The drone of the intercom broke my slumber. It was noon, on the first day of our mandatory COVID-19 government quarantine in Hong Kong. “Could your family come downstairs to the clinic with your identity documents? Please wear a mask,” said the woman on the phone grimly. I had butterflies in my stomach. My wife, son and I had submitted our saliva samples for COVID-19 testing just hours earlier, soon after we landed in Hong Kong. 

We had been dreading the call. We were half convinced we had contracted the virus, more out of paranoia than anything else. After all, we had spent the last two days traveling from Delhi to Hong Kong, surrounded by people at airports and in packed flights. 

We stepped into the clinic to join a couple more families looking around anxiously. They had been called too. I walked up to a nurse enquiring what was this about. “General health check, sir. Nothing to worry,” she said, every word easing my nerves.

It later turned out not one passenger on the two flights we took tested positive for COVID-19. But the fear was real. It followed us like a shadow. We had trained our mind that staying indoors was the way to deal with the pandemic.

For nearly three months we had been confined to our house in a suburb southeast of India’s capital Delhi. The city was shut and air travel was suspended. In June, we found a repatriation flight out of Delhi to Kuala Lumpur, overnight stay at the airport and then a connecting flight to Hong Kong, where we have been living since last year.

At the Delhi airport, passengers were covered head to toe in white and blue hazmat suits. Some wore aprons, “face shields” strapped to foreheads and had gloves and masks on. We chose to go with just masks and lots of sanitizer.

At the boarding gate for our Kuala Lumpur flight, just as I was about to enter the aerobridge, an airport staff approached me. “You need to wear this,” he said, as he handed out an apron and a “face shield”. “You’re in the middle seat. It’s mandatory,” he said curtly. I followed the instructions.

The airport

As we strode towards the check-in counters at the Kuala Lumpur airport the eeriness was palpable. We had spent a night at an airport transit hotel and were about to catch our flight to Hong Kong. We made our way past rows and rows of boarding gates with empty waiting enclosures. Unsold wares stared at us from behind shopfronts, which were closed off with duct tape and plastic sheets. It felt as if we had the whole airport to ourselves. A couple coffee shops were open and it seemed that had been done exclusively for us. I knew the pandemic had changed our world. But the depth of it was beginning to sink it.

The quarantine

The notice handed to us at the Hong Kong airport laid it out explicitly. Stepping out of our quarantine accommodation was punishable by law and would attract a heavy penalty. That didn’t help my claustrophobia. I dread being confined against my will, like in a prison. The quarantine home provided some relief though.

It was in a cluster of high-rises at Fo Tan in northeast Hong Kong. A two-bedroom unfinished flat, more like an apartment shell. The flooring was still concrete with no tiles. The kitchen had just one kettle. The windows were locked. But the upside was the space. It felt like an apartment, a space you could call home for 14 days. 

The phone rang. “Good afternoon. I’m calling from the Department of Health,” said the lady. “May I know your body temperature today?” We were given thermometers when we arrived at the quarantine center. We were to record our temperature twice a day and report it over the phone.

Food came thrice a day, with fruits and cold drinks in between. All meals came from restaurants. You could choose from a variety of options -- vegetarian, non-vegetarian Indian and Chinese meals. Meal packets were dropped in a bucket hung outside the door. 

The flat came with only the bare essentials. One table fan per person, no AC and no washing machine. But we could purchase stuff and have it delivered, except for window and split ACs. We bought a portable AC like many others quarantined here. The one thing I couldn’t fix was the bed, which was essentially a hard wooden board fitted into a frame. The flimsy mattress didn’t help either. By the third day, my wife and I were complaining of stiffness in the back. 

As I stepped into the lift, cardboards and tape lining the walls of the semi-finished elevator, I was convinced it was the bed. It was day 4 of quarantine and I had requested to meet a doctor for a crippling lower back ache. The doctor said bed was the likely reason and prescribed a pain relief gel. “I can’t give you painkillers. It might hide symptoms of COVID-19, if you might have any,” he said apologetically.

At the quarantine center, there’s one unwritten rule about medical tests -- no news is good news. So, it was a relief when on day 11, hours after we had submitted a second sample for COVID-19 testing, we hadn’t heard from medical staff. The next day, we received the document we had been keenly awaiting. A certificate states we didn’t show any symptoms of COVID-19 and could be let go home.

Two days later, just before midnight, we found ourselves under the open sky. As we waited for our taxi in the compound, our quarantine tower block loomed behind us. A week before flying out of Delhi I had imagined this moment in my head over and over again. Freedom, what would it feel like? It felt exactly what I had thought. Empowering.