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Unlock Diaries: I don’t want to be out there again by Maaz Bin Bilal
Will we ever be able to sing together of the dark times?
The lockdown brought with it many anxieties and fear. Could we live alone, cooped up in our own little pigeonholes with some un-/lucky to have their families with them? Of course, this was a middle-class anxiety, not for someone who didn’t have a home, or shared a room with five others.
I have stayed by myself in my suburban home in Sonipat next to my university during these last few months, meeting only a couple of colleagues-friends-neighbours, and taken walks inside the society and gone to the local grocery store. Most home deliveries are open now, following upon the earlier phase of stringent supplies. From lockdown 3, maids came in, although my gardener has gone back to his village in Madhya Pradesh. I am not sure when he will return, if ever.
I have discovered gardening in a never-before-experienced kind of way, and have grown my own tomatoes, chillies, mint, lemons, beans, and okra; guavas, cucumbers , and melons are on their way. The extended spring of 2020 in north India was particularly delightful when experienced up close in my flower garden with white and red roses, yellow, red, and pink hibiscuses, white, magenta and pink bougainvillea, white African daisies and jasmines, and multicoloured gazanias.
If I may say so myself, with shami kebabs, mutton qorma and stew, baked fish, doi maachh, and chicken khao suey, I have also cooked up a storm. Mother was always forthcoming with Mughlai recipes on the phone. For the rest, what can you not learn on your own in the age of the internet?
Rising from the ground, the eye has not just rested at the kitchen counter but travelled beyond into the open skies. It has been enamoured there with the long-migrating wire-tailed swallow’s smooth flight, the thieving black drongoes, the bright green bee-eaters, the wailing red-wattled lapwings who keep asking “Who did it?” and the white cattle egrets whose necks have now turned yellow with the arrival of their mating season. The skies and fields of Sonipat are filled with avian friends who I can go on naming, but you get the drift. Nilgai, hares, snakes, monitor lizards, grasshoppers, frogs, and packs of pariah dogs provide other points of interest. Some of these may be fed when one feels charitable.
In another first, I have taught students online. I must say I did not mind these classes. While teaching the classics, I realized afresh that Oedipus ruled a city undergoing a plague. He ruled a tad bit differently from the leaders of the world today. And I wrote about it, the piece is forthcoming.
I have rediscovered writing by hand, with fountain pens; thanks again to Amazon. Some childhood bullies who’d break the nibs of my pens had stolen this joy from me for almost two decades. I have now realised writing with a medium nib is so much easier, infinitely more pleasurable, and I am writing much, much more. I have also written fiction in Hindi-Urdu for the first time. I wonder how much more I would have written across my languages these last two decades if I had still held my fountain pen squat between my childhood finger and thumb. But fountain pens it shall be hereon, and that’s a promise. Take that you suckers.
Middle-class life is good.
And even its socialising obligations may easily be dropped, this lockdown makes you realise. Especially if you are single.
I don’t want to be out there again. For I can no longer take the apathy that has been unleashed, which allows people to walk, cycle, hitchhike, and migrate hungry to their deaths. People should not eat grass, cows do.
The little help I am capable of providing, I can give through electronic channels, (while I continue to have the internet). I am not sure if we’d be allowed to congregate. Of course, we shouldn’t on account of the disease. Are we still at local transmission levels or have reached the community stage, and is there anything past that? I am from Delhi. Which particular place is a containment zone? I read hospitals are running out of beds.
Will we ever be able to sing together of the dark times? EM Forster wrote in “The Machine Stops” of a time when people, even family, only interact on computer screens. Black Mirror had also shown us many such mirrors to our lives more recently. And now we are conducting webinars. They are smell proof. No more sweat, farts, but no more musk or jasmine either. Perhaps, the protest shall congregate on Zoom. I wonder if 144 covers that. We shall deliver our “Azad Bol” or words of freedom in virtual solidarity.
The new capitol may soon be constructed.
I don’t think I would like to witness it.
Maaz Bin Bilal is associate professor of literary studies at Jindal Global University. He is the author of Ghazalnama: Poems from Delhi, Belfast, and Urdu (Yoda Press, 2019) and the translator of Fikr Taunsvi’s The Sixth River: A Journal from the Partition of India (Speaking Tiger, 2019).
