"My work is an allegorical representation of the times we live in. Conscious of the pain we have caused mother nature, اڈیک (Waiting) represents my feeling that life has wilted like drying flowers, and we are waiting for the proverbial "beloved" to come and ease the pain." ‘اڈیک’ ('Waiting’) by Zahid Mayo / Prints for Pandemic Relief www.printsforpandemicrelief.com
As we write this, the coronavirus crisis continues to make dangerous headway into Southasia; over 10,000 cases of COVID-19 infections have been reported in the region. Like most of the world, Southasia is undergoing a collective shutdown of a scale not seen in generations. Such a jolt to our routines, our plans and our way of being is certain to leave an imprint on us and our communities. We reached out to ask for Southasian perspectives on living through these times – and many responded. These are their stories. We'll be updating this page regularly with more.
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Priyanka Chatterjee
Siliguri
As a mother I covet solitude. While confinement is an almost predictable condition for women, a room of one's own is still unattainable for many. When COVID-19 hit and home became the safest place to be, dear ones returned home to work-from-home, office accounts were logged into at regular office hours and logged out of god-knows-when. In other words, my desire for solitude was thwarted.
That the economy's new engine – work-from-home – which is supposedly driving the show now, is not raising any serious discussion about those who have always worked-at-home seems, at the very least, negligent.
The luxury of the home (considered immune to worldly defilement) and the joy of an aromatic cup of almost home-grown Darjeeling tea comes gratis for the Bengali man, whose stomach awakens every half hour or so. And while this process appears to exude togetherness, home-keeping is a battle that is fought and won daily by the women of the house, particularly if domestic help is unavailable. That the economy's new engine – work-from-home – which is supposedly driving the show now, is not raising any serious discussion about those who have always worked-at-home seems, at the very least, negligent.
The character of work-at-home is considered feminine, as home is considered a space for women. This assumption sustains the ubiquitous associations between women and domestic work. Work-at-home, a space normalised for women, fails to deliver obvious material benefits and remains an 'unserious' affair that seems to require no specialisation, unattractive for 'productive' workers who can reap quantifiable benefits elsewhere.
In most middle-class Bengali homes on the fringes, like in Siliguri, the use of machines for domestic work is highly discouraged. Domestic work must be done in traditional ways: stone grinders (shill nora) are used to grind the endless masalas for better tasting food, hand washing is preferred to washing machines, and squat-mopping with an old piece of cloth is preferred to vacuum cleaners. The kitchen is sacred for the Bengali foodie, cleanliness is paranoia, and daily elaborate pujas for infinite deities is succour for the soul.
However, work-at-home remains a womanly affair – it is supervised, controlled and operated by a community of women.
All this keeps the Bengali bhadralok going. The Bengali bhadramohila, meanwhile, does all the background work for the upliftment of the husband's soul. If, riding on the wings of modernity, the bhadraloks ever become obliged to share the burden of household work to prove themselves companionate spouses, they cut a wretched figure (recorded now in several social-media jokes) or desire accolades. The Bengali bhadraloks, historically occupied as the intellectual sons of the nation and architects of useless adda, have always escaped from meyeli (womanly) affairs, especially domestic work. Here, they are satisfied to be assistants. Domestic work finds no resonance in their perception of work. The dutiful bhadralok, thus, brings home bags full of vegetables, chicken and fish. He bathes, prepares for puja, has breakfast (with the nth cup of tea) and then, readies himself for work. Completely absorbed in work considered part of her natural disposition, the bhadramohila, like myself, prepares four meals a day and does everything else required to keep the household running. In the fray, I wonder if I am losing touch with my non-domestic work, a result of some progress in this place, which I must also do from home.
The emancipated 'modern' woman can transfer some domestic work to women from lower class tiers, which accentuates class distinctions and sustains the gendering and devaluation of this work. However, work-at-home remains a womanly affair – it is supervised, controlled and operated by a community of women. Non-domestic work is considered a luxury for women until it acquires a masculine status of productivity – for instance, if it embellishes a woman's bank account.
I have salvaged bits of time from household work during the lockdown to write this piece because far from being an endless reverie of reading, thinking and writing, women academics, like myself, must race against time now.
Modernity is therefore just a mirage in Siliguri. That we are a hotspot for development is apparent in new highways, malls, private schools and our trendy nightlife. But at its core, the town brims with patriarchy. Just as serious diseases find no cure here, women, too, are without solution. In academia, modernity demands the acknowledgement of women as participants. But they must still fit into a patriarchal frame of advancement which invariably views a woman academic as a woman first, and, only after she has successfully been a woman, as an academic.
Again, higher education has generally been the preserve of upper-class women or women with a family background in education. If, like myself, you are from a middle-class family, which has no grasp of the endlessness of research work, and live in a provincial town, with limited scope and few role models, the barriers against higher education seem far too many. In particular, humanities-related research, which has no obvious end in sight, has always been considered 'non-work'. It does not align with expectations for real work – which, if research, must result in development or conspicuous results. Hence arguments against my condition, or that of women at large, either fall on deaf ears or make me a boring feminist, perhaps even a deviant.
What does it mean about the significance ascribed to their work that they are provided these separate spaces?
I have salvaged bits of time from household work during the lockdown to write this piece because far from being an endless reverie of reading, thinking and writing, women academics, like myself, must race against time now. I save every possible morsel of time from washing, cleaning, sweeping, cooking, caring, the entire continent of physically and mentally exhausting domestic work, in order to pursue my academic aspirations.
The dichotomy between work-at-home and work-from-home weighs heavily on me. While women must live in homes that double as work spaces, men can afford to be disconnected from the home by creating and escaping to a secluded room of their own. While their spouses manage the domestic work, working-at-home, they may even retreat to the top floors of their houses to work-from-home. What does it mean about the significance ascribed to their work that they are provided these separate spaces? Women academics – and perhaps those employed in other non-domestic work – sit by the kitchen table and divide their time, if not space, between a range of 'works.'
I finish writing this at midnight, with one part of my mind telling me to go to sleep. I must be up early again to roll the stone uphill. I keep wondering, however, if my six year old daughter may also desire a room of her own? Virginia Woolf seems epiphanic: "In the first place, to have a room of her own, let alone a quiet room or a sound-proof room, was out of the question, unless her parents were exceptionally rich or very noble, even up to the beginning of the nineteenth century". I fear my daughter's reality may be similar to mine. Should I tell her, then, of its impossibility?
***
Taran N Khan
Mumbai
Mumbai
In the half sleep of Ramzan afternoons, dreams are full of food.
Perhaps that's why the memory arrived so vivid and fully formed – of a meal during a curfewed winter nearly 30 years ago. Aligarh, my hometown, had been reeling from communal violence for weeks. School was closed, and life had settled into a strange pattern of everyone being homebound. During a break in the curfew, my aunt's family had driven down from Delhi to see us, and had carried provisions. Besides the staples of rice and daal, there were fresh vegetables, mutton, and memorably for us children, a large carton of Maggi instant noodles. Lunch that day turned into an impromptu celebration, but I remember tears in my aunt's eyes as she left in the evening. For the kids, the carton she left behind made sure the feeling of festivity remained – we were not allowed to eat Maggi during 'normal' times.
"Why waste?" an aunt would enquire brightly, on virtually every choice of consumption or disposal we made.
Perhaps that memory was what nudged me outside when I heard about the 'janta curfew' on 22 March – what turned out to be a rehearsal for the much longer lockdown that was to follow. I found large groups of shoppers buzzing in the kirana shops, men clutching bags of flour, delivery boys heaving cartons of milk into waiting cars. I made the rounds of smaller stores, got vegetables and meat. And lots of boxes of Maggi. I knew that, after the curfew, nothing would be the way it had been.
