Apocalypse Aunty
Apocalypse Aunty has been waiting for this day.
She has been stocking up on onions and potatoes since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Apocalypse Aunty laughs in the face of your extended curfew.
“Until further notice?” she scoffs, flinging sachets of herbal cold medicine and coconut milk powder across the kitchen like ninja stars. “Is that all you’ve got?”
And indeed, she’s got so much more.
Access to daily essentials is child’s play when you’ve been doing I’ll-grab-that-just-in-case shopping for most of your adult life.
Panic buyers? “Pfft… amateurs,” she mocks, devastatingly, as she scoops out a cup of basmati from the literal vat in her pantry.
There will be no frantic online purchasing at the stroke of 6am, only to have the website crash just as you reach the checkout page here.
Nor will there be any mystery vegetable combo boxes containing half a million small onions and the remnants of half a green chilli pepper.
And there will certainly be no emailed supermarket lists that have disappeared into the Void, or orders placed over WhatsApp that have vanished into the abyss of Time (unheeded, even though those two little ticks on your message are blue and you know someone has read it) here.
No.
When you’re Apocalypse Aunty, the grocer calls you.
She’s at the bank before the tellers. She grills the neighbourhood security guards for intel using bribes of drinking yoghurt. And she corners the cops with her disarming charm — by the time they know what’s happening, it’s already too late.
We salute you, Apocalypse Aunty. We’ll see you on the other side of this pandemic. But for now, keep saving lives, and keep saving everything else, too. We’re going to need it.
***
This piece was inspired by my mother-in-law, who is, inexplicably, ready for anything — a trait that I have never been more grateful for than during Sri Lanka’s month-and-a-half-long COVID-19 curfew. I should also point out that this really only encapsulates what it felt like during those first two weeks of uncertainty, where the country’s delivery systems weren’t quite ready for the load. Since then, things have improved considerably. Curfew or no curfew, I may never set foot in a supermarket again.
