Home Time Space

22 May, 2020

Kolkata, India

Home?

I am lucky to be at home, in Kolkata, with my parents, in this lockdown period. Struggling to concentrate on writing my doctoral thesis and disturbed by the social turmoil in India in the past several months, I had fled Delhi, a city which is just as much home although differently, to crawl back into the womb as it were, seeking refuge to work in peace. Here I lack for nothing except the freedom of movement caused by this enforced isolation yet even so, I am comfortable. In the initial weeks, I chuckled at the urgency with which banks and clothing stores and shopping malls normally devoted to luring customer to their premises, were sending out ‘stay at home’ messages. Stay at home. But this is not a message meant for everyone. There are many who have been shown in these past weeks, that they have no right to a home, or that their right to homecoming actually harms society, or the economy. The entire country is today divided into green, orange, and red zones, but Indian Muslims, wherever they are, have already been declared hotspots through a relentless campaign of fake news, rumours, and selective reporting. Not a physical location, not an individual, but a religious community is now a hotspot. I don’t know why I was so taken aback at this — for those who have been termed pests, what else could they be seen as but carriers of infection, and those over whom the prospect of loss of citizenship looms large, what homes did they think they would be safe in? What is happening to healthcare providers here is more inexplicable. The Indian state and public has made ostentatious shows of appreciation towards these ‘corona warriors’: applauding them, banging pots and pans , and literally showering them with gratitude (flowers), and yet. There have been multiple reports of landlords, neighbours, and residents’ welfare associations harassing, abusing, and throwing them out of their rented accommodations, out of fear of infection. Those who spend inordinately long hours at the hospital, fighting with inadequate and uncomfortable protection against an enemy they little understand yet, under strict state surveillance, come back exhausted to find they have no home. In both the above cases, it’s a fear of contamination, but their causes are different. In the case of Muslims, it is the fear of the ‘other’ that is not uncommon to pandemic psychology. But the case of discrimination against doctors may be more culturally Indian. This fear of contamination is hardwired in our collective psyche — we have a long tradition of mistaking the removers of filth and contagion as the agents of filth and contagion. It goes by the name of casteism. But by far, the most heartbreaking instance of those denied a home are those who are denied a homecoming through the consensus of big business pressure, government discouragement, and middle-class apathy. Ever since the nationwide lockdown was hastily announced, millions of impoverished workers of irregular employment and little means who had left their villages and flocked to the city in search of better prospects of survival, have taken to travelling hundreds of kilometres on foot, to their home states, abandoned to their fate by cruel landlords, exploitative employers and middlemen, and a complacent state. They are condescendingly and misleadingly dubbed ‘migrant workers’. Many of the young carry small children and the elderly with them in India’s scorching summer heat, with little or no food, water, or money to sustain them, and no available means of long-distance transport. Some are making this arduous journey on their own. Some perish on their way. Like the little girl who walked for one fifty kilometres on foot, only to die of malnutrition and dehydration one hour away from her village. Or the fifteen people who died on the railway tracks, waiting for a train that would take them home, unprepared for the one that did come by and crushed them to death in their sleep. Middle-class incomprehension throws up questions like: why did they defy lockdown? why do they want to get home? why were they lying on the railway tracks, in the first place? There are many speculations about that last question, ranging from utter exhaustion to mass suicide. As to why they were bound homewards, even if their destination possibly held deprivation and death in store for them (in the absence of adequate quarantine facilities and money for sustenance), I cast my mind back to a couple of months back, when my uncle was hospitalised with a brain stroke for two weeks, before he passed away. And I remember those long hours my family spent daily in the corridor outside his ICU, without so much as the hope of being allowed to meet him, and the prospect of his death growing increasingly inevitable — and I understand the comfort inherent at the very thought of physical proximity to those we love, even when death approaches, perhaps all the more so then. Again, that irresistible urge to crawl back into the womb.