In the early days of the lockdown that is now in its eighth week, I wandered the streets of my Mumbai neighbourhood with a grocery bag. I was looking for provisions, and I was also looking at the city, a metropolis usually heaving with people, transformed. I crossed men sitting outside shuttered shops, and a few beggars on the steps of vacant malls. At the kirana shops, frantic purchasers still thronged the aisles, faces now hidden by masks. I walked to the vegetable stalls spread out on the pavement near a bridge, where the hawker tried to push extra provisions onto me. "Take it, who knows if you will get it later," he said, weighing up the items over my protests. A customer who had appeared from an apartment complex nearby bargained with him over the price of carrots. "They will rot, who knows if you will be able to sell them later?" he said. The uncertainty buzzed in the air, like the now absent traffic noise.
The lockdown has forced Indians like myself, accustomed to domestic help, into the kitchen. The results flood social media.
And yet uncertainty and scarcity were ideas that were familiar to me and to those from my generation of Indians, who have memories of curfews and living with shortages. Even in my relatively well-off family, wasting food was taboo. Glass bottles were diligently washed and reused, appliances repaired and used as long as possible. "Why waste?" an aunt would enquire brightly, on virtually every choice of consumption or disposal we made.
But as the supply chain wobbled and stores began displaying empty shelves, I found myself nervously, constantly, counting over my food stock again and again. In some part of my mind, I knew that, with what I had, my family could subsist on a monotonous but nutritious diet for over a week. Nevertheless, I was nagged by the question: "Do I have enough?"
Bengal famine (1941–1941), Pen and Ink 19 x 28cm. Chittaprosad Bhattacharya, DAG/ Artnet.
All around me is hunger. The lockdown, announced with only four hours' notice, has cut off labourers and daily wage earners from their livelihoods. Within days, millions set off on foot for their homes. The photographs of their figures on the road remind me of the stark black and white sketches made by the artist Chittoprasad during the Bengal famine in 1943. Men die by the side of highways. Children are hitched to the hips and backs of their parents. Those who don't leave, or cannot afford to leave the city, are herded into shelters. The fortunate ones get food. Most face a slew of petty humiliations. On 14 April, when the first lockdown was to end, a crowd gathered near a railway station was lathi charged by the police. They had come there hoping to find a train home.
All around me is food. The lockdown has forced Indians like myself, accustomed to domestic help, into the kitchen. The results flood social media. There are recipe exchanges and photos of lunch spreads and Zoom dates to share meals. I am counting the days to Ramzan, and worry as I hear of vegetable hawkers being chased away from the streets by the police. Once, I arrived minutes after a crowd had been dispersed, for gathering around a truck selling produce. No one was sure how long the shops would stay open, or when they would be forced to shut. The rules of the lockdown keep shifting.
Frustrated at the shortages on the street, I begin prowling the aisles of virtual supermarkets. I look at photos of the goods on display, clicking through offers, filling my basket with fruits and produce, with frozen delicacies and delectable snacks. I continue till my virtual basket is full. And then I click on the checkout button, and watch it turn empty, its contents vanishing into thin air. "No delivery slots, please try later" flashes the message on my screen. The gap between promise and reality makes me angry – the images of well stocked aisles flashing on my laptop seem to mock my inability to access them. But, in part, the sight of those familiar items also reassures me. It makes me feel that the future still exists. And it will be one of recognisable abundance.
The virus is an X-ray, revealing the value and vulnerability of the workers who run my megacity. I call my domestic help, who has not left her single-room home for a month. Her daughter went out to try to find vegetables, but returned empty handed, she said, because the market had been closed down. They had been eating daal and rice for two weeks. She had no option of buying more food.
The virus is a drug, an escape, a time machine. I spend day after day engaged in mundane tasks – washing, cleaning, cooking. The time I had, the time I used to do what I called 'work', was made possible by the labour people now vanished. The cooks and the cleaners, the drivers and the shop-delivery boys. Their absence is what marks the city now.
I cannot remember the last few weeks of my life, and I am not certain that I want to.
What I do remember is this: my father's scrawled reply to a foreign acquaintance's Christmas card, resting on his mantelpiece. "It's hard to realise that the home you had dreamed of for so long has changed", I recall him having written, about the communal violence that had wrecked our city. I was embarrassed by him writing such an emotional letter, certain the recipient would either laugh at its excess sentimentality, or ignore it. Both ideas horrified my adolescent soul.
And yet now I catch myself doing the same. In reply to casual sentences in emails, from people who have little interest in my well-being, I compose long missives, listing anguish and hope. I talk of the millions who are hungry, of the many who are doing their best to feed them. I write about the families still walking, the people still dying. "We just want to go home", they tell journalist after journalist. I write thinking of a photograph that defines these times: a few rotis are scattered by the railway tracks, where a group of labourers had fallen into a deep sleep of exhaustion, and were mowed down by a cargo train. They followed the tracks, I learned, as a map, the easiest way to return to their homes.
I get replies with bland concern and expressions of support. "Take care", they say. "Stay safe." "Stay home."
Fear has revealed linkages we had worked hard to forget.
The fear of contagion makes me reflect on the food I now handle with such care. It forces me to think through the steps with which it reached me, and in this way, to think of the hands that grew it, and that brought it to the city.
The past weeks have altered the relationship many Indians have with food.
The threat of contagion makes me reflect on my own body, engaged in the most mundane of tasks. Every movement is interrupted and daubed, cleansed before it can be continued. Every surface around me is interrogated, each swing of my limbs marked by interruption. It is like never fully drawing breath.
Early in the lockdown, it becomes clear that the illness is only part of the problem. By the second week, a Muslim organisation called the Tablighi Jamaat is in the news for creating a transmission chain through its large religious gathering in Delhi. Soon enough, there are references to 'Corona Jihad' in sections of the media and elsewhere. There is an uptick in hate speech and fake videos are circulated. Saffron flags go up on vegetable stalls. There are even calls for an economic boycott of the community.
As I prepare to leave the house, I don a mask and gloves, take precautions to protect myself and others from infection. But there is nothing I can do about my Muslim body, toxic in a way it has never been. In public spaces, I interrogate my presence to check for anything that can give me away.
It is only when Ramzan begins and I actually live with hunger that the stress of scarcity leaves me. Overnight, I stop worrying about having enough.
The fasts of Ramzan are enjoined upon Muslims as a pillar of faith. To abstain from food and drink during the daylight hours is an act of worship. It is also, I was taught as a child, an exercise in empathy. We fast to feel the pain of the deprived, to make our hearts compassionate towards those in need. Much as this appeals to me as a thought, I have also found it to be a tricky concept – I endured deprivation secure in the knowledge of a substantial meal at sunset. This year, unusually, I am fasting and also preparing my own iftars. I alone will be responsible for what I eat, when I eat.
As I prepare to leave the house, I don a mask and gloves, take precautions to protect myself and others from infection. But there is nothing I can do about my Muslim body, toxic in a way it has never been.
The past weeks have altered the relationship many Indians have with food. They have exposed the inequality that drives our cities and revealed the figures of the essential workers who actually keep the wheels turning. Like the photo of the rotis scattered on the rail tracks, this is a truth that is impossible to unsee. And yet somehow it remains just as irrelevant as before.
