dairy about second wave lockdown
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There is perhaps nothing more personal than the act of writing a journal. It is, after all, one of the few forms of without that don’t carry consequences, where one is not only vivacious and intensely humane but also honest about oneself and the world. But journals can also be something more: texts that offer relief not only to the one writing them but also to those reading the entries.
That is quintessentially what Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee’s work, A Town Slowly Empties: On Life and Culture During Lockdown, does. Written over three weeks during the early days of the lockdown, from the confines of his apartment in New Delhi, Bhattacharjee offers us insight not only about the pandemic and our condition, but also our relationship with the world we live in.
“[For] us who are a little guilty of the luxury – however stifling – of home and not yet saved from restless anxieties,” he writes in the preface, “Nature is Elsewhere”, “reflection is an ethical necessity”. What follows in the book is precisely that: reflections on life and culture. From March 23, 2020 – the day Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the nationwide lockdown – to April 14, 2020, we follow Bhattacharjee as he tries to make sense of the pandemic.
Reading it a year later, one rediscovers one’s fears, relives the days spent staring outside the windows, once again hears the emptiness of the world that had finally come to a much-needed halt, a world that allowed us time to reflect and remember what makes us human.
Cultural crossroads
Bhattacharjee’s ledger not only touches on our condition during the pandemic but also reminds us of the pleasures of simple things like cooking. “I cooked mutton for dinner. Richa helped with cutting the vegetables. I kept the recipe simple. I felt all meals under lockdown should be made light, in contrast to the heaviness of our solitude”.
It is in these moments that the best of this work emerges. More often than not we start the day with Bhattacharjee as he sips his tea, listening to the chirping of the birds, talking to the eucalyptus tree that casts a shadow on his balcony. “You can talk to trees in the oldest sense of communication,” he writes, “it is like talking to a grandfather, who does not speak, but simply listens to you, with his grey, flowing beard, eyes closed,” before quoting the Finnish poet Paavo Haavikko:
So, be seated under the tree and listen to it,
Exchange pleasantries, talk to it.