NEW FANTASIES

Some may dream of travel post lockdown, but Samanth Subramanian’s longings are closer home

- Samanth Subramanian

There are those who, in the locked-down weeks during the pandemic, yearn for grand adventure. That’s understandable, I suppose. The very opposite of this confinement is an extreme kind of physical or social liberation—a hard ramble up a mountain, or a deep dive into an ocean, or a rave on a beach. And after the lockdown ends, they’ll travel, I think—although that verb feels too weak for the energy with which people will seek out the world. They’ll burst out of their houses like champagne from a shaken bottle, and they’ll pour around the planet as if to satisfy themselves that it’s all still there. I have friends who will be on booking websites the minute flights resume, with their credit cards at the ready, raring to get as far away from their homes as possible.

Not I. What I long for, before and above everything else, is an evening out. Nothing extravagant, no Michelin stars or night-long pub crawls. Just dinner with a small group of people.

Let me lay out the scene, for myself as much as for you, because even in the description of this fantasy, I sense that it draws closer and grows firmer, and I feel heartened that it will soon come to pass.