Time…

Twentieth-century modernism familiarised us with the differences between clock-time and psychological-time. I have learnt the importance of the latter in my own life. As a slow person who likes to take her time with things and as someone who is inordinately fond of her solitude, and also as an otherwise unemployed PhD candidate, I do not set too much store by clocks. I should have been singularly suited to quarantine life? Not quite. Never have I struggled so much to keep to clock time. At one level, as days melt seamlessly into one another, I try to create a daily and weekly schedule for myself. I maintain a daily diary, and every week upload the entries online for my social media friends to read — the first, to resist the onslaught of indistinguishable time, and the second, to push back the enforced privacy that I so jealously guard under regular circumstances. Twice a week — on Mondays and Fridays — I also make and upload videos online, of my read-alouds of poems, stories, and essays. I have never felt easy sharing my videos with those I have only known virtually, but there is something compelling about being seen and heard these days, by those one does not share physical space with. Through the eyes and ears of others, I see and hear myself, and draw reassurance that indeed, I do exist, outside my own mind; solitude is of little help here. The instinctive choice of days (Mondays and Fridays) puzzled me initially but in retrospect, I think it was my way of keeping track of the beginning and end of a working week — weekdays that no longer mean much anymore. More important than any of this is the other kind of reconciliation with time-keeping that many of us are despairing over. For there is another time-keeping quite beyond that of individual subjective time and the resolute, objective ticking of the clock: that of the future already set in motion by forces beyond our control. At the onset of lockdown, I think many of us believed that with this global emergency upon us, other tragedies and injustices would halt in their tracks. The lockdown came as a reluctant respite for many involved in protests against many government bills, policies, and actions that we believed to be undemocratic — a temporary truce between the state and the citizenry. But that has not been the case. As Indian citizens went into lockdown, the Indian state has used this time to mould the future to its own dictation, and charged ahead with sinister policies that spell doom for our post-lockdown realities — a bill clearing the way to ‘redevelop’ (at humongous cost borne by our taxes) the Indian parliament building and several heritage sites around it in the capital city, wrong-headed environment policy drafts and labour laws couched in the language of improving ‘ease of doing business’ standards, and an aggressively-peddled contact-tracking app with questionable security and surveillance concerns. Masha Gessen’s essay in The New Yorker drew my attention to Hannah Arendt’s observations on how isolation and loneliness are the fertile breeding ground for totalitarianism. And what is more isolating than quarantine? And what is a more helpless way to spend time, than witnessing a future in formation, and possessing no power to resist or change it?

Space .

The latest cartoon that is flashing repeatedly in my virtual environment is this: an image of a storm-struck sea, being navigated by a big, sturdy ship and several small, flimsy boats. The accompanying caption reads: we are not all in the same boat, only tossed into the same storm. True enough, quarantine is punishment for all, but for some it is boredom, and for others, a luxury. I am spending my days in a spacious house, where each of us — my parents and I — can lounge in a different room, and there is a terrace and a garden to bring us in touch with our own bits of the soil and sky and bird and tree and flower and fruit. My parents are retired, I subsist on my savings as I wrap up my dissertation, yet we have enough to see us comfortably through these days. For a big part of the day, we are each in our virtual worlds — I on Facebook, finding companionship in those with similar political views and my ‘infotainment’ through webinars and performances and special free lockdown access to magazines and streaming sites, and my parents lost in their Whatsapp groups with their deluge of news-cum-gossip-cum-speculation. I churn out desperate quarantine humour and scroll endlessly for fresh content, my mother shares pictures of food she cooks for her friends’ admiration and watches one classic black-and-white Bengali film a day, and my father is busy administrating his old college friends’ whatsapp group, where fights regularly break out. And then there are the video calls to friends and family, some of which we three attend together, especially the weekly one with my brother and sister-in-law in another city. Video calls that do not occur to us under normal circumstances. Another luxury — the internet. We are the first generation in human history to be surviving quarantine without only our memories and our immediate physical realities for company. I can’t stop marvelling at this grateful reality, every day. And again, there are those for whom both physical and virtual space are a luxury. In our neighbours’ house next door, also lives a family of four — a married couple and their one-year-old twins (a boy and a girl) who live in the garage. It is not an unusual living arrangement in these parts: a garage let out to a low-income family in exchange not for rent, but service and security. The wife cooks for the house-owners on the first floor in her free time and helps keep their house in order, and the husband works as a small-scale real estate contractor in regular time, and runs errands for the family above. It struck me yesterday that the metaphor of the basement and the sprawling mansion from the South Korean film Parasite are realities in my immediate vicinity. What social distancing there? What sanitation precautions possible? And yet, they seem to be the most content lot that I see around. I hear the toddlers cooing and gurgling and their parents’ delighted calls of love and encouragement, and I wonder what these children will remember from these infant years later — their world closed in by walls and trees, with only a driveway as the extent of their playground. Truly, there are as many quarantines today as there are people in this world.