The day before everything changed forever
It was only almost a year ago, only just March 2020, on the day before a curfew that everybody knew was only just the start, that I spent my last day of free movement doing little things. I bought shampoo, took an auto ride, met friends for dinner, then went back home. I didn’t know, the way everyone else did. I just knew that I was perfectly happy, for no reason at all. I felt every sensation so keenly. The wind, which I didn’t try to hide from, even though it got dust in my eyes and whipped my hair up into a frenzy. The sunlight, which seemed more golden than it had been in a very long time. If I ever drank in a day, down to the dregs, gave myself up to it, this was that day.
I was puzzled when my auto driver asked me Do you know about the curfew? What will we do for food? You can manage without eating out for a day, I said, assuming he didn’t want to cook. I didn’t know, the way he did, that so many people, so soon, would spend a very long time not being able to earn, to pay for those daily meals.
When I think about this day now, I remember Ged. Ged, the wizard from Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea chronicles, who became the greatest of wizards, the Archmage of Roke, the school of wizardry, and the saviour of the world – one world. One type of world. In The Farthest Shore, Ged sailed to the end of his world, the last habitable island, to fight Cob, a wizard who did not want to die, and fix a breach, a broken wall, between the world of the living and the dead.
Wizards, like witches, don’t use their powers freely, at least not in the works of older fantasy writers. They reserve them for just the right moment, just the point of necessity, and nothing more. However, towards the end of his voyage, on the very last stretch, Ged did just the opposite. He used his powers wildly, unwisely, took absolute pleasure in them, drew up winds to fill out the sail of his boat, flew across the waters.
Soon after he saved the world and defeated Cob and fixed the broken wall and crossed from the dead land back to the land of the living, he lost his powers. He went from Archmage to non-mage, just a man. A man carried home by a dragon, but still, a man. He might’ve saved the world, but he’d lost his world.
I loved that little stretch of pure pleasure and freedom, just before he lost everything. It seemed so precious to me that even though he couldn’t predict the result of his battle with Cob, he knew just enough to really enjoy his last spell of magic.
I didn’t know that the world would change forever, on that last day, but I knew just enough to record every sensation, on the day before it would all end.
Practising being present in the real world
When I look back now, wonder if there was something I should’ve done differently, or better. But I can’t think of anything. I did just the right thing, which was to absorb every sensation I possibly could.
They call a state of absolute presence mindfulness. Ideally, they say, we should spend our entire day being mindful, all our waking hours. Most of my waking hours are spent thinking, dreaming, hopping between worlds, slipping back and forth across time, talking to imaginary people and, of course, fighting the present. I didn’t intend to be mindful, on that day. I just let – Mary Taylor says let the soft animal of your body/ love what it loves. I did that, and only that. It would only be a very short time, before the raging caged animal of my body started pacing within the four walls of my room, day after day. Not looking for an exit, because that would be pointless. Just pacing.
Could we call this mindful walking?
Ged didn’t want to be saved, really. We all have this thing that we cannot live without. This thing that makes up for everything else. He had his powers. I had mobility. I had the option of escape. I didn’t use it all the time. Like Ged, I had become more and more sparing over the years. I spent a long time in voluntary lockdown, just to see, just to know, what I had missed when I was escaping. But the option was there, for the moment when desperation peaked. The absolute inescapability of things had only appeared to me in abstract, until that moment.
Soon after, when I was reading the various accounts of writers and artists who were grateful for the lockdown for giving them time alone, I wondered why they’d never done it to themselves. How many people were relieved to have agency taken away from them. You can only be grateful for the loss of something that you’d never properly used, never really got the point of. You wielded it like a sword that was just a little too big for you, always in the fear of injuring yourself. You are a person with a home with access to zoom calls and online yoga classes and delivery services. Officially, you are the only kind of person who’s really allowed to exist, in the new world.
You think about other humans, and you remember the slights, the anxieties, the slurs, the wishing you’d gone home earlier. You think, thank god I won’t have to do that again. You remember the wind the mizzling endless rain the bugs and the critters the burning sun of the outdoors and you’re grateful to be watching it on a screen. You didn’t however, choose to stay home, before you were told to stay home. You waited until when you were told that a life lived online was better, safer, more morally correct, and most importantly, the only thing you had left.
Plants, bats, bugs, sheep and Returns to Nature
In Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens, there’s a very insightful paragraph about the name of a girl named Pepper:
Pepper’s given first names were Pippin Galadriel Moonchild. She had been given them in a naming ceremony in a muddy valley field that contained three sick sheep and a number of leaky polythene teepees.