I see a picture of a man holding a sign that reads: "The city we built is now holding us prisoner. We want to go home." On the news, I see a labourer being asked if he would stay in the city if he got food. No, he said. He wanted to go to his family. What he meant to say was: he was a person, not only a worker. In this simple sentence, I find an echo of my own need – to inhabit myself, to believe in my realness. A way to recollect our shared humanity, despite the erasure.
The past few weeks have altered my relationship with hunger.
Before the call to prayer that ends the fast, there is an azan in the late afternoon. It is a time that is both near the end of the day, and seems to elongate it. It is when preparations for iftar begin, when hunger and thirst peak before being slaked. As I wait for this sound, I know the hunger that has lived in my gut for over a month now is for more than just food. It is hunger as fear, as memory of a time when I felt at ease in my body and in my cities. This is hunger that takes the place of rage, and loss, and sadness – a crop that was sown with the first curfew all those years ago, now harvested.
~ Taran N Khan is a journalist and writer based in Mumbai. She is the author of Shadow City: A Woman Walks Kabul (2019).
***
Manish Gaekwad
Kolkata
Kolkata
On 1 March 2020, I moved into a rented apartment in Kolkata. A Chinese lady and an Italian man had vacated it in the afternoon. There was no reason to panic.
I fell ill the next morning.
One day it was a runny nose. The next it was a red-hot fever, followed by immense fatigue.
My mother was staying in a chawl room with one of her sisters in Bhat Nagar in Pimpri Chinchwad. I told her to leave if she could.
The foreigners had looked healthy when I met them to collect the house keys. No one was wearing a mask. We chatted at a respectable distance as we normally do with strangers. We did not shake hands. Instead, they said namaste and folded their hands. Foreigners adapt quickly.
The lady reached her home in Shanghai and reported to our landlady that she had tested negative for the virus. So did the Italian man.
A week passed, and I recovered from my illness. I had not left the apartment. Living alone insulated me from seeking company. My only neighbours were a family living on the ground floor who I rarely saw when I stepped out occasionally for essentials. I was using this period of convalescence to begin writing my book. Then the news broke about a potential lockdown.
I called my mother who was at her friend's house in Jaipur, and told her to return to Kolkata. She said she was going to Pune the next day, and that she would leave from there in a few days time.
She reached Pune safely. Then, the lockdown was announced.
The rickshaw driver scanned me and asked: "Aap ko udhar kyon jaana hai? Aap toh padhe-likhe lagte ho." ("Why do you want to go there? You look civilised.")
My mother was staying in a chawl room with one of her sisters in Bhat Nagar in Pimpri Chinchwad. I told her to leave if she could.
She replied that her nephew's rickshaw was damaged (he is a rickshaw driver). She refused to step into a municipality van, even though her niece is a sweeper in the Pune Municipal Corporation, fearing it would be a minefield of other scabrous diseases. She tried to shrug it off saying she was in a better place than being dumped in a garbage truck.
I was trying to convince her to reach Baramati, where another sister lives on her farm. My mother would have a better chance of survival there than in Pimpri which was going to record a morbidly high number of cases.
It was almost inevitable. Bhat Nagar is where the poor, the 'untouchables', the so-called 'scourge of society' live.
Two decades ago, I stepped out of Pune station and asked a rickshaw driver to take me to Bhat Nagar (I was 17 at the time). My kanjar-samaj relatives informed me those two words were the complete address: Bhat Nagar. The rickshaw driver scanned me and asked: "Aap ko udhar kyon jaana hai? Aap toh padhe-likhe lagte ho." ("Why do you want to go there? You look civilised.")
During my time at Bharat Nagar, I learned to not take myself so seriously.
This is why I was so worried when I heard that my 60-year-old mother would be stranded there during lockdown.
My cousins work as security guards in banks and hospitals, sweep roads, sell illicit liquor and weed, drive rickshaws and live outrageously (if somewhat harmoniously) with squalor. Bhat Nagar is populated with pigs, cows, horses, donkeys, goats, ducks, cats, dogs, chickens, birds, rats, cockroaches, spiders, lizards, fleas, bees and mosquitoes. I may have missed a monkey or a bat. Not a single flower can grow there unimpeded.
I lived there as a teenager, trying to impart my boarding-school-acquired knowledge to both children and adults, advocating cleanliness, hygiene and education.
I try to look happy. Always. It is a trait I may have unconsciously picked up in Bhat Nagar. It may be the only survival trick I learned from the community.
"Aap ne baraf dekha hai!" ("You have seen snow!") they gasped when I told them about my school in Darjeeling. They thought it was in Switzerland, like in a Yash Chopra movie.
I was treated like an entitled prince from a foreign state, offered a small bucket to fill and defecate on a vast tract of barren land across the road.
During my time at Bharat Nagar, I learned to not take myself so seriously. Life is precious but it is also unpredictable. A little reckless abandon can perhaps build character. I left Bhat Nagar after a few years of failing to convince the residents that things could be better for them, and went on to pursue my own career.
Today, I sit alone in the Kolkata apartment, worrying about my mother who is diabetic and has high blood pressure. All I can do is call her every day and remind her that she will be fine if she takes all the necessary precautions.
It is my good fortune as a writer to have emerged from that abysmal place, to be able to express myself and magnify the lives of those who soldier on with quiet persistence.
I also remind my mother to be happy. I try to look happy. Always. It is a trait I may have unconsciously picked up in Bhat Nagar. It may be the only survival trick I learned from the community.
I never told my mother I was sad when I experienced lows. I did not tell her about my illness when I first moved into the rented apartment. She would have upset others in the family by constantly obsessing about my health.
Isn't that exactly what we are dreading – community paranoia?
I never went back to Bhat Nagar because I felt that that unexamined life would be a waste of my education. I had to be 'somebody' while my relatives were trying to turn me into a hooch-seller, a bellboy, or a salesman in a garment store.
Like everyone else, I am re-examining how we treat the marginalised. How expendable they are. This pandemic is renewing our ties with them as we try to acknowledge their invisible presence amongst us.
It is my good fortune as a writer to have emerged from that abysmal place, to be able to express myself and magnify the lives of those who soldier on with quiet persistence. But that too will have to wait.
There is nothing I can do for them right now. But what I do know for certain is that as long as the people of Bhat Nagar are together, they will watch over my mother and keep her in good humour.
That is a luxury my privilege simply cannot guarantee.
~ Manish Gaekwad is a freelance reporter, screenwriter for a Netflix series, and the author of Lean Days. He currently resides in a lockdown state.
***
Chiranthi Rajapakse
Kandy
Kandy
The alarm goes off at 5:30 am. I can't afford to be late.
We've been under curfew for weeks now, after it was suddenly imposed on a Friday evening. Today, curfew has been lifted for a few hours so that people can buy provisions. Usually, I hate driving, but being able to go somewhere – anywhere – feels wonderful.
I drink my coffee and quickly eat the sandwich that I made the night before. Next I grab a handbag. Ready. No – wait – most important of all, I need to check that I have my mask. Now I'm ready.
I'm driving up the lane when I see a three wheeler chugging past. That means vehicles are back on the road.
We've been under curfew for weeks now, after it was suddenly imposed on a Friday evening. Today, curfew has been lifted for a few hours so that people can buy provisions. Usually, I hate driving, but being able to go somewhere – anywhere – feels wonderful.
It's only 6:30 am but there are already so many people on the road. I thought I would be early, but I now realise that I'm hopelessly late. I have multiple lists of provisions to get for my parents and sister.
There are queues of masked people lining up at the shops I drive past. I drive a bit faster. After I finally get to the supermarket and squeeze into a parking spot, I realise I can't see the end of the queue which stretches down the road for quite a distance.
