"Sometimes these days,” says my friend V, “I feel I am blanking out whole chunks of this last one year.”
The second April of the pandemic is on us. A morbid anniversary, in a year of many morbid milestones. The finish line nowhere in sight.
I nod in agreement even though V can’t see me. Our conversation, like most conversations these days, is happening via text. I send her the millennial equivalent of deep understanding: an animated sticker. It is our favourite character, Daisy Romashka. Perched on a green stalk, white petals framing her round yellow face, Daisy is banging her head against a red brick-wall.
We are in April and the second wave is here. Solidarité.
In my youth, during the course of a long (and no doubt taxing to others) Eliot phase, I would be on the constant lookout for an opportunity to drop the ‘April is the cruellest month’ line from ‘The Waste Land’. Bad breakups, being broke, beastly deadlines: such were the treacheries of our innocent Aprils. Then came 2020 and the pandemic, by which time, I had outgrown Eliot and, possibly, youth. In India, April was the cruellest month.
We quickly acquired a new vocabulary of loss and unmooring, even those of us who had a few layers of buffer against first impact. As the storm made landfall, we had walls within which to hunker down, we had enough money for provisions, we had work which could be done remotely. But the virus too was canny, good at barrelling down these buffers. And then there was at least one great equaliser. As human beings, panicked, lost, fearful, flocked towards home, as the ill tried to breathe wherever they were, and the dead did not get their traditional last rites, all of us survivors, rich and poor alike, would bear its mark forever. However much we tried, we could not go back to our old selves. That was our punishment.
V’s message sends me into a wormhole of sorts. My April wasn’t as cruel as many other peoples’ or even the rest of the year came to before me, and perhaps that is why when I try to remember it, I fail to find specific memories that I can hold in the palm of my hand, deploy as mnemonics to conjure up one clear day or hour, with some definition or clarity. I find only fragments.
April 2020.A strange silence outside our windows, which, before Corona, looked onto a madly busy street. The metro that runs aboveground in our neighbourhood is no longer operational, and only a few cars whiz past. From the study, we can see at certain times of the day, the tail-end of a serpentine queue of masked people who have lined up for a meal at a government relief centre, waiting patiently in the heat. Inside, there is endless washing of dishes and cooking of meals and some negotiation with the local Modern Bazaar for a delivery. How much nourishment does this stupid body need?
Days and nights blur into one another.
I know that on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I would have taught my classes. I know that SJ would have made brunch, having taken the executive decision, in the wake of my meltdowns about the endlessness of the nourishment process, to collapse our meals into two main ones, brunch and linner. I know we would have spoken daily to our parents, and often to our friends. I know I would have checked Instagram from time to time, refusing resolutely to make dalgona coffee. I know I would have picked out books from our shelves and read quietly every afternoon, trying to still the panic in my heart with prose. And it is from the faint memory of this definite panic that a clear moment emerges.
Last April, I chose to re-read Satti Khanna’s translation of Nirala’s memoir A Life Misspent which, among other things, recounts the influenza pandemic of 1918, popularly called the Spanish flu, that had raged across India. In it, Nirala’s intense grief at losing first his wife and then several members of his family to the pandemic is captured with an economy that only a poet could summon. “This was the strangest time in my life.
My family disappeared in the blink of an eye. All our sharecroppers and labourers died, the four who worked for my cousin as well as the two who worked for me... In whichever direction I turned, I saw darkness.” A few days later, he began to sit by the river again.
“The mound of sadhus in Dalmau is famous for its height. The Ganga made a sharp turn below it. The corpses were laid together. Sometimes I would think of the ascetic sadhus, sometimes of the ephemerality of the world.”
Later that day, I call V. We talk about this and that, little things, an essay that is due, a loud peacock in a tree, the illness of a loved one, the worth of Daisy Romashka. We resolutely skirt around ephemerality and ascetics and corpses, and in that deliberate omission of course, we fold them carefully into our world too.
Devapriya Roy
Author and teacher Her latest book is Friends from College
roydevapriya@gmail.com