’t think it necessary to report to her my would have been status. A friend to whom I happened to mention that I was at Ina’s went on the moral high ground immediately and berated me for not having informed her, not once but repeatedly. I tried to explain that I had made sure that I was not infected but logic and reason was not required. The empowering effect of one’s rightness against another’s perceived wrong was for this person overwhelming.
I met this syndrome again when I returned to India but this time a friend was the victim. Her fault – getting the dreaded infection after a holiday, alone and I stress alone and not as part of a group or a crowd. This gave her sister the opportunity she had waited for to put her in her place which she then proceeded to do through abusive phone calls and messages and generally doing everything possible to make my friend miserable. What the omicron was unable to do which was to lay her low the sister had done.
On my return to India I found that the anti-social practices persisted despite all the science, vaccinations and certainly less infections. A friend ticked me off because I wanted to go around in my car checking how crowded the booths for the municipal elections were. Elections in India for the uninitiated is a spectacle especially in urban areas – long queues, tedious waiting time, police presence, arguments about who was ahead in the queue and everybody predicting the results. Taking the high moral ground, he declared that I should isolate at home because otherwise my OCI (which substitutes for a visa if you were an Indian national but no longer) could be confiscated as had happened in other states. When I asked what the transmission route for the virus might be from me to the crowds at the booth through a closed car window, and, given that the previous day I had tested negative, there was a disapproving silence on the phone. I guessed that logic and science were no longer seen as evidence, instead what I should have done was.
Living loneliness actively with a little help from friends
Our pandemic social interaction practices are not something new but merely a rehearsal in a stricter form of the social exclusionary practices that we have always had but now with a reason; we were asked by governments to socially distance ourselves from others and we did this out of solidarity. It is not surprising therefore that the nourishing power of social interactions kept me going: a phone call every other day from a friend in India not just as catch up but as mutual desire to be part each other’s life. Sharing food with friends in between the lockdowns and going easy once we were vaccinated in our interpretation of infection, social distancing, masking – all of it contributing to a feeling of community and belongingness. And of course the marches and demonstrations in support of refugees here widened the network of social interaction to include and be included. To live alone is a practice but loneliness must be actively lived.
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