A year ago, the world went into lockdown. I was in India, on what was supposed to be a ten day vacation, and what had turned into a two-week quarantine. My flights back had been cancelled, my work had gone remote, and so I had decided to stay back - for what I thought at the time would be a few weeks.
That first month, all of us started doing all these zoom calls, with different groups of friends. We caught up with more people in that one month than we had in a year. Those fizzled out after a while, when we realised this wasn't ending any time soon.
But one sustained, and has continued.
My father used to play bridge with his friends when he was in college. Over the years, he didn't keep up with the game, save during the occasional getaway they did once every few years. A couple of his friends have stayed connected to the game, at varying levels of interest. So at some point during those early zoom calls, someone suggested hey, why don't we all start playing bridge online?
So this group of 60-something men, all with varying levels of comfort with technology, sitting in different countries and continents, started playing bridge online. Four times a week, without fail.
My mother and I watched, first with amusement, then with some consternation, as our daily schedules began to revolve around his bridge calendar. Meals, shows being binged, evening walks or drives, calls with the brother and SIL - they were all planned so that the bridge was not impacted.
A few months later, he discovered that another friend has a whole other group of online bridge players, and he asked to get in on that. So suddenly, he was playing every day, and was beginning to juggle these two groups of fellow players. The mother meanwhile started texting with the wives of his college gang, with debate over whether an intervention was required as yet.
It got to the point where we ended up creating a shared Google calendar, the parents and I. He faithfully goes in every week and enters his upcoming games, and we have continued planning everything else around them. Even now, being back in the US for three months, while my parents and I do try and do a call a few times a week while I'm having breakfast and they're having dinner, I check the calendar before calling him, because God forbid I call in the middle of a game.
With his college gang, a fair amount of drama has taken place of the past year of bridge. They started by having video chat on at the same time, which some people found very distracting, tried doing just audio calls for a while (some people didn't like that either), and now just do text chat apparently. Some people in his college gang seem to be a problem child, and are a source of great personal amusement to me, because they very much remind me of certain problem children the gal pals and I have had to deal with in our own time.
The father, being a diplomatic sort of chap, will never overtly bad mouth this person, even to me. But he lets drop enough hints for us to catch on when things are more cray cray than usual. I understand there was a huge brouhaha between this problem child and another friend a few weeks ago, bigger and more dramatic than usual, leading to friend leaving the group I think? And said friend has refused to play with problem child anymore, so I think they have now split into two groups, and alternate between the two who had a fight?
This morning, they called me while I was making my chai and toast, and they were prepping dinner. And the conversation began like this:
"Your gift arrived! Trust you to think of this!"
"Hain? I haven't ordered my gift yet?"
"Then who sent him this book on Bridge?"
Apparently someone has sent him a gift for his upcoming birthday, but we don't know who. So that's a puzzle we have to solve.
For the next hour, we ate, we chatted, I rolled my eyes only a couple of times. After a while, I started hinting that we should end the call.
"Why, are we boring you? Do you have things to do? What time is it? Oh GOSH, it's 8.30! I have bridge in half an hour! Ok bye!"
