Unlock Diaries: My Home as a Blue Kite by Parimal Bhattacharya
Oh, to step out into the city with more hope than worry, if only to return home and rediscover the repose it gives after a long hard day!
On 24 March, 2020, when my world shrank into the confines of my home, I discovered a space that I had neglected all these years: our rooftop terrace. During late afternoons, our neighbourhood would turn into a fleet of ships with passengers on deck, enjoying the spring breeze and open skies. Families lounged, gossiped, unstiffened their limbs, did yoga, played hopscotch, and yes, hunched over their smartphones. Some resourceful men flew kites. Thus, while our city’s streets were empty, colourful kites populated its skies. One afternoon, when a runaway blue kite, felled by a rival, landed on our terrace, the 10-year-old inside me leapt out and grabbed it. I was caressing its crisp rice paper, feeling sweet memories well up inside me, when my wife, who was also on the terrace and having a safe-distance adda with neighbours in the next building, saw me.
“Don’t forget to wash your hands thoroughly when you finish playing with it,” she commanded, in a voice that was stern and indulgent in equal measure. “You never know!”
At that instant, I knew. I knew what my life would be after lockdown. Suspicion, caution, sanitizer, distance — these would be my mantra, and I’d be running them in my head every time I shall step out of the house, like a monk turning his prayer beads.
Now as I walk the streets again and meet my neighbours sporting masks of all colours and designs, and nod or wave at them, I am also feeling an odd exhilaration, a sense of solidarity. It is as if all of us are playing a game, a very serious game, of staying safe and keeping others safe. Rarely do self-interest and altruism merge in a single act, and all of us are trying our best to play the game by the rule book. But the unsettling part is, we are still in the middle of it and nobody knows when and how this deadly game will end.
I have other, more immediate worries. I teach literature to graduate students in a college, and my normal workday involves communication in a live setting. It is not just verbal communication; facial expressions matter a lot too. How do we achieve this when the most expressive parts of our faces, except the eyes, are concealed behind those samosa-shaped N95 masks? Also, how shall I spend an evening with a friend, sitting two metres apart, not being able to see his lips when I crack a joke, or reach out and pat his wrist when he shares a feeling of despair? My imagination fails when I try to visualise us inside the Coffee House, or our favourite Shaw’s Bar behind Metro Cinema, with tables packed so close that anyone could pick up a drink from a neighbouring table by mistake. Many friendships have blossomed this way, and such cramped conviviality is the essence of these places.
I know they wouldn’t be the same again soon, and I have braced myself to face the fact. I have also prepared myself to meet a class of twenty young minds and read with them Barthes or Camus, and not be able to see their lips pinched with curiosity or curled in apathy. And yet I am itching to get back there — to see again my folks, to catch up with pals, to greet the old cucumber seller outside our college gates and to hear the blind singer on the steps of Esplanade metro station.
I have missed them all. This lockdown has taught me how connected I am with a human web that folds around my city, that I always took for granted, and how important they are for my sanity.
It has also taught me the value of sound. As a surreal silence descended over my noisy city, I heard the birds sing after a long time. I also learned that a high-pitched chirp that I had always thought to be the harangue of a house sparrow was in fact a squirrel’s mating call. I now plan to use my auditory faculty more carefully when I hear out my students and friends, so that I can catch in their voices the hint of confusion or anxiety that I cannot read on their faces, and to use my own voice with more subtle modulation.
Read more: Review: Bells of Shangri-la by Parimal Bhattacharya
I want to step out into my beloved city with more hope than worry, if only to return home and rediscover the repose this space gives me after a long hard day spent outdoors. The lockdown had turned my home into a prison. I want to get it back like a blue kite.
Parimal Bhattacharya is an Associate Professor at a college in Kolkata. He is a bilingual writer. He is the author of Bells of Shangri-La: Scholars, Spies, Invaders in Tibet (Speaking Tiger, 2019).