Lockdown Chronicles #2

At the horizon, the flat blue of the sky is smudged with orange heat and violet shadow. The rippling sea reflects the orange in some parts and the blue in others. Anchored boats bob as the water rises with incoming tide. The sun is a neat, brilliant, golden circle. This is an unspectacular sunset, all drama of light and colour beaten out of it by summer heat. It’s also the first sunset I’m seeing since March and I find myself grinning stupidly under my mask as I stare at the sky and sea before me.

That’s when I hear the abuse. It’s rendered largely unrecognisable by the virtue of it being yelled out, but I know it’s directed at me because no one else is here. I look up to see a policeman. He, I note, is not wearing a mask but he does have on aviators that make him look a bit like a human-sized fly. From the fact that I can now decipher words in his yell (something about throwing me in jail), one may conclude he is not ambling but striding towards me. I scoot, without regrets and with my contraband — photographs of a sunset, taken from a bandstand in Bandra.

Of course it makes sense that during a lockdown to contain an infection, seaside bandstands are among the public spaces that are closed, but it feels wrong. This is the sea whose breeze once helped blow the plague away from Bombay. These bandstands are among the few spaces in this crowded city that can legitimately be described as ‘open’. The sea is a comfort to Mumbai and now, just the sight of it is contraband for all of us who don’t live in sea-view apartments.

Back home, I go through the photos in my phone the way a shoplifter examines their loot. The pictures are unremarkable. Even so, as I look at the sunset that’s been miniaturised to fit my phone’s screen, I find myself breathing slower and deeper. 

Today is exactly a month from the madness of April 5, when the Prime Minister’s call to switch off lights in homes for nine minutes left electricity boards and the power ministry scrambling for a man-made miracle. The announcement, made during a Prime Ministerial address to the nation, seemed at the time to be frustrating insubstantial and full of hollow rhetoric. In fact, it was revealing. It showed just how lightly the Prime Minister was taking the Covid-19 outbreak and that he saw the country, on the brink of financial collapse and riddled with the fear of contracting this new infection, as his entertainment. Some people looked for new streaming shows during lockdown; our Prime Minister got the entire country to make a TikTok video for him.

[image error]This is one stretch of Mumbai just before and during the nine-minute stunt. The photographs were taken by an HT photographer. A month later, I see more lights in the darkness.

When it finally happened, the engineers did end up saving the day. All the flats around me shut off their lights and quite a few yelled “Go Corona Go” for good measure. I remember feeling like the swivel-headed cop from The Lego Movie, except both my faces were snarling. I was furious that the Prime Minister would infantilise us like this, waving the lollipop of an idiotic spectacle to divert our attention; and I was doubly furious at us, because of course most of the country did switch off their lights because they believed that at 9pm on April 5, for nine minutes, the mahashakti of candles had anti-viral properties.

Welcome to 21st-century India where on one hand, engineers make careful calculations to ensure the country’s plunge into darkness is only temporary while on the other, nationalists following their Dear Leader’s instructions breathe new life to the Orientalist stereotype of the exotic, superstitious and gullible ‘native’. Back in the old days, at least you could grind your teeth and blame it on the British. Now it’s all on us.

At the time, the Prime Minister’s supporters said to detractors that the Prime Minister was just trying to comfort the anxious masses with small but significant acts that united the nation and made a leader memorable.

A month later, the memory of that night has been crowded out by drudgery, tragedy, anxiety and exhaustion. It’s from a distant past when fresh produce was not rotting in fields across India, daily-wagers hadn’t been driven to starvation because of gaps in our public distribution system, and we didn’t suspect migrant labourers were being forced to stay where they are because host states don’t want to lose cheap labour. We didn’t realise it then, but those were more hopeful times.

The present is made up of the restlessness of the privileged, the hunger of the poor, survivors’ guilt and the desperate selfishness that comes from abject fear.

My personal triumph is that I have not done any Insta Live sessions during this lockdown. Not that anyone wanted me to, but when has the lack of an invitation stopped anyone from putting their face on camera in the age of the internet? Every time I open Instagram, it seems half my timeline is going live with someone. Some of these live sessions are, admittedly, interesting and informative, but from my limited experience, most Insta Lives seem to be two or more friends hanging out, turning their genuine friendship into a performance (works for Fleabag, but boss, we are not all Fleabag. Sadly). I’m vaguely relieved that I have not felt the need to do this. I may not have much to show for the six-odd weeks of lockdown, but at least I didn’t contribute to the noise.

Instead, I’ve stayed indoors, in an apartment that has so quickly become home and whose lease I will probably not be able to renew next year. This is not the first apartment I’ve called home, but it’s the first one that is all mine and I’ve been enjoying it as fully as I possibly can. I’ve been trying to appreciate it without thinking about how it’s highly unlikely that I’ll be able to renew this lease, given the mangled mess that is the Indian economy in general and the media sector in particular.

I’m surprised to find I haven’t mentioned the house at all in my notebook. Its pages are filled with all sorts of nonsense, but there’s nothing about the house. No mention of the moon that I marvel at while sitting at my desk, working from home, as it rises, opalescent and beautiful, above the terrace of the hideously-ugly building that faces mine. Nothing about the path that the sunlight follows from one room to another, slanting past other multi-storeyed buildings and the occasional cloud.

Here’s what I do write in my notebook: Covid statistics; grumbles; art; and stupid questions.

Samples:

Stupid questions from April 5: “If examiners can’t take answer sheets home, then how the hell will the kids get results on time? Also, obviously school/ college/ uni can’t be held ‘normally’ given infection rate, so why aren’t boards and HRD figuring out something for the academic calendar? And online is NOT the answer. How many students can afford smartphones and gadgets (not even getting into access to electricity and internet)?”