The man buys 6000 rupees worth of vegetables. The woman behind him is asking for the price of everything. She finally gets 250 grams of Bombay onions and potatoes, and walks away.
It's 6:45 am. The supermarket hasn't even opened yet.
I'm driving back when I get lucky. A small vegetable shop has just opened with a queue of only around 15 people. The shop has organised a system – each person takes a plastic crate, selects their vegetables and waits in the queue to pay. Sri Lankans? Actually queuing in an orderly fashion!? COVID-19 is achieving the impossible. The sight of fresh tomatoes is so exciting that I almost forget about the one-metre rule.
My phone rings as I'm trying to hold onto my crate filled with pumpkins and brinjals.
"I'm buying the medicine. You don't have to get it."
It's my father. Why is he out of the house, even after I called him last night and explained that I could buy whatever was needed?
"Go home," I say.
"No, no," he says. "It's only a small queue at the pharmacy. It will just take around 15 minutes. And I have to go to the ATM anyway."
My father is 76.
I give up. At least I have tomatoes.
As soon as my mother opens the door, I take off my shoes, walk past her and wash my hands, even before saying hello.
There are still two people ahead of me in the queue. The man buys 6000 rupees worth of vegetables. The woman behind him is asking for the price of everything. She finally gets 250 grams of Bombay onions and potatoes, and walks away. It's hot and sunny. She could be my father's age.
I worry on the drive to my parent's place. I should hand over the groceries and leave, but I can't quite bring myself to do that.
As soon as my mother opens the door, I take off my shoes, walk past her and wash my hands, even before saying hello. It strikes me then that I'm finally listening to the things she's spent the past twenty-something years lecturing me about.
"Wash your hands."
"Why are you coming into the house wearing your outside slippers?"
My mother has always scrubbed vegetables, even before COVID-19.
In the past, during war and 'civil disturbances', the dangers we faced were tangible. This time it's invisible and we have no idea how it will end. Perhaps that's why the threat still doesn't feel real.
She asks me to help get the gas tank in. It's too heavy to lift so I roll it towards the kitchen. Then she tells me not to take it in there yet, and to leave it under the tap. I discover that my mother now washes gas tanks. I am glad to be there to help, but inwardly worry about the next few days. With curfew being extended, they will be on their own.
Driving back I am curiously tired but satisfied. After a week of staying in, there is relief in having tasks outside the house to be accomplished. It makes me feel, even if only for a while, that I am in control.
There is half an hour more until curfew is re-imposed.
In the past, during war and 'civil disturbances', the dangers we faced were tangible. This time it's invisible and we have no idea how it will end. Perhaps that's why the threat still doesn't feel real.
What people are worried about now is not so much the virus but how we will survive the 'cure'. When will the curfew lift again? Did we buy enough rice? Daal? And for those of us who cannot work from home – which is most of the country – when will we get paid?
As I'm turning into our lane I pass a woman walking home, holding loaded sili sili bags, the thin straps cutting into her hands. I hope she doesn't have much further to go.
***
Ghazal Qadri
Kashmir
'A comic for my mother' by Ghazal Qadri
~ Ghazal Qadri is a Kashmiri born illustrator, currently living in Somerset, New Jersey.
(ghazalqadri.com, https://www.instagram.com/____alif/)
(ghazalqadri.com, https://www.instagram.com/____alif/)
***
Sandesh Ghimire
Minneapolis
Minneapolis
Sushmita said she would buy the flowers herself.
"But why?" I asked. It was the first time we had considered the severity of COVID-19, and we were hit with the realisation that this was going to be a pandemic. We were in Cubs, our neighbourhood grocery store in Minneapolis, to stock up on essential supplies in preparation for a stay-at-home order, which we expected the state governor of Minnesota to enforce in the next 24 hours.
There are distinctly two kinds of people in the store: those who are panic shopping, like us; and those who defiantly walk as close as possible to a stranger, mocking the panicking strangers.
"Because you are an unromantic bojo," Sushmita said, "I will buy the flowers myself." She then walked to the floral section to make her pick.
Cubs, the grocery store, is in a state of panic. The store is crowded with people. The idea of social distancing is not yet popular, but many are seen taking precautions. There are distinctly two kinds of people in the store: those who are panic shopping, like us; and those who defiantly walk as close as possible to a stranger, mocking the panicking strangers, and walk out of the store with a bag of chips or a bottle of soda as if to make a point.
Our shopping cart has a lot more stuff than we initially intended. At the checkout, two clerks are busy talking about using bleach to disinfect drinking water as they help customers with habitual ease.
"Is it safe, though?"
"I have been to the third world, girl," the other clerk responded in a superior, knowing tone. "Just a little bit of bleach and the water is clear and pure as the blue sky." Unfazed by the people around them, the clerks talk about preparing for the day after the apocalypse.
Our Somali Uber driver, who dropped us home from the grocery store said, "Do you think everyone is turning into zombies?" and laughed at us for panicking about a virus that spreads common cold.
Since the news of the COVID-19 has broken, I have noticed how American conversations have suddenly taken a Hollywood-inspired apocalyptic turn. Our Somali Uber driver, who dropped us home from the grocery store said, "Do you think everyone is turning into zombies?" and laughed at us for panicking about a virus that spreads common cold. Why had the driver not felt the severity of the situation? I asked Sushmita, forgetting how dismissive I had been a day or two before.
While unpacking the groceries, I noticed that the flowers that Sushmita bought were not really flowers, the ones that come with petals. "The stems will bloom after you put them in the vase," she said. We don't have a vase, so she half-fills a Mason jar with water and puts the flower stems in them, placing it in the windowsill by our bed.
We spend the night talking about the strangeness, the suddenness of it all. Earlier that day, one of our roommates had decided to weather the pandemic in the solitude of nature. He had packed his car with some essentials and left Minnesota to live in the deserts of Utah, Colorado and New Mexico. While saying goodbye to him, for a moment, I wondered if I would ever see him again.
Starting the next morning, I start consuming CNN's COVID-19 coverage all the time. For hours, I let the horror slip in as I watch the White House press briefings where the US president has reduced the discourse, as James Fallow put it in an Atlantic article, "to the two themes of his own greatness and the unfairness of his critic". I was still in spring break from graduate school, so I allowed myself to wallow in hours of Trump content, which further paralyses me with despair and anger.
We spend the night talking about the strangeness, the suddenness of it all.
But a magical thing happened the next morning. I woke up to the sight and smell of flowers in full bloom. I don't know the names of those flowers, but the hollow cone formed by the faint yellow petals around the stamen reminded me of temple bells in Kathmandu. The other flower looked like the white Parijat flowers that bloom there at night. Over the next few days, I start learning of the terrible news of the long march out of Kathmandu. In a state of lockdown, many workers in the city had started walking back to their villages from the city centres. The callousness of the Nepali state's response filled me with grief, even though I don't find myself surprised. But the flowers soothe me in a way that I had not expected. They are a reminder that good things are still possible in this world.
In this moment of despair, I am reminded of Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel The Idiot, where the epileptic protagonist famously says, "Beauty will save the world." At a time of global pandemic, it seems like a ridiculous thing to say, but is it not beauty that gives us hope and renews possibilities – and that will resist the likes of Donald Trump from their ignorant march to a nihilistic nightmare?
After five days, the flowers have withered, but the hope to survive hasn't.
~Sandesh Ghimire is a writer from Kathmandu. He is currently an MFA candidate in creative writing at the University of Minnesota. He is on twitter @nepalichimney.
