To walk in this world
In the early days of the lockdown, I found myself stepping out of the house every few days on one or the other pretext. ‘We need bananas’, I said to A one morning, darting out of the house before he had a chance to object. A few days later it was bread and dhanya. On another occasion, I went to pick up dried leaves from the street, purportedly for the fusty home composter which had turned into a mass of too-squelchy vegetable peels and fruit remains. I was secretly proud of that one. It allowed for multiple stops and to the casual onlooker, looked industrious (and therefore permissible, I reasoned).
That morning, I walked past a park which had hosted weekly vegetable markets, flower shops I’d stop by for rajnigandha and the 100-year old Hearsch bakery I’d visit for mutton patties. All locked up and shuttered. My feet found their way to the cannonball tree under which ‘Javed Key Maker’ would sit. I knew the spot well from having frequented it earlier in the year. There was no sign of him — not the wooden board with his name printed in red paint that would sit propped against the tree, nor his tools and mechanised key cutting machine.
Even as I acknowledged the absence of familiar faces, the usual landmarks and the thrum of activity, there stood the cannonball tree, its presence reassuring. Growing from long stalks projecting from the tree trunk were woody spherical fruit, mimicking the shape and size of a cannonball (therein its name). Interspersed with it were dark pink-and-red flowers with yellow undersides, some of which were now scattered underfoot. We exchanged a quiet greeting as I rooted around the base of the trunk, adding leaves to my bag. A few hundred metres ahead, I stopped below a peepal tree, its canopy now pink-and-green, marking the change of season. Closer home was jarul or crepe myrtle — purple and bright pink, the two living across the road from each other. I hadn’t noticed them standing guard at the end of the road. Now in full bloom, they were impossible to miss.
Talking to my father that night, he asked why I hadn’t gone down to the little garden behind the building in which I live to pick up leaves. It was a valid suggestion, but one that wouldn’t allow for rambles in the neighbourhood — time and space I needed to be with the grief and rage that have become daily companions. To give them room to soften.
Every day, as I read and watch the mounting deprivation that the lockdown has wrought, I’m reminded of other stories. Of a 12-year old child I’d met at an institution who was sent away from her home in Odisha to Mumbai for work because her father got tuberculosis and the family was thrown into debt. The trigger — tuberculosis. A treatable disease, but in the absence of an affordable health care system and social protection for the family, her childhood home and family were hundreds of kilometres away, and depending on her labour for survival. I remembered a 13-year old boy in a Mumbai slum telling me how his younger brother was too little to work, but when he reached this height, indicating his 4-foot high shoulder, he could start working too. He was frighteningly vulnerable and terribly grown up all at once.
Many stories crowd together, some from well before the lockdown. Children and women who were already living on the margins, one shock away from falling into the cracks. I think about how they are faring and what new injustice they have to grapple with now that existing fissures of class, caste and religion have deepened. I think about structures that perpetuate this — economic systems built to extract and exploit, a caste system designed to value one persons life over another. Accompanying it are questions of how I am part of these systems, and how I choose to challenge and resist. Has the pandemic made visible what is glaringly wrong with the world? Or will they become more invisible?
As I walk in the neighbourhood, there’s space to grieve. To remind myself to continue to look and ask questions of the world I inhabit. There’s comfort too in stories, faces and in holding them close — in the act of remembering.
I choose routes past trees I favour from my childhood like the amaltas which has transformed into bright yellow flowers. Another route is replete with 7-foot high plants — red and white flag bushes, yellow trumpet flowers and bougainvillea. Round the corner from them, a wall is covered in butterfly pea plants — a vivid, deep blue flower.
I want to know the names of others. To smell and touch them as I walk. There’s intimacy in knowing names and saying them out loud, in stopping to look, listen and note changes wrought by the wind and rain. It’s a life affirming reminder of the passage of time. Down the street, the flowers on the crepe myrtle have fallen away and faded even as the gulmohar has come into bloom. In every moment, change.
As the world continues to turn on its head, the presence of these reminders are powerful talismans against slipping into helplessness. It allows for space to rage, weep and look up at the monsoon sky and again be grateful for being alive. To walk in this world.
