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A NATION ON PAUSE: CORONAVIRUS IN INDIA



Mall Road, Ranikhet | Anuradha Roy

It is the middle of April and weeks into lockdown, limbo is a jittery place. 

In today’s newspaper, gunshots during a game of Ludo: “Jai accused Prashant of coughing with the intention of giving coronavirus to other people. He shot him in the thigh.” Rumours whine like mosquitoes. A strident voice wafts across from next door: “Is this futuristic Chinese bioterrorism or a Muslim conspiracy?” Some say our hellish sanitation and tropical fevers have given us a carapace of immunity. We breathe calmer for a moment. Then the bad news closes in again: lost jobs, suffering, starvation and no end in sight.

I chanced upon a tweet yesterday from Christina Lamb, a foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times. “For the first time in my life I find myself wishing I lived in the country with a dog and a breadmaker and maybe a lemon tree.” That’s been us the past 20 years, in a corner of the Himalayas with three dogs and two lemon trees. No breadmaker though. We’ve always made bread the old-fashioned way, massaging dough like a lover’s limbs, not as a hobby but because it’s the only way we can have passable bread. Now friends at a loose end write for tips on starters and crusts and send sweetly proud images of fresh loaves. I’m a specialist agony aunt with time on her hands. In my past life I wrote fiction, my spouse ran an independent press. Now printing presses are closed and books locked in storage.

For the moment we have sky, forests, bread. And a series of unpredictable problems. Last week someone’s cow keeled over in the nearby forest. We could see it from our house: an immense, immobile mound. Since there are no municipal services for such things the owner gathered four friends who dug a pit big enough to house a lorry, then rolled the carcass into it. Social distancing remained a hopeless aspiration during this exercise.

Read the rest here in the Economist, where I wrote on the experience of lockdown in Ranikhet alongside Nilanjana Roy and Rahul Bhattacharya, who wrote in from Delhi.

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