As love affairs go, ours wasn’t the ‘love at first sight’ mushy-mushy type. Heck, I hadn’t even helped my wife pick her out from the furniture store that had just announced a ‘Black Friday’ sale that transformed genteel ladies into blood-thirsty Amazonian princesses.

I had instead, followed the line of my fellow caught-with-no-excuse-to-get-out-of-it-husbands as they made a bee-line for the nearest corner, away from the eye-gouging and cloth-tearing feeding frenzy. Even when it had been delivered to our apartment the next day, I hadn’t paid much attention as I munched down my double patty beef burger with a glass of lemonade.

Our love had evolved more organically, as all true romances do. And for that, I had a bat to thank for. While Corona raged outside our windows, we defied the rules of ‘social distancing’ and got to know each other during the long hours of the night, when my wife and daughter had gone to sleep. In the background, Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin would be plotting to outdo each other while we both made goo-goo eyes at each other and got to know all about the other’s past and future aspirations.

Slowly, but surely, we gave in to fate. It was a match made in lockdown heaven. And as with all things of the heart, sooner or later it had to end.

On Monday morning, I woke up and knew that the day had come to spend some time apart. I mean we had never said we were exclusive. I knew it was time for us to see other people. I could tell by the looks my wife and my daughter gave me whenever they walked into the lounge to find me sprawled on Rhonda, (after two months of mandatory lockdown which for us, amounted to speed-dating, we had come to a first name basis), that they wanted me to broaden my circle see other people. It didn’t help that my daughter had caught me scribbling R+M on the armrest with my fingers. In a way, the writing was already on the wall, or on the couch to be precise. And after ratting me out for spilling coffee, which wouldn’t have happened if we had gone with a darker colour instead of grey- I’m not a racist ok? I’m just sayin’- I was ready for a break, just to let Rhonda know that I wasn’t easy, I had options.

So, I went out, like a primitive pre-Corona caveman, out into the sun, suffocating in the coffee breath air of my mask, to get my medical done. After an hour of moonwalking from left to right on the metro-as I had been instructed by the missus to not, at any cost, get my hands out of my pocket and touch even the air, let alone the railings- I got to the medical fitness center where I saw the line stretching and coiling around the building like the burlap sacks I had been harvesting on my love handles for the past couple of months under the guise of building a ‘dad bod’.

As I walked from end to end twice, looking for a chink in the chain, or in other words, an opportunity to cut in, I was aware of a feeling of unity and harmony amongst South Asian nationalities that traditionally, would never agree on anything except total annihilation of each other. Today, however, Bengalis stood shoulder to shoulder with Indians who linked arms with Pakistanis and Nepalis and Africans as they all glared at me to get back to the end of the line. My degree in Lip Reading hasn’t come in yet but a two-year-old could’ve guessed the words billowing behind those masks as I beat a hasty retreat to the end of the line.

And thus began the next five hours of what can only be described as ‘The Great Deluge’. I found pores on me where no man should ever have pores as the heavens seemed to open up only on me as my pallid, indoor-used, couch-lounging body sang like a canary after spending a day in solitary. I must have lost ten pounds of carefully built flab from all the home-baked apple pies, the extravagant cheese omelettes and the gallons of cold drinks I had guzzled down as I stood in the hardly moving human centipede that was being roasted under the 130 Fahrenheit temperature. Here’s what they don’t tell you about standing in a line; there’s a lot of standing involved and not much moving. You would think that every time somebody moves at the front of the line, you move too. You’d be wrong. There’s a formula here which depends on how far down the line you are. Now, I know I cheated on my Calculus II paper so I might not be an expert but here’s how it goes: after one person goes, the person infront of you doesn’t move, he only looks up. When two persons leave the line, he moves the weight of his body from the left leg to the right as he farts, crop dusting behind him to bring home to the effects of osmosis in a way that your seventh-grade science class teacher who had prophesized that you wouldn’t amount to much, never could. When three people go, the person infront scratches his balls and may flick some of the sweat from his brow your way so get ready to do some Neo-level bullet-dodging moves. If you’re lucky, which means if you’re somewhere in the early 200’s after four people leave, you might get a chance to take a mini step forward and gaze at the change of scenery, snickering at the people behind. However, it’s not an exact science and there have been instances where even after five people, the only movement that reaches you is the sight of someone digging for gold in his nose.

I could go on but after the third hour, the details get sketchy as somewhere amongst the vapors oozing out of my physical body, a part of me also decided to escape. And it was only when I felt the sharp pain of a needle being stabbed into my tired and flabby arm to draw out some pizza-fed blood, that I realized that I had made it.

Afterwards, as I made my way back, I knew what I had to do. When I opened the door to our home, I avoided the outstretched arms of my daughter and the groans of the better half as I had eyes for only Rhonda. I snuggled myself into the indentation that had taken two months of binging on The Tiger King and re-watching The Wire, and vowed never to get off the couch again. As I fluffed the couch cushions for a better snuggle, my eyes fell on one of the gummy bears I had been eating last night. It was a red one, my favorite, wedged in between the cushions. It was as if Rhonda was saying, Welcome home baby.