Dearest Reader I am talking to you from day twenty… I don’t remember - of the quarantine. I hope this finds you and your loved ones in health. Time is reeking in its overabundance these days. I try to drown it in the photos and stories of Instagram, discard it through incoherent conversations with people long forgotten and gulp it down with the incessant news flashing in my home every now and then. Fear gathers itself in the living room, makes its presence felt in spite of my desperate attempts to ignore it. My friend messages me, “When will things be normal? What will be the cost of it?” I wait for a few seconds, type some sweet nothings, pause again, and delete it because I fail to believe in it myself. I can only manage to write, “I don’t know when, but we will get through this, this will have to end someday.”
Quarantine has made me spend a lot of time with my past selves. Like xewalis gathered by my mother in winter mornings, I gather snippets of open skies from the past. I remember the sky spread over the small square inside Delhi University’s Faculty of Arts building, blue and magnificent, holding within the shrivelled leaves of a receding winter the seeds of a new friendship. I remember the aerial maze of interconnected wires above Sharma’s Tea Stall at Malkaganj Chowk, where the wisps of several intoxicants- tea, coffee, Maggie, cigarettes- hover and linger together amidst various stages of youth. I hope that in midst the confinement of human walls, human bonds give you company and the memories you created with them occupy the abundance of space in your unoccupied mind.
Strength is effervescent. Today I find myself in its resounding cataract- I sketch a little, read some Dickens and ponder some more about the resolute, indomitable human spirit. Other days I only manage to hold it as it is about to burst. My consciousness quarantines me from any ray of hope, painting the windows black, stuffing any crevice with enough self-doubt, loneliness and worthlessness that no light can get in. In times as these, Time is insidious, strolling over and around me in its ghastly walk. Rest arrives through the a three minute read of Tintern Abbey on some days, Wordsworth reminding me of Hans Raj and the other palliatives spread across the expanse of my life. At other times I read stories of tragedies and resilience, of the lack of hearth and heart, of food and water that makes my intangible ponderings inconsequential. I smell privilege in the vapours rising out of my diluted cup of boiling black-coffee, one sip at a time, too slowly till it becomes a lukewarm tonic.
Hope is stubborn. It gnaws and at the walls, weakens it with its slow but steady trials, till it manages to create a crack and enter with its temporary brightness. News of vanguards, fighters, contributors, donors fills the small circles of transience that Instagram provides. Just as the xewalis, despite their nightly existence, alleviate some of our dread and despair with its Elysian smell, hope comes with its myrrh and embalms us within its presence, however short-lived it may be. If you struggle to find hope, if anxiety seeps within your lungs and you find it hard to breathe, get help. Talk to a person you feel safe with, seek out the company of nature and open skies, engage your mind with some series, show, YouTube video, a forgotten poem, a piece of art incomplete. Seek out the free sessions given out by NIMHANS Bangalore, which is providing unique ways to deal with mental health issues. Hold it out friend, we are all in this together, however disparately it may be.
Amazing read.