Lockdown Chronicles

Please don’t stop the music

On March 22, it begins a little before 5pm. The time lag is something I will remind myself of later because it shows that at a basic level, for all its love for virality and ‘sound energy’, the nation is not in sync. At 5pm, however, there are faces at windows and balconies; there are people on the road; and all anyone can hear is coordinated chaos.

“I can hear clapping and banging on vessels,” writes a friend. It is 4.55pm.

The original command, issued by the Prime Minister on March 19, was to clap at 5pm on March 20, ostensibly to support those working on the front lines against Covid-19 (because somehow, clapping for five minutes would show the virus our medical awesomeness). However, in the intervening few days, WhatsApp forwards circulated faster than contagion and informed the people of India that this wasn’t just the Prime Minister asking Indians to replicate viral videos from Covid-struck European cities. The 5pm clap was all about destroying the virus using sound energy.

Consequently now, on March 22, we are a nation of Saucepan Men and the air is filled with the sharp, echoing yowls of steel spoons and spatulas hitting the flat bottoms of pans and plates. Metal slams into metal and the sound is pure dissonance. In many neighbourhoods, conches are being blown (or perhaps played off YouTube?).

Two weeks later, despite this exhibition of sound energy, more than 3,000 people will have tested positive for Covid-19, at least 75 will have died of the infection and there are more than 200 containment zones in Mumbai. For now, though, there is only metallic jubilation all around — desperate, clanging, relentless.

A cluster of us old friends have over the years come together to form a nucleus. It would be wrong to call us a family because we’re not held together by obligation or inertia. You don’t choose family; you just make the best of it. These people, though, they’re chosen and for reasons I will never understand but always be thankful for, they’ve chosen me. So yes, we’re friends in the purest sense of that word. This collective keeps us somewhere close to sane when everything else is madness.

On March 22, for the first couple of minutes, we were still able to write messages to one another. “How the hell do so many people have conches?” “This cannot seriously be happening?!” “I want to cry a little.” By 5.04pm, we had all gone quiet. We sat in rooms across the world, hearing the noise of the herd — “GO CORONA GO” — swell up against our individual silences like a battering ram. Unbelonging has a tinny, mineral taste.

“Will it never stop?”

In one pocket of central Mumbai, one friend stood at his window and screamed at the people who were too busy banging plates to notice his rage. Far away in Andheri, at 5.17pm, another wrote that it had finally stopped and azaan was ringing cleanly through the air that was still humming with the tinnitus of the 5pm viral ritual.

In Bandra, with its artisanal bread and kombucha and Japanese cheesecake and sushi, it went on for 12 minutes. In that time, I felt as though everything inside me shattered to jagged, impossible-to-rejoin pieces.

Then at 5.12pm, there was quiet. The windows started emptying as people returned inside. I could see people walking into the kitchens facing my window and put the utensils back on their shelves.

That was when it happened.

Someone in an apartment near mine started blasting Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up”. The song is suddenly more musical and harmonious than it has ever been since its release in 1987. Most of the words are muffled but “Never gonna give you up” and “or desert you” — possibly because of the higher notes in their melody — ring loud and clear as Astley’s baritone happily soars through our little neighbourhood.

For the next 45 minutes, the silliest, ear-wormiest of pop music from the Eighties and Nineties thudded against our walls and window panes. Love songs, from us to an old-fashioned idea of India.

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Pineapple

The date is March 25 and I’m suffused with admiration for Amitabh Bachchan’s T-rated tweets because this lockdown has just about started, and already I’m confused about how many days into it we are. (It’s a little complicated for us in Mumbai because Maharashtra went into partial lockdown on March 20 and the national lockdown was announced on March 24. Also, I can’t count to save my life.)

The morning after the lockdown announcement is calm, quiet and not yet empty of newspapers. Last night, I could hear raised voices and yelling, which was … unexpected. You don’t expect Bandra to brawl.

“It’s like a stampede here,” a friend in Santacruz, who had stepped out to pick up a loaf of bread, told me. I worriedly asked if she was hurt or needed anything. “No, not like that. I mean, it’s a long queue,” she wrote back. Another friend messaged while also waiting in a queue, and we briefly mulled over whether millennials who want to buy ice creams from medical stores but can’t decide which flavour, should be allowed out in public. (Ans: No.)

That was last night. This morning, I had just about finished two of three newspapers, when I got a call from the ex. “Do Nespresso pods count as essential services?” Anuvab asked me. I confessed ignorance and expressed doubts. He said he was going to be like Leo di Caprio in The Revenant and step out to stock up on Nespresso.
“You don’t think there’ll be violence out there, do you?” he said.
“In Pali Market in general? Or outside Choice Foodland in particular?”
“Madam, it’s the great outdoors and we are living in times of pandemic. Anything could happen. If something happens to me, you’ll regret this mockery and rue the day you didn’t use your Press card to save my life.”
“Because Press id is anti-viral?” As usual, I’m struggling to keep up with what passes for logic in Anuvab’s head.
“No,” he said, “but the Press card might be handy if policemen want to throw me in jail for stepping out to buy Nespresso during a lockdown.”

Which is how two people who have uncoupled end up going grocery shopping together.

Not one of the policemen stationed in Pali Market showed any inclination to accost anyone. Anuvab decided to chat with a cop, who was clearly more interested in buying paneer. I sidled off to chat with a fruit vendor who suggested I buy a pineapple. “It might be the last pineapple you have this year,” he said, “and it’s only a little bit bruised at the bottom. You won’t even notice until you’ve almost finished eating it.”

