One night in the middle of the lockdown in April, I got locked out of my bedroom in Wales. I had just completed a month’s stay in a cottage...
One night in the middle of the lockdown in April, I got locked out of my bedroom in Wales. I had just completed a month’s stay in a cottage on the University of Wales campus in Lampeter. I had pulled the door too hard when leaving and the automatic lock clicked shut. I had not lived in the house long enough to grow into it.
I didn’t know how tightly the windows had to be pulled down to make the house airtight; how the radiator worked; and the exact quantum of force to apply on the door to achieve the “Goldilocks zone” where the latch bolt sits on the strike plate but doesn’t slip into its slot. It was 6 degrees Celsius, and the only room that had a heater was the bedroom.
I was by myself in an empty corridor of a secluded cottage, shivering in my pyjamas, in a nearly empty university campus in a foreign country. I felt abandoned.
I was in Lampeter on a three-month residency under the Charles Wallace India Trust Creative Writing and Translation Fellowship. When I received my acceptance letter in October 2019, no one knew that a virus originating in China would take over the world and...
