It was during the relaxed lock-down period that we all caught COVID. Everyone in the family, except for my sister-in-law. She was somehow immune to COVID. I think the day after we discovered that most of us were tested positive for COVID, me and my father went out of the house into the courtyard and were pacing rounds in the courtyard, as usual, because we were feeling shut out of the world. We discovered that the gate was locked from outside. Somebody had latched the gate shut. My memory is just a wisp, so I imagine we were pacing the courtyard when we found the gate latched from outside. But this fact remains clear: somebody had latched the gate shut from outside.
At that moment I discovered how fragile our idea of community was. All you had to be was to be ostracised from the rest of the world—in this case, because COVID—and immediately you became something the community did not want among themselves. As a fundamentally polite citizen, my father would never have thought of roaming around the place and spreading COVID in the community. But after all the things he meant to the community, someone had shut the gates on us, effectively circumscribing our existence in the community to the walls of our house.
This was deeply disturbing. How could you trust the community again? All you could imagine as the feeling of community was shut down at that point. My father was nonchalant, like always. It appeared to me that he did not find it a fundamental closure of our being-in-community. But to me, it changed a lot of things. It was as if our family’s connection to the community, just like how every family in the community is connected to the community itself, was broken off because we had become an object of fear, of a lack of trust.
This was a lesson no sociology could teach me. It rendered clear to me the unpredictable nature of community. One moment you are part of it, and the next, it shuts its doors on you. It just happened that it was literal in this case.