A few minutes later, Anuvab and I reconvened outside Choice Foodland. The shopkeeper spotted him and beamed.
“What can I get you, sir?” he said.
“Those Nespresso pods,” Anuvab said, pointing at the baton-like packages stacked up near the cash counter. “How many do you have?”
The man seemed confused. “Nespresso? Like the ones you bought yesterday?”
It turned out the man had nine packets left after Anuvab’s previous foraging outing. Now he bought five more and asked if the remaining four could be “reserved” for him. “Just in case I run out,” Anuvab said. There are 10 pods in each packet. The shopkeeper smiled and said no, he wouldn’t be able to reserve anything for anyone.

I would make fun of the fact that Anuvab is stockpiling Nespresso pods but for the fact that I paid Rs 180 for a pineapple. It is safe to say none of us are making particularly sound decisions.

Essential items

Things I can’t find during lockdown:

Maggi noodles
Cake
Cooking oil.

This being Bandra, I have been offered imported instant noodles, McVitie’s chocolate-coated biscuits and cold-pressed olive oil as alternatives by compassionate salespersons. I appreciate the gesture, but my Maggi-loving heart demands I check at other stores before accepting this injustice.

Side note: guess what is not listed among essential items? Sanitary napkins. Though given even officially essential items aren’t coming into the city, it wouldn’t have helped even if all the men who run this blighted country had remembered that most women get periods every month.

Thanks to the lockdown, we now play pandemic hopscotch in Bandra. Outside every shop, there are squares painted on either the pavement or the road. Each aspiring customer is to stand on a square and wait for the queue to move so that shops aren’t crowded. Social distancing is an exercise in patience. Mark’s in Pali Market helpfully plays music from a speaker that has, like the rest of us, seen better days. As a result, one minute you’re listening to “Lambada”; next minute, you’re ordering things like keema, chicken and cooked tongue.

As grateful as I am for the cooked tongue, the tragic truth is even at Mark’s, there is not one packet of Maggi noodle to be procured.

This really hurts. I don’t want the fancy flavoured, foreign instant noodles. At best, I can stretch myself to Wai Wai, which is like a love-child of murukku and noodles (it’s so far removed from organic produce that you don’t even need to throw it in boiling water to make it edible). But really, I want Maggi — that rectangle slab of tasteless noodles (one-third of which has crumbled into squiggly bits at the bottom of the packet) with the masala that stains the noodles yellow and fills boiling water with the taste of childhood memories. (Add cheese and a splash of vinegar for pure, unadulterated contentment.)

“How can they not have Maggi?” I wail to my mother, who is cooling her heels in the opposite end of the country.
“It’s a travesty,” says my mother, with very little genuine sympathy. “Is the distribution system collapsing because of the state and the Centre bickering? Or is some sort of misunderstanding or glitch?”
“God knows.” I do not appreciate how this conversation is paying attention to the system instead of me, but I humour my mother. “It’s tough to get any idea of what’s actually happening because most reporters are stuck thanks to no public transport etc. Maybe it’s the police. There were loads of reports of cops not letting delivery guys through even though deliveries are allowed under lockdown.”
“In Kolkata, the cops are singing Anjan Dutta songs. I think I prefer them stopping delivery boys.”
“Please focus on the trauma being suffered by your only child, Mother. There’s no Maggi in Bandra!”
“Well, you could just make it,” my mother suggests. “The masala can’t be that complicated and surely shops aren’t running out of plain noodles too?”
“This is not about noodles, Ma! To not have the option of eating Maggi is like attacking my fundamental rights. It’s like taking a hammer to my mental health and general wellbeing. At difficult times like these, we need Maggi, with its assurance of zero nutrition and 100% nostalgia, to comfort us!”

I could go on about Maggi, but I stop because of what I see on my phone.

We’ve got into the habit of video calls ever since my mother had an accident a few months ago that initially left her looking like the first cousin of Frankenstein’s creation. Now, she’s almost entirely healed, but we still do the video calls. Most of the time, this means I see everything in the room other than my parents. Occasionally, my mother will carefully position the phone so that I have a stellar view one ear and one tuft of hair (both hers). This morning, however, is an exception. She’s in frame and in focus. Which is why not only can I see my mother, but I can also see her reaching for and then biting into a darbesh.

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I shriek at an appropriate volume. “A darbesh!” (It’s Bengali laddu.)

The only thing this achieves is that my mother takes her second bite even before she’s gulped down her first. She grins.

“How the hell did you get bloody darbesh in the middle of a lockdown?” I ask.
“It’s an essential item,” my mother replies.
“No it isn’t.”
“Well, it should be. Anyway, your father defied lockdown and went all the way to Dhakuria to get this darbesh. As a supportive wife, I’m duty-bound to eat this.”
“You’re also diabetic, in case you’d forgotten. And both of you are supposed to be staying at home. Not traipsing around Kolkata, looking for bloody darbesh.”
“I’m only having one a day.”
“Oh yay. Proper tsunami of relief.”
My mother grins again and finishes the wretched sweet.
I scowl.

Overheard in Bandra

“I can’t do this surgical mask ya. It’s too hot. I’ll get heat rash on my face.”
“Corona ya heat rash?”
“Corona.”
“You can not be serious.”
“Do you know how much I had to pay the dermatologist for that [indistinct] treatment? He’s Kareena Kapoor’s doctor. This glowing skin doesn’t come cheap. I can’t afford to go back to him with a heat rash.”
“You could die!”
“But while I’m alive, I’ll have great, blemish-free skin. If I die, you can admire that skin in the coffin.”
“You’re Hindu.”
“Ya, but I live in Bandra.”