The world after Covid-19

When I last wrote this column two weeks ago, India was a very different place. Yes, we were already talking about social distancing, but if we brought it up, we did so with an embarrassed laugh, as if to imply that we knew we were over-reacting. We were wary of public places already, but we still got into an Uber or took the metro, trying to dismiss the twinge of apprehension as we did so.
 

We knew that the coronavirus had blazed through Wuhan in China, killing many, and that it was convulsing Italy, too, sending several parts of the country into a lockdown. But even so, we felt it was a catastrophe that belonged to another, far-off, place. The drum-roll of death was still a distant tattoo. We shared heartwarming videos of Italians quarantined in their homes coming out on their balconies to perform community concerts. The videos were an affirmation of life, and they had a movie-like romanticism, a romanticism that almost made us forget the fear and hardship that those men and women were enduring because a deadly scourge had their cities in its grip.
 

Today, we Indians are in the thick of our own coronavirus hell. The country is locked down — not for a few days, but for three weeks, and we are shut inside our homes because we've been told that it's our best shot at battling the invisible enemy called Covid-19, which is doubling the number of those infected roughly every four days.
 

And suddenly, nothing is as it was. The once tidy park outside my house lies unswept, and masses of yellow-brown leaves rustle softly in the cool spring wind. The children who used to come and play here every afternoon are absent. Those of us who have often been profligate with our food are rationing it now, figuring out how many days’ worth of rice and dal and other essentials we have stockpiled. Our conversations revolve obsessively around a few topics: the effectiveness of masks of various kinds, the hand-washing protocol even if we're not stepping outside, whether online delivery will resume soon and whether the packages could carry the malignant germ, whether we will face shortages, whether the lockdown will be extended… whether, whether, whether… and all questions really coalesce into one overwhelming existential query: Can we beat this virus and reclaim our world?
 

In between, we deal with nightmarish videos of policemen thrashing people who have ventured out on essential business; we see them overturning cart-loads of fruits and vegetables, brutally swinging their lathis, and wonder what perversion, what rot in our society could have produced such thuggish keepers of the law. We sit in the sheltered cocoons of our homes and watch migrant workers on our television screens as they begin their long march home. The lockdown has stripped them of their livelihood in the city; the absence of public transport has robbed them of the means to go back to their villages. So they have decided to walk hundreds of miles to try and get back to where they belong. Do they have the money to buy food along the way? Probably not. The depleting store in my pantry doesn't seem quite so life-threatening any more.
 

Sometimes we remember our plans and preoccupations from early March. They seem laughably unreal now. Did I really spend a lot of time wondering which colour would be ideal for my living room walls? Will I ever again have the luxury of expending mental energy on something as trivial as wall paint? Will I ever again make plans for a party? A holiday? Or go out and watch a movie at the theatre? Have the contours of work and leisure changed for good? The village, the town, the city — those clusters of civilisation where we live and work and play — have they forever been transformed into inhospitable pens, where we eye each other with suspicion and keep our distance?
 

Actually, I don't dwell too long on such questions. The future seems very far away. The present fills every corner of our cowering minds.
 

Shuma Raha is a journalist and author