INDEED. Like a soft breeze or a lingering thought, the zeal that elegantly clothed the people’s animated demeanor during the season of yuletide came and went without any drama. By Monday morning, the scheduled times for returning to school and work, it simply poofed into thin air and vanished without a trace.
It was only fitting that the last day of the 2025 Christmas season ended on a Sunday. When on the following day, it had dawned on the metropolis, the anarchy of the streets was again exposed, out in the open, finally, without the guise of Yuletide spirit and its colorful adornments.
Short-fused drivers once again snarled at each other from inside their gleaming SUVs as these jammed almost every inch of the intersections. Ironically, during the day before, which we ex-kids liked to call it in the day, Three Kings Sunday, the same city intersections were as free-flowing as Bankerohan even after a rain.
It seemed unthinkable, only two or three weeks ago, one could roll down a car window and wish people merry Christmas or happy New Year. But now, it’s Monday sucks baby, as that 70s saying goes. Now, that T-shirt meme is sadly played out in real time, in street intersections everywhere, like a sick way of welcoming the new year.
True, Grub drivers on both vans and single motorcycles still make their late and unending runs to deliver late gifts and packages. But with these, plus their regular assignments of food orders and other such deliveries, they significantly affect the volume of vehicles clogging the city’s thoroughfares.
Two drivers, stuck along the Ma-a junction, yell over the rumble of their idling multi-cabs, ‘it’s back to normal, pre’!, as though that were a quiet submission to the growing madness all around them. I lean back in my front seat, while at the same time tugging at the make-do seat belt, thinking ‘normal never left us, pre’.
The Christmastime celebrations were merely nothing but a thin veil that masked what normal was, and as Arnold would say, I’m baack… baby.