Grumble from April 8: “Made the worst lunch ever. Not even first attempts at cooking back in uni days compare. Completely inedible, but forced self to eat it in the hope that I would feel virtuous by the end of the meal. Instead feeling sick. Thank god wasted money on big jar of Nutella.” 

Stupid questions from April 10: “All very well to say vegetable markets and meat shops are part of essential services and should remain open, but what are they going to sell? How are farmers supposed to get produce from fields/ orchards to the mandi without labour to help load and unload the produce? Are we going to have the rabi crop just go to waste while the poor starve?”   

Stupid questions from April 14: “Just one thing about the gathering of migrant labourers at Bandra station — surreal to think it was so close to home — has the Railway ministry explained that internal circular that ABP Mazha carried, and the curious detail that YOU COULD BUY TRAIN TICKETS FOR APRIL 14 ONLINE?” 

Culture-vulture-ing from April 15: “Marie Brennan is a goddess and The Natural History of Dragons is perfect lockdown reading – short chapters, great world-building, AND DRAGONS! Love how Brennan throws conventional structure out the window and packs all the action in the last few chapters.” 

Covid-related note from April 15: “29yo dies by suicide in Nair Hospital after testing positive for Covid-19. She hanged herself in the bathroom hours after getting the positive result.”

Culture-vulture-ing from April 17: “Werner Herzog + Baby Yoda. LOVE The Mandalorian.”

Stupid question from April 23: “Lockdown to be extended, people saying till May 23. But what after that? No vaccine, no treatment; we cannot afford an indefinite lockdown. So then what? Do our leaders really think it’ll disappear by May 23? Need to make this distancing thing work once public transport reopens, but how? Three to six feet from the next passenger on a local train? HA! What about enforcing a long-term work-from-home policy (can’t think of any other way to reduce pressure on public transport)? Doesn’t solve the problem for a lot of industries, but surely the priority has to be to figure out ways that the privileged can work from home (since they can) and the labourers, who need work and whose labour is essential to so many industries, are the ones who step out?”

Covid-related note from April 25: “The building parking lot is full of boxes of ration that are being distributed (I presume). Step out and within seconds, there’s a hungry child who will beg you to buy them some rice and oil, a couple of bananas, a packet of milk. How many people are we losing to hunger? Is anyone even counting?”

Stupid question from April 27: “If all of us download that deeply dodgy Arogya Setu, will India become South Korea? ”

Culture-vulture-ing from May 3: “Parks and Recreation is just the cutest, most enjoyably escapist show ever. Please let there be such a thing as a Ron Swanson plushy.”  

I understand how entirely and ridiculously steeped in privilege this sounds, but I’m waiting for the lockdown to ease up because I’m running out of notebooks.

We are living in hope that April was the cruellest month as far as the story of Covid-19 in India is concerned, even as the lockdown has been extended for the second time to May 17. On April 1, 36 people in Maharashtra tested positive for the Sars-Cov-2 virus that causes Covid-19. A month later, on May 1, the number of new cases were 1,008. In Mumbai, the number of containment zones — where multiple people are testing positive for the virus — came down to 1,036 on April 27 after 231 zones fell off the list because they had not reported any cases in 14 days. That’s right. Came down to 1,036. Today, India reported 3,900 new cases, the sharpest spike in daily cases of Covid-19.

It’s not all doom and gloom. The mortality rate in Maharashtra has come down — from 7.21% on April 12 to 4.23% on May 3. (The national mortality rate is around 3.25%.) Meanwhile on April 4, Kerala reported the second consecutive day without anyone testing positive for Sars-Cov-2 (it reported three new cases today).

The word on the street is that India’s population is remarkably resilient as far as Covid-19 is concerned, with 1,573 deaths reported so far. The United States of America has more deaths (69,680) from Covid-19 than we have reported cases (46,620), and no one is quite sure why. To quote one Maybelline, maybe we’re born with it. (Or maybe we just don’t have enough reliable testing kits.)

If only these silver linings felt shinier.

Sometimes — particularly while cooking — I wonder what we will remember of this past month.  Will it settle in memory as the month in which everyone and their goldfish did live sessions on Instagram, when screenshots of Zoom meetings became the new humblebrag, and when my tribe of privileged bubble-dwellers philosophised about isolation, beauty and self-improvement? Will this visceral hatred of sweeping the floor be the remains of these days?

Last night, I made a list of things I would like to not forget from this past month. This is the edited version. 

Shortage of testing kits.

Abundance of art — particularly dance and theatre — made available for free.

The drudgery of domestic chores.

Covid-19 is not a great leveller: the poor are devastated in ways the middle classes and elite can’t imagine.

Frontline workers being barred from or turfed out of their homes by housing societies that feared doctors and nurses would bring the infection back with them.

Private hospitals charging between Rs 1 lakh to Rs 2 lakh a day to treat Covid-19 patients. (Average hospital stay: 14 days.) Note: there is no known treatment for the infection at present, beyond attaching a severely-affected patient to a ventilator and saying many prayers.

The triumph of making excellent food, day after day, using only two utensils and one knife because the more items you use, the bigger the pile that needs washing afterwards. 

Stepping out to see women and children, begging for food, in every lane, outside every shop, at every market.

The two girls who come to the window at 5.45pm to catch the golden light of the sun as it gets ready to set, and make TikTok videos.

Those who collected funds and organised relief packages for the destitute, and the ones who feed the dogs and cats on the streets.

The terror of starting to cramp two days before the period is due, when there is no Combiflam at home.

Flamingos returned to our city and thanks to the internet, we could see them without moving an inch.  

Pay has been cut, jobs have been lost, opportunities have been revoked and assignments have been cancelled. Still, we remain afloat and we smuggle sunsets.

[image error]May 3, 2020