The first detected case of the coronavirus in India was reported on January 30, 2020. Over the next two months, the number of cases had risen to 500, and—in an effort to stem the spread of the virus—on March 24, the Central Government announced an immediate lockdown. What ensued, of course, we all know. Almost a year down the line, it’s obvious that the repercussions of that lockdown will take a long time to die down. And some of them, perhaps, will haunt us for the rest of our lives.
How the lockdown has affected us, how differences in social status and privilege have been made even more stark because of it: all of this, and more, is highlighted in Udayan Mukherjee’s collection of lockdown-related short stories, Essential Items and Other Tales from a Land in Lockdown.This is a set of 10 short stories, each about people living through the lockdown. In the ‘Essential Items’ of the book’s title, an elderly couple is visited by a young volunteer who fetches their medicines and groceries. In another story of a person confined to home because of the lockdown, the writer Varun of ‘The Stroll’ finds, to his disadvantage, that while going out for a walk may be a refreshing change, it comes with its own perils.
There are others, the lockdown changing their lives in its own way. The migrant labourer returning to his village in ‘Kumaon’. The chawl-dwelling couple, struggling to manage their finances on a suddenly depleted income. A resourceful dom, burning bodies by the ghats, and realising that this too could be used to make a profit. And the privileged: the people who still entertain, in ‘The Party’, and over their drinks in the comfortable cocoons of their homes, try to absolve themselves of the guilt of being well-off.
Mukherjee is a fine storyteller, and his stories mostly manage to stay away from the predictable. For one, his characters are a very varied lot, and therefore the situations they find themselves in differ widely. For some, like the British climber stuck in Munsiyari, the lockdown is a mild inconvenience; for others, like Raja Babu, scion of a once-royal family in Bengal, Cyclone Amphan brings an opportunity to revive a half-remembered spirit of noblesse oblige (and some plain and simple humanity).
Most of all, these stories show a deep understanding of human nature. The people here are beautifully nuanced, and very real. There are those whose generosity surfaces in times of trouble, and there are those who seek to take advantage of the situation. There are hypocrites, and there are those who try to hold a mirror up to that hypocrisy. There are those who put themselves at risk to do good, and there are those who greedily accept that goodwill without any real gratitude.
Only one character in all these stories actually suffers from Covid-19, and that too is shown only briefly. An interesting reflection, perhaps, of the way the lockdown has affected us. It’s not just the disease, it’s the lockdown that has turned our lives upside-down.Someday, perhaps, this lockdown will be history. But books like Essential Items will remain as a fitting memory of these trying times.