Published on 29 April 2020.
***
"The Somnambulist is a representation of being in a limbo- a liminal space where we sit and wait, half asleep, dreaming time away, on the threshold between past and future. It is oddly pertinent to our world today, where we are all somnambulists, dreaming of far-off realities, swaying in our minds to our own private troubles." 'The Somnambulist' by Isma Gul Hasan / Prints for Pandemic Relief (www.printsforpandemicrelief.com)
***
Sarah Dara
Karachi
Karachi
The sirens rang just minutes before midnight, silencing a metropolis known for its ability to function at all hours. As per the notification the day before, on 23 March Sindh's 15-day lockdown had begun. The announcement had blared on our screens – white text on a sharp red, twisting repeatedly for emphasis. All shops except grocery stores and pharmacies were to be closed. No one was to venture out of their homes unless necessary. Even then, freedom had its limitations; one person per household could go out for groceries, two if a driver was needed. National Identity Cards (NICs) and appropriate reasons for leaving the house were essential.
According to some sources, Karachi has been under curfew 30 times since 1947. Most of these resulted from violence – ethnic or otherwise – that led to city-wide strikes. The last strike that I remember was on the day after 18 October 2007: former prime minister Benazir Bhutto had descended upon the city and supporters toppled off each other to greet her. The rally was vitiated by a blast, resulting in the deaths of 180 civilians and the municipality was shut down. Two months later, Bhutto herself was assassinated during another rally in Rawalpindi.
But this is the first time an invisible threat has caused a lockdown and many seem to be taking it lightly. In the initial days, families flocked to samosa stalls, risking their lives to bite into the warm potato snack while others headed to Seaview beach for a whiff of damp, salty air. Some offices remained open, only adopting a work-from-home policy after a phone number to report non-compliance was announced.
According to some sources, Karachi has been under curfew 30 times since 1947.
It has been over three weeks since the lockdown was imposed, but law-enforcement agencies are still finding it difficult to stop men who seem to believe that Friday congregational prayer is currently a necessity. Despite the order to seal mosques and the provincial government's total lockdown during Friday prayer hours, clips of policemen trying to convince worshippers to pray at home, and of mobs attacking the police, emerge online weekly.
For those of us in physical isolation, reality feels rather different. Days and nights have blended into each other and 2 am could very well be the new 9 pm. Physical interactions are non-existent but online networks are flourishing. Everyone is reaching out to friends they haven't spoken to in months, maybe years. Weekly catch ups on Zoom – the new fad for this pandemic – are organised and everyone is making Dalgona coffee – a frothy concoction that has existed in desi households for decades but seems to have gained worldwide fame overnight. The #DontRushChallenge hashtag now chokes our timelines – it has taken a pandemic for the world to understand the value of arts and literature.
At my place, 'working from home' has become a code for working around the clock. Free time is either spent cooking, cleaning or watching the news, so much so that the thought of home-cooked food sickens me. COVID-19 paranoia is at its peak.
My father, a diabetes patient, stops and looks at me wide-eyed every time he accidentally touches his face. His handwashing is accompanied with a grin and a little song that goes like "dhote raho, dhote raho, dhote raho" – keep washing, keep washing, keep washing. His other obsession is finding out all there is to know about COVID-19 (every family has one such individual, it seems): when the first cases were identified in Pakistan and abroad, what the recovery and death rates are, why some countries have a higher death toll than others, and, most important of all, new cures that only he seems to receive on WhatsApp.
We are all stuck in this dystopia together, and our only comforts are compassion and solidarity.
My mother, in comparison, is much calmer – probably because I didn't drill in her head that she is at risk, like I did with my father. She doesn't watch a lot of COVID-19 news, which is probably the secret to her positivity. My brother, who recently returned from the United Kingdom, after his classes and exams were moved online, was in self-isolation as per the World Health Organisation's (WHO) guidelines. His isolation period has been over for a while now and, because he hasn't touched his face since the detection of the UK's first case, all is well.
There is a certain pressure to come out of this quarantine with a set of new skills. The memes about Shakespeare's literary output during the plague makes the writers among us feel even more guilty. However, the idea seems impossible to me. Something as basic as getting out of bed in the morning is difficult right now, simply because I am essentially living the same day over and over. And what is there to leave the comforts of bed for? Around three billion people are under lockdown with only doom, gloom and uncertainty to look forward to. This is hardly an ideal environment for productive work.
For now, bursting, beating and exhaustingly crowded Karachi has stopped in time. Pollution is at its lowest and stars are clearly visible. In the daylight hours, chirps and meows are heard instead of honks and whirs. Grocery stores are filled with masked beings that separate like flies being swatted away when a cough or sneeze is heard. We are all stuck in this dystopia together, and our only comforts are compassion and solidarity.
~ Sarah Dara is a freelance journalist, writer and workshop instructor.
***
Prawin Adhikari
Kathmandu Valley
Kathmandu Valley
Isolation in Sanepa began on 24 March. It feels good to open the door to the landing outside the apartment at least once a day – the extra jar of water is still there, the shoes wait on their rack and trapped mosquitoes buzz for permission to enter. That is also where – on days when she hasn't tired herself out by midmorning – the downstairs neighbours' four-year old plays and sings. Her father is perhaps easily bored – he smokes right by the gate and flings cigarette butts into the alley between the house and the shuttered school. Cigarette smoke wafts in. The outside world finds ways to intrude.
On 24 March, the first day of the lockdown, young men roamed the streets in groups, wearing masks but holding hands, passing around bottles of sanitisers while huddled around a television in a dairy shop.
A week or so before the lockdown was announced, we had gathered to read proofs of an NGO report, friends all, desperate to finish the assignment. The term 'social distancing' was being nudged out by the idea of 'working from home'. Dipak, the office gopher and driver, said, "I'll also start working from home, in that case." We had all laughed, somewhat uneasily, recognising the indictment of our privileges in Dipak's joke.
I've ventured out four times during this lockdown, each time swinging an empty water jar – this is urgent business, keep your distance. The streets of Kathmandu had begun emptying over the preceding week. On 24 March, the first day of the lockdown, young men roamed the streets in groups, wearing masks but holding hands, passing around bottles of sanitisers while huddled around a television in a dairy shop. The police posted requests at the police station gates – "Please don't enter without wearing masks." At an organic vegetable shop nearby, a woman constable picked through wilted bunches of mustard greens to cook for her cohort quartered at the station. "There's nothing here," she muttered to the shopkeeper. A dozen customers, mutually wary and flinching apart, danced about each other. Something dense yet invisible repelled the bodies.
To walk without broadly playacting a lurch of urgency for onlookers now is to loiter, akin to threatening them with the invisible reek of the virus.
By 29 March, the two grocery shops in Sanepa Chowk that remained open offered hand sanitiser to everybody, the shopkeepers wore thick rubber gloves and surgical masks. Social-distancing rings had been marked on the asphalt. A dog barked at other strays that approached in a pack, raced claw-on-concrete to chase away the intruders. A policeman – familiar, usually a small nod and a handshake kind of a man – grimaced in the middle of the chowk. The standard-issue lathi is barely four feet long, not enough to poke a man away to create distance. The chowk pulsed between teeming quickness and moribund quiet. But fear hovered over every encounter or interaction. Everybody was suspect. To walk without broadly playacting a lurch of urgency for onlookers now is to loiter, akin to threatening them with the invisible reek of the virus.
It is the absence of choice that creates helplessness.
