Half a decade down the Covid-lane, many of us carry the remnants of a pandemic which struck our body and mind. A 2018 Pushcart Prize nominee, Babitha Marina Justin’s poem ‘Writing from my Neighbourhood’, portrays how estrangement reprogrammed our normal lives.
Homes are silent:
children no longer play
in the bylanes…
The aroma from her neighbour’s kitchen reminds her of the two daughters in the neighbouring house. Her quiet daughters have become quieter, she observes. The initial lines of the poem delve into an eerie silence which accompanied the pandemic. It was not a meditative hush, but one which was quite sinister, always anticipating the worst and anxiously awaiting the bleakest news. In contrast to this human predicament, the dogs lived their lives, muses the poet.
My mongrel is the one
who has no panic button on.
He sleeps dreaming of his bitch:
she hovers around
my house, sniffing (every corner
where he had pissed) and whining
in love, he darts to the gate,
they sniff-kiss each other, like refugees
from two warring countries:
Home and Street.
The persona’s father sits in the house, watching sports on TV, and sometimes snatching glimpses of ‘sniff-kissing love in the time of quarantine’ on YouTube. Her boys mouth the quarantine ‘like a lollipop’, and prefer social distancing and online games to the outside world. On the contrary, the persona wishes to be kissed by the sea.
I want to break the roof,
let lovelorn leaves fall on my
bed, I want to stretch
on the ground branching out
my tendrils with the roots.
The pandemic drew lines between the ones who revelled to stay within the houses, getting attuned to the sudden outburst of online resources for entertainment and pleasure, and the ones who wanted to break the roof and branch out in all directions. Five years later, we have evolved into a species which explores the possibilities of social media over face-to-face conversations. A human breed has been born, which depends on emojis rather than words. That is how we advance, and let us not be judgmental here, at least for now. The poem concludes:
I have traveled a long way
from my neighborhood
Have we?