Level 4 Lockdown
It’s the 10th of July 2021, and we’re still under lockdown since March last year. We were recently put back to Level 4 as the Covid-19 Delta variant is making it’s rounds around South Africa.
This past two weeks, we had deaths on both sides of my extended family. Two weeks ago, my Dad’s cousin passed away here in Cape Town. I was very sad that none of us could attend the funeral. This past week, it was my cousin’s ex-husband in Johannesburg. Now his death was particularly shocking as he was my age, and I will always remember him as a relatively young man.
Then this evening, my youngest sister, Malika, told me about her late father-in-law’s friend, Boeta Gamat, who is very ill in Groote Schuur Hospital. Last year, his brother was the first person I knew who died of the coronavirus. When I think of this sick man, I will always remember how back in 1997, my siblings and I went on a road trip to Durban, and Malika’s father-in-law asked us to drop a parcel at Boeta Gamat’s brother’s home in Chatsworth. Now none of us know Durban, and we were all shocked when we saw the area the uncle lived in was very rough. It was like something out of a Bollywood movie, complete with people walking around with cows chanting Hindi devotional songs.
That happened twenty four years ago, but the culture shock was so great, the memory was etched on my brain!