In all likelihood, this virus will kill more than the earthquakes did. Is it possible to catch the hidden wail of grief under the sounds of the outside world that filter into the apartment? Now there are so many animated videos to watch – bars racing each other beside national flags, the numbers rising and rising. It is impossible to not see each numeral as a life – arrested, or erased. The heart aches already for losses that will come. In moments of sudden arrest the mind lines up the dead, a conflagrated chain from ghat to ghat across the country, lime-washed new graves on hilltops, the glow of the electric crematorium at Pashupati warming the blood of the mourners.
It is the absence of choice that creates helplessness. Living alone had never been difficult – it was sometimes even desirable. But even then there were bars, or the arms of friends, into which it was possible to escape. Now solitude sours into loneliness only because the choice of climbing the stairs to Base Camp for the fortnightly quiz or boring the life out of my first-year students with a rant isn't available.
It is as if friends in distant cities suddenly realised it was time to tell Prawin to hunker down – Give us something, man! Where's the next book? Are you writing that screenplay you said you would finish last year? Tell us a joke!
On Whatsapp, every friend is just as close – without physical distance to separate from or collapse into each other, it is difficult to gauge the urgency or honesty with which to react to anyone. "It must be a good time for you," friends say. "You can write that novel now," they accuse, as if isolation is a curse to them alone and a blessing to writers and artists practised in the difficult art of keeping sanity in the company of none. It is as if friends in distant cities suddenly realised it was time to tell Prawin to hunker down – Give us something, man! Where's the next book? Are you writing that screenplay you said you would finish last year? Tell us a joke!
It isn't a lack of isolation that has kept the novels, short stories and screenplays from being written. Man is supremely lazy, adept above all at avoiding work. What's the deadline? Can we push it by a few days? All along, a nagging sense of displacement persists – was I supposed to be somewhere else? Doing something else? Something useful, perhaps?
In the meanwhile, crushed and helpless, there is nothing to do but wait.
~Prawin Adhikari writes screenplays and fiction, and translates between Nepali and English. He is an assistant editor at La.Lit, the literary magazine. He is the author of The Vanishing Act (Rupa, 2014) and his translation of Indra Bahadur Rai's short stories has been published as Long Night of Storm (Speaking Tiger, 2018).
Published on 21 April 2020.
***
'Mythopoetic'
Muvindu Binoy
Muvindu Binoy
"Mythopoetic is an amalgamation of the movies I rewatched, the albums I played in the background, the beats I played between intervals and my chronic socialising via the interwebs due to quarantine and curfew." 'Mythopoetic' 10, 2020 (Mixed media on sketchbook paper, 21 x 30cm) Muvindu Binoy/ Saskia Fernando Gallery. Courtesy of the artist.
***
Nur Nasreen Ibrahim
Lahore
Lahore
I know I will hear the call to prayer as if it is happening right next to my window during any crisis – for better or worse. Most days, the call to prayer is soothing, an assurance that, despite our struggles, life goes on, marked five times a day by supplication to god. Any interruption is an afterthought, be it the screams of playing children or the bird that keeps tapping its beak against the glass of my window. Two decades in this house and these sounds never really change.
Yet a curious thing happened around 10 pm on 24 March. As someone turned off the running water from the outdoor tap next door and everyone prepared for bed, another call to prayer soared through the window I had left open. The timing was eerie, but not entirely unexpected.
I feel a distance from this desperate rush to enter the mosque, even in the midst of a crisis.
In Karachi too, a late night azaan caught residents off guard. In a darkened video posted on Twitter, where only the distant lights of the road illuminate the buildings, a man points out the azaan. "Astaghfirullah," he says. Seek forgiveness from Allah. "Allah, protect us from all challenges, all aafatein."
Aafat. An Urdu word that means calamity, or disaster. The English translation doesn't do the word justice. A mother will scream that word to her child, a dramatic reaction to something as small as spilling food. A man on a roof in the dead of night, watching our world change, will use it to supplicate a higher being. The word evokes a crisis of cataclysmic proportions, as if the day of judgment is upon us.
Some nights, when the azaan recedes, the muezzin will advise people to stay indoors. There are reports of muezzins breaking down in tears doing this. I was sitting in our garden one afternoon, right before Zuhr, the afternoon prayer, and a man cycled through our neighborhood, reciting the call to prayer, followed by "Please, please, pray at home."
In Kuwait, the line "Come to prayer," has been replaced by "Pray in your homes." This crisis marks perhaps the first time that Kuwait has cancelled congregational prayers.
Television programs hosted debates between religious leaders, scholars, politicians, and activists, all arguing for and against leaving the mosque open.
But in Pakistan, policemen stand at the gates of mosques, begging crowds of congregants to go home. An Islamic missionary movement went ahead with planned gatherings in Lahore, resulting in at least 500 cases, according to official figures. One congregant stabbed a police officer, in an attempt to escape confinement in Layyah. A meeting of ulema and religious scholars from across the country announced on 14 April that congregational prayers will continue in the mosques, even as provincial governments extend lockdowns.
I feel a distance from this desperate rush to enter the mosque, even in the midst of a crisis. Perhaps it is a result of my gender; I always did my Friday prayers in my room. But I am not the only one. Many religious minorities in Pakistan, groups that have been isolated by state and society, have closed their places of worship.
A sense of nervous panic has taken over those of us sitting inside, cut off from the streets, but has not fully translated to concrete action from the authorities. Television programs hosted debates between religious leaders, scholars, politicians, and activists, all arguing for and against leaving the mosque open.
Social media screams at our 'delusional' prime minister. Meanwhile, confusion spreads.
My mother is a deeply practical woman. She is always the first to mobilise in a crisis, organising rations for daily wage earners, finding the right charities to donate to, the one checking on her parents and scattered family members. She is also the first to give up control to god.
"At some point," she told me, "you have to have faith in god's will."
One of the first things I learned from her was adaptability in an Islamic context. We are required to follow a procedure to wash our hands up to the elbows, our ears, our feet, thoroughly before prayer. In the absence of water, we do a dry ritual purification, tayammum, using sand or dust. There can be fluidity in ritual.
On television, Prime Minister Imran Khan stubbornly argued that a poor country like Pakistan cannot afford a curfew, confusing the terms 'lockdown' and 'curfew'. And on Easter, he did not notice the irony when he asked all Christians to stay home and worship. Social media screams at our 'delusional' prime minister. Meanwhile, confusion spreads.
The other day we received a bouquet of gladiolas from a friend. "Is this the time for flowers?" my father said in shock. Yet, they had been bought in bulk, after a local flower seller begged for help from his clients. All orders had dried up, and his flowers would as well. We left them outside for a few hours and then, with gloves, put them in a vase on our dining table.
Prayer is better than sleep. A key line in the azaan and a point of pride for devoted Muslims. Pakistani Muslims, I often think, take this advice to heart. We will pray through thick or thin, against all forms of aafat – against calamity, disaster, hunger, poverty, sickness, even death.
I recently called a former teacher, desperate for a wise voice to tell me exactly what to think. "This is our world where god will forgive us," she said, "but man will not."
How do we keep ourselves safe and fulfill a religious duty that has been ingrained so deeply that we will defy religious scholars around the world, the very muezzin crying at the loudspeaker, practices adopted by other Muslim-majority countries and our own law enforcement, just so we can enter the house of prayer?
I stare at the gladiolas, already beginning to wither. I sit at my window every day as the azaan continues with renewed urgency. The view outside has not changed, but the atmosphere has. There is electricity in the air, a sense of approaching aafat.
