A couple of years ago, I received an email from a retired university English teacher. His eyesight was poor, and so a friend sent the email on his behalf. He had taught in Sudan, where I am from, several years ago, and being a reader of this column, sent a note reminiscing about his time there, hoping to hear some news of how it had changed. His name immediately rang a bell, and I remembered that my mother, who was an English literature student at the University of Khartoum in the 1970s, often mentioned an English professor who had brought a special passion to his classes and left a mark on her.
For an entire generation of Sudanese like my mother, whose parents were barely literate, a free university education was transformative. She had spoken so often about this particular professor that I even remembered certain turns of phrase he had used in tutorials. She confirmed it was him, her face lighting up in a way I hadn’t seen in a long time. I emailed him back, and he said he did, in fact, remember my mother. It seemed as if we had all become protagonists in some literary plot, and we made plans to speak as soon as possible. Then nothing happened.
Life got in the way. My mother fell ill and the promise died in the urgency and distraction of tending to her. I thought of her teacher often, every day resolving to pick up the thread but never managing to. Until the first lockdown, that is.
In the slowing of life over the past eight months, I have picked up many of these threads. Truncated email conversations with old friends, missed catchup calls that were never rescheduled, thank-you notes that sat half written. With the suspension of the mindless daily activity of normal life, an entire hinterland of dormant relationships emerged. But even as I tried to pick up these pieces my brain kept skipping forward. I found myself dreaming of the time when the everyday could restart again – even though, in all likelihood, that would mean these threads being buried once more.
Now that vaccines bring hope the pandemic may soon be behind us, the next few weeks and months seem like a countdown to “normal”. That normal plays out on vivid reels in my mind. It is different things on different days. Sometimes it’s a loud scene – a crowded room of friends. Sometimes it’s a more prosaic moment – catching the bus, standing on a busy platform as a train pulls in, eating a quick lunch on a step or a bench in the middle of the city. Among all the things I have missed from pre-lockdown life, those are the ones that wind me when I think of them. The connective tissue of life, stretched across the day: they now feel, in hindsight, like luxuries, aspects of an existence cushioned by reassuring predictability.
Over the next few weeks I suspect we will see a lot of this hankering. We will try to nail scientists on when everyday life will resume, scour timelines sketching out the rollout of the vaccine, cautiously resurrect plans. But I worry something will be lost in the rush back to life as it was. Is there a way to merge what we have discovered through lockdown and isolation over the past few months with whatever comes next, rather than consigning everything we have experienced to the past?
A few weeks ago, I got another email. This time from my school principal in Khartoum – a teacher who was as pivotal to my own development as the old university professor had been to my mother. While me and the other students saw a cheerful man who calmly shepherded us through an education at a time when there was teargas in the streets, his message revealed that he had been constantly fending off threats of deportation and the closure of the school. No need to write back, he signed off, I’m sure you are busy.
But I will. As I did with my mother’s old teacher, who we found healthy and shielding and eager to talk. His friend sent a few words of reproach for the late reply, which I deserved. But then my mother got the chance to tell him, when he asked her what she had done after graduation, that she now sits in the same office he occupied decades ago, herself a tutor at the university, teaching the same course he did. In that moment, I was happy for time to stand still.
