By Varsha Tiwary
The Big Stop
With four hours notice, a country of 1.3 billion is whipped to a stop. Those who have homes lock themselves in; the millions who sleep on pavements—hawking, cleaning, lugging, building, begging—have to begin walking back to their villages.
It is a spring of dis-ease, despair and kindergarten obedience. A lockdown on news, facts, logic. Empty shelves. Hoarding of potatoes and pumpkins. Quarantined common sense.
Uncertainty
Funerals alone. Birthdays alone. Weddings postponed. The due date for the pregnant lady in N5 is fraught with a million fears. Someone’s knee surgery, someone else’s root canal are wait-listed.
Life moves forward even as time becomes a stagnant pool. Fear comes not from the virus still busy wreaking havoc in China, the U.S., and Spain, but from the police. Stasis is simultaneous with the equally strong feeling of unprecedented change.
The Evening Walkers
The April evening makes walking a test of will. Yet everyone is out circling the complex: iron-willed matriarchs; office-deprived men dragging stoic Labradors; pert-buttocked, blonde-streaked young wives in Lycra with matching masks, talking only in English to their kids; the (apparently) buff guys running endlessly, wee paunches jiggling under their bicep-revealing vests; aunties in all-encompassing frock-gowns who lower their masks on their double chins to gossip as they waddle and trudge, forcing themselves into endless circles around the six towers of our complex. They move without any need to reach or arrive. Just to prove to themselves that movement is possible or to remember that movement matters.
Minus the cussing and revving on the roads, the frenzy of homecoming is now heard only in the canopies reverberating with squabbling mynahs and parakeets. A different kind of homecoming—the march of hungry, penniless columns of laborers including barefoot girls and boys, skinny women, empty-eyed men walking the highways and rail tracks all the way from Delhi to Balia, Banaras, Begusarai—is unseen, voiceless. It must not exist. But for the quiet city streets.
The Market
The police have turned the buzzing intersection of pre-lockdown days into a homey drawing room—a circle of molded chairs around a table laden with tea things: a basket of oranges, a water cooler, and a wilting rose stem stuffed in a glass bottle. Armed with a medical prescription, I sneak past them onto roads as still as graveyards marked by a terrible absence. In a city with a population density of 29,000 people per square mile, and 200,000 homeless, how can you make people vanish overnight?
No jumble of cars outside the Sikh shrine, no throng of devotees at the big temples; no sellers of flowers, incense, or offerings; no mangle of scootys outside the IIT-JEE coaching institutes. The market that once slept only past midnight is desolate except for bewildered stray dogs by vacant dumpsters and shuttered eating stalls. Where can they seek redress for the sudden plunder of all color, smell, and noise that made their life their life?
The Cars and the Apartments
Long-parked cars all the way up to C-12 begin to look like a pretentious art installation that has fallen on bad days. Sleek SUVs sit covered in unaccustomed dust and bird shit, their hoods and roofs heaped with brown finger-like leaves of devil’s tree. Curled-up bowls of yellowing sacred fig leaves gather in wiper nooks; windshields bear names scrawled in grime by bored fingers. The delivery vans, which never stopped moving, now look like grounded geriatrics showing every bit of their age.
The good apartment owners of Vasant Kunj—to maximize space—left only miniscule slivers as balconies and these have become precious and sought after now. The balconies are a refuge for bored smokers, lovers on the phone, and tuneless singers. A man struggles with a dumbbell in one. Children hang by railings and peer down. Several protesting dogs sit banished on them.
The Rain
An afternoon dust storm lifts spirals of debris and rakes dried leaf nests from windshields, depositing them on staircases and balconies. This is followed by short, swift showers. Not showers so much as a lackadaisical drizzle like from a disgruntled lawn sprinkler. Still, the winds bring coolness, lift the hair of socially distanced and masked little girls on the swings, and make the last of the wild petunias sway. Curtains of bougainvillea look washed and pinkly fresh against the peeling plaster of our boundary wall. People walk faster, chatterers laugh more, joggers jog jauntily. No one looks at the sky. The light is clearer, the blue of the sky washed bluer. A contest is on. Flocks of soft, blurry white clouds seek to run over the blue which keeps pushing through them assertively. But the clouds are persistent, too many and too beguiling. Some soft white clouds catch the western sun, and their edges turn gold like cooked egg whites. Then they are replaced by a denser darker sheet of big clouds through which radiating daggers of the setting sun poke making momentary magic. There is every color for a brief while: ivory, smoke, gold, melting into lilac and indigo. Everything struggles, everything succumbs.
The Full Moon
The empty street with grim yellow streetlights looks different when presided over by the giant disc of a slow-gliding copper moon. I see it held low in the bare branches of the silk cotton tree and then entangled in the newly-leafed sacred fig tree. And then it moves higher. Then it is pressed between Towers five and four. Then caught inside a rickety square of bamboo scaffolding. I can moon over the moon. Had I been walking empty stomached like the migrants, it would have reminded me of a roti. Had I been hit by the virus, it would have looked like a giant pill.
The Loss
Lockdown brings the peace of the full moon and the reckless quiet of preventive safety. Makes radical distancing mandatory in a city alive with radical gatherings.
I miss them: the tailor with his rickety sewing-machine who sat under the ficus; the barber who hung a mirror and brushed on the grille of a boundary wall; the transvestite who begged for a new shade of lipstick; the ice cream man; the one-armed puncture repairer; the incredible richness of fleeting encounters that I mourn only when they are gone.