Faith doesn't absolve us of responsibility, my mother keeps telling me. You have to have both. She is still praying every day on a chair, the result of a bad back. She prays sitting upright in an airplane, interrupts a movie or a conversation so she doesn't miss her prayer. She also tells me to stop moping and do something.
I recently called a former teacher, desperate for a wise voice to tell me exactly what to think. "This is our world where god will forgive us," she said, "but man will not."
If this calamity has shown me anything, it has exposed, in starker relief than before, just how far we will go to maintain the status quo and how unwilling we are to evolve. Our adaptability is the first thing that will help us survive a global crisis. Where there is no water, we have to use sand.
***
Rana Preet Gill
Hoshiarpur, Punjab
Hoshiarpur, Punjab
I had plans. We all did.
I have not seen my parents, who live in Canada, for the past two years. Dad has a medical condition and cannot travel to India anymore. The Canadian embassy rejected my visa twice because I had close family in their country and they feared I might overstay. I have a house, a government job, a husband, a daughter and a future in India which I have no intention of leaving behind. This year, after a fervent plea, I was finally granted a visa. Excited to see my parents, I booked Air France tickets – Delhi to Paris to Vancouver.
Either the animals are scared to get sick or their owners are too fearful to report them!
Now, COVID-19 has hit. I check the airline websites constantly, wondering if there will be flights at all. And though I am still hopeful, a fear that my plans will be jeopardised creeps into my mind.
Travel will have to wait. I will probably be able to see mom and dad next year. I am not alone. A thousand itineraries have been altered, plans shelved, lives affected. I understand that this is not the time to grieve for a lost trip.
At home life is not hard and I am able to cope. I have resources and know many do not, so I count myself among the lucky. The growing tide of uncertainty has not destabilised me the way it has millions of others. I've only lost the luxury of freedom, not my livelihood.
I work as a veterinary officer, an employee of the state government of Punjab, and have been told by my department to report for duty. But for the past week, as the state has been placed under curfew, hardly anyone has come to the hospital. Either the animals are scared to get sick or their owners are too fearful to report them!
I still carry memories of those difficult times when the militancy was at its peak and Punjab suffered a wave of killings.
My husband and I spend a good deal of time with our eleven-year-old daughter, who is learning to cook. As she chops vegetables, she exclaims "It is so satisfying to cut the veggies." I laugh at her enthusiasm and feel grateful that she remains sane amidst the brouhaha gripping the world. She strings together information from the family elders and construes that things are not so bad. Even though there is a pandemic, she has her parents and a loving family, and that is more than enough to survive.
My daughter is hopeful. Eventually, she believes, things will fall into place like the lost pieces of a puzzle and make sense again. Convinced this is all a big vacation, her main concern is that Amazon has stopped their operations and her Lego delivery is on hold. I do not contradict her and make her anxious. Children need room to grow and normalcy to flourish. Too much information can create chaos. We need to protect our children from knowing too much.
The shops are closed, the roads deserted. I drive to work with a mask on even though my husband is dubious about its capacity to resist the virus.
A child of the 1980s, I have witnessed militancy in my state. The movement to create the separate state of Khalistan, a homeland for Sikhs, was loudest then. I still carry memories of those difficult times when the militancy was at its peak and Punjab suffered a wave of killings. I was the same age as my daughter. There were frequent curfews back then. And though the situation is peaceful on the streets now, this curfew reminds me of those days.
I prefer not to dabble in the past for long. Painful bits of the past should not be exhumed and examined, they should be forgotten. They should not serve as a reminder of what was lost. I hope I will be able to put the difficult memories of this lockdown in the same casket and bury them deep.
The shops are closed, the roads deserted. I drive to work with a mask on even though my husband is dubious about its capacity to resist the virus. But since only three of us manage the veterinary hospital, I don't really come into contact with many people. It is the medical doctors who bear the danger: they are at the frontlines dealing with a highly infectious disease and without protective gear. I am glad my job does not put me at that kind of risk.
We all wish for a safety net around ourselves, and, if it's not there, we weave an imaginary one around ourselves. Only safe and secure citizens of a country can make strides in achieving their personal goals. But what about the doctors who must quarantine themselves at homes after their gruesome work shifts – can they feel secure or create a safety net for themselves?
Life in the times of COVID-19 is okay, I will say. It will be better when the hype dies down. It will be good when this virus has been driven from the face of the earth. It will not happen in a day. It might take months, perhaps even years. But it will happen. My job is to stay healthy, to stay put, and to protect my own sanity. The rest will fall into place. Like missing puzzle pieces, they will eventually find their place.
Published on 11 April 2020.
***
***
Rutuja Deshmukh, Pune
If one recedes from the seven mountains of Satpura in central India, leaving behind the pleasant weather of Malwa plateau, one comes to the medieval town of Burhanpur. There, along the banks of Mouna, a tributary of the river Tapi, was a patch of land where my father had his plantain plantation. The river near the plantation was shallow with a rocky bed, which allowed us children to play in the water and spend the afternoon in the cool shades of the jamun tree with branches leaning over the river.
After we were done playing by the river, our lips and tongues purpled with jamuns, he would tell us a story about the piece of land we rested upon. "There was a village here called Manus Gaon," he would say, painting a vivid picture of a village that perished a hundred years ago, due to a plague pandemic. Quite ironically, this village was named manus gaon – village of humans – in his description.
My baba was a great storyteller; I always felt he was a historian trapped in the ancestral family occupation of a landlord agriculturist. His sketch of a seemingly happy village that turned into a morgue would come alive in our imagination.
In these collective memories, the plague did not seem like a long-gone catastrophe – rather like a letter which was written to my ancestors and was lying somewhere inside a trunk in a seldom-visited room of the house.
A woman lies on the floor, having just fed her newborn, and the house smells of palash gum frying in ghee for the postpartum recovery. Under a thatched roof, near a mud stove, julienned bitter-gourd is scattered on a tray, while the tempering is burnt in the kadhai. A few children have left their catapult on a mango tree and have dropped under it like the raw mangoes they intended to fell, a field of golden wheat crop has men and women who have fallen like puppets without strings. And a seemingly dead village still wears the signs of life it used to hold.
The account of death due to bubonic plague of 1896-97 remained in the Indian subconscious for a long time. My grandparents, who were probably born in the second half of the 1920s, shared these stories with my parents and their generation. And I heard these accounts in the 1990s, growing up in a very different world. In these collective memories, the plague did not seem like a long-gone catastrophe – rather like a letter which was written to my ancestors and was lying somewhere inside a trunk in a seldom-visited room of the house.
This oral history of a village hit by plague and caught in an unexpected whirlwind of death compelled me to look at these stories in a larger context. Much later I realised that the stories about plague held a very important lesson. The memories, experienced neither by my parents nor by my grandparents, reminded us of the social spaces and the community that we need more than any other material comfort. In this account of the bubonic plague in India, there was an element of collective suffering, and death became a leveller of sorts.
Much has changed since then, and, in a highly globalised world, the rapid spread of the pandemic seems unprecedented. As COVID-19 grips country after country, we are also being exposed to the fragility of the neoliberal order. The sheer inability to organise and collectively stand against a global pandemic is the outcome of decades of fractured solidarity.
It makes me wonder how we might remember these times, where rightwing populist governments are using the pandemic to consolidate power. In India, the Hindutva culture's disregard for scientific temperament is further fuelled as it seeks justification for the Brahmanical concepts of 'purity' and 'untouchability' under modern social-distancing regimes. Existing inequalities have become more pronounced, with thousands of migrant labourers walking back home on the deserted highways without food or water, exposing the inhumanity of the neoliberal order and its incapability to deal with crisis. It is becoming increasingly evident that socialised welfare measures work much better for most in our communities.
We are not directly responsible for the coronavirus, but we can certainly be responsible towards imagining a more considerate, humane and inclusive world order, beyond national boundaries. For when future generations recollect COVID-19, they may talk not only about failed leaders and failed systems, about many dying because even nuclear powers couldn't provide adequate healthcare, but perhaps also how out of this utterly painful chaos, a new world emerged.
~Rutuja Deshmukh teaches Film and Cultural Studies at FLAME University, Pune. She writes about cinema, gender, caste, denotified tribes, and culture at the intersection of neoliberalism.
Published on 08 April 2020.
***
Md. Shamshul Arafin, Dhaka
Only one or two shops remain open. One of the shopkeepers told me that his daily income – usually between 500 and 1000 takas – has shrunk to around 50 to 100 takas. Even if COVID-19 does not kill him, he says, hunger certainly will. As I returned home from the grocery shop that evening, I saw the police warning people to stay at home, and noticed people keeping their distance. I am not familiar with these new spaces between people or these pale faces, and the emotions they betray. The world is fighting an enemy it cannot see or touch, and the fear is beyond description.
So many face masks, so many different colours – it is as if we are in an active chemical factory.
For six days, I have remained at home with my beloved wife in my small apartment in Dhaka. Although I grew up in this city, I have never seen it worse. My parents and my in-laws warn us not to go outside to pray; they tell us to eat regularly. Meanwhile, my eyes are plastered to the TV, news sites, and social-media platforms that can keep me up-to-date on COVID-19 news. So far 48 people have been tested positive for COVID-19, and among them, five people have already died. Most of them were old.
Fear spreads through Bangladesh like wildfire, and the frequent rumours make the status quo unbearable. Influenced by rumours and relatives, I bought enough groceries for two months! When I went to buy essentials last week, I saw others, too, returning home with more goods than they needed. Now the price of goods is high and the poor are suffering. I do not worry about myself or for the wealthy – only for day laborers and rickshaw-pullers who live hand-to-mouth. It is as if a big cloud of anxiety hovers over our country. In this crisis, people will do anything to survive.
Bangladesh is densely populated and poor – we will not be able to cope. The people of Italy, Spain and America are dying at an alarming rate. The horrible, hellish things that have happened in Italy have not yet happened here. The government is trying its best to stop this invisible beast from killing us. When the West struggled to fight the pandemic, we were just spectators. Now, the virus is here – a real-life nightmare.
Foreign-returned migrant workers – once the heart of the country's economy – are now the nation's new enemy.
To stop its spread, early measures have already been taken. First, schools and universities were closed. Then, the government announced ten days of holiday to make us stay at home. Transportation has shut down, praying has stopped; Dhaka has become a haunted ghost town. Doctors are afraid because they do not have enough protection. Patients who go to the hospital with normal coughs, colds or flu are being sent home without treatment. So many face masks, so many different colours – it is as if we are in an active chemical factory.
People do not just fear the virus, they also fear the police beatings. The Bangladesh Army has been ordered to help maintain law and order. People are staying at home with their families as if our country is going through a war. COVID-19 has spread mainly due to foreign returnees. Foreign-returned migrant workers – once the heart of the country's economy – are now the nation's new enemy. They are prisoners in their own homes, aliens in their own motherland. People despise them, curse them, keep their distance from them.
The panic created by COVID-19 was unimaginable three months ago. I was roaming outside, eating at different restaurants, visiting tourist spots. Now, suddenly, all my freedom has been taken away. I think about my aged parents and relatives and I am afraid. The changes are hard to digest. As I return home from the grocery shop, infamous lines from the Heart of Darkness echo in my heart: "He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath: "'The horror! The horror!"
~Md Shamshul Arafin did his Master's from the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB) and is currently working as an English-language teacher.
Published on 08 April 2020.
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Dipti Tamang, Darjeeling
When the lockdown was initially announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 24 March, I was a bit sceptical about how it would work in the hills of Darjeeling, where I live. The main question in my mind was, "Were we prepared to fight against this new challenge?"
For those of us who grew up witnessing and living through conflict and violence, terms like 'lockdown' and 'curfew' are normal. It is almost like we are tuned to function 'normally' during these times. The present curfew comes three years after a complete lockdown in Darjeeling in 2017, when life was brought to a standstill for 105 days by political parties demanding the creation of the separate state of Gorkhaland.
The present curfew, announced at 8 pm in the evening, resulted in an exodus of panic-stricken people rushing to the stores and stocking up for months. The owners of the ration shops sold their products at exorbitant rates, gleefully opening up 'credit books' and creating fresh hardship for already burdened people.
For those of us who grew up witnessing and living through conflict and violence, terms like 'lockdown' and 'curfew' are normal.
People continue to flow on to the streets, ignoring rules and regulations –'defiance' also comes naturally to us, having faced systematic oppression for far too long. I experienced a range of emotions – from anxiety to stress to anger to helplessness and frustration – when I saw people who didn't seem the least bothered by or afraid of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, reflecting back, it was nothing but my privilege that allowed me to view reality unfolding before me as 'the ignorance of the common masses.' These people did not have access to relief, economic packages or assurances that despite an immediate 'lockdown', their families would be taken care of. Hence the panic, despite the announcement that supplies would be distributed by the state and central government.
Due to the lack of basic facilities at the local hospital, my father's chemist shop is now flooded with patients stocking up on their regular medicine. Flustered parents of young infants come in for baby food which is now running out of stock. Essential goods are running short and we are clueless about how they will be supplied.
My Instagram feed makes me sick to my stomach, because all we seem to care for is 'self love.'
What I see around me are the harsh realities of our times– where fear of hunger, poverty and hardship is stronger than the fear of the virus. Hamilai pahad ma chudaina virus le (we will be untouched by the virus in the hills) was the attitude of many here until 29 March 2020, when a patient who tested positive for COVID-19, was admitted to the North Bengal Medical Clinic and declared dead. Amidst the chaos and anxiety of asking 'what next?' we have again been reminded of what we lack.
As a lecturer I am helpless and frustrated. I know it is called 'work from home', but where is the digitised technology to reach out to my students, most of them with not even basic facilities in place, let alone internet connectivity? We are once again creating an army of youth who, without anything to look forward to, may succumb to rampant substance abuse.
My Instagram feed makes me sick to my stomach, because all we seem to care for is 'self love.' The wonderful delicacies and artistic skills being explored by those of us who are privileged enough to do so is in stark contrast to the plight of the tea garden workers, the wage workers fighting for basic survival.
It is then, amidst sheer despair, that I take solace in the fact that we have a system where locals have been looking out for one another: the people bringing daily supplies of milk and vegetables;he people stocking and distributing rations to the needy, to ensure no one goes hungry; the same people making sure that others comply with rules to ensure the safety for all – this despite 'social distancing' being an alien concept to many.
In the absence of well-equipped hospitals, members of the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) and health groups have been offering basic services – they educate and seek cooperation from those who simply rush and panic, unaware of what is going on. There is also paranoia, anxiety and fear all around, amidst rumour-mongering and the rampant spread of false information.
We saw 40 days of agitation in 1986, 105 days of bandhs in 2017, and now we face this new crisis. As the world debates what COVID-19 means, we in the hills continue to build on our own way of living that has kept us going for so long. It is in this pahadi way of life that I find hope that we will sail through, like we always have.
~Dipti Tamang is an assistant professor of political science at Darjeeling Government College.
Published on 8 April 2020.
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