Her mother had chosen the Welsh valley of Pant y Gyrdl as the ideal site to Return to Nature. (Six months later, sick of the rain, the mosquitoes, the men, the tent trampling sheep who ate first the whole commune’s marijuana crop and then its antique minibus, and by now beginning to glimpse why almost the entire drive of human history has been an attempt to get as far away from Nature as possible, Pepper’s mother returned to Pepper’s surprised grandparents in Tadfield, bought a bra, and enrolled in a sociology course with a deep sigh of relief.)
I spent Lockdown 2.0 out of 300 in a farm on the outskirts of Bangalore. There were blanket bugs that crawled up my pants and left a trail of red rash on my skin. There were daily spiders, evening mosquitoes, nightly toads, frogs living in the flush, bats’ eyes shining like torchlights from the trees. There were snakes to watch out for, all day and everyday, leopards to scare away with firecrackers in the night, dogs to feed at dinnertime, cats to be ill-treated by. There were even humans living in a natural social distance in a place with space. I thought about Pepper’s mother sometimes. Sharing space is tricky. You can do it with some kinds of creatures. Beetles, some spiders, tiny frogs, a toad that waits at the door. You can’t share space with cobras, vipers, scorpions, nests with thousands of daddy-long-legs. Daily fascinations combat daily battles. And yet, somehow, I was never maddened, never even on the brink.
A lot like my last day before the world ended, this was a time of perfect happiness. That does not mean that there were no disruptions, or that I was not afraid of the thousands of insects that threw themselves like waves at our solitary lights in the night. Perfection is not perfection. Perfection does bring itches, stains and rashes. Perfection is not a cleaned-up, sanitised picture of things. It is a complete picture. Absolute presence.
It would behove anyone seeking to Return to Nature to prepare themselves for a lot of unfriendly animal encounters and for a defeated return to civilisation and to set aside a little money to buy a bra. I had, though, this very brief, very fragile sense that time had gone back to its normal pace. The world, though still terrifyingly morphed into an unrecognisable creature with metallic tentacles, was at least far away. At a safe distance.
On some days, I got tired of taking a walk to find network on my phone, taking another walk to the bathroom to take a piss, taking one more walk to get a coffee. And when I caught myself sulking on these walks, I would remember that what I was experiencing, the space to walk, was an absolute luxury. And feel again bright sunlight, bursting through my heart.
Luxuries, losses and the world that ended
In some ways, the new world is not different from the world before it. Luxury has always been a comparative term. Food can be a luxury. Four walls can be a luxury. Walking can be the opposite of a luxury, when you have to walk 900 km to get home, because you lost your job and your temporary home and were told, sanctimoniously, to stay home. Walking can be torture, when you have to walk 900 km dodging patrols and well-meaning do-gooders expound passionately about how you need to be kept in shelters and fed twice a day.
Maybe the difference between the new world and the previous one (not the old one, because there are so many of those) is that those comparative feelings have been erased. Those people who didn’t find walking a luxury were briefly noticed, but by then they were already not people anymore. Debates revolved around where they should be kept and how they should be fed.
I’m as amazed now, as I was back then, at how so many people imagine that the change in the world is temporary. Or that they will be participants in the building of a brave new world, without realising that they are already living in it. Or that the things they miss they list as holidays, meeting friends, travel – such a loaded word, eating airplane food, which no one, I believe, really misses.
Denial is a slippery path to tread. You don’t need to grieve over a loss that you denied ever happened, this is true. However, it still remains a tiny little steel-door over a vast, hungry, ever-growing emptiness. You try to shrink it down by pretending you only lost little things, meaningless things, immoral things. Even as your little door trembles from the distant echoes of a rumbling earthquake.
Having had the luxury of time, I spent a lot of time counting my losses and grieving. I counted many, big ones and little ones. These are just some of the things I mourned:
- Mobility, now forever lost.
- My relationship with my health and my body, now forever intercepted.
- My relationship with the earth – now forever intercepted.
- Art that was interactive, collaborative, created in public spaces, unstructured and intimate. Once upon a time, this was my primary way of connecting with humanity. Even before the new world came to being, these things were unregarded and not valued. Now their disappearance will go unnoticed.
Nothing on this tiny list, or the much bigger longlist, was perfect or unimpeded before. Nor evenly distributed. That might be why it was so easy to give them up without mourning, for so many people. That might also be why so many people’s existence was erased from the collective consciousness.
Things you see when you climb up onto a solitary haystack
A long time ago, a few worlds ago, on one of my first escapes, I told a new friend how I felt like I’d never really lived, never really touched the ground, never been a part of this world. He said oh, you are so close. So close to the ground. So close to making contact.
I felt, at that moment, that he was looking over my shoulder, and I was standing on the threshold of the world. That I couldn’t see it yet, but he could.
In my time of grieving, I didn’t remember the things I had done that I could not do in the new world. I didn’t gaze at photos of that past. Instead, I remembered the nineties. I was in school in the nineties. The world was outside the gates and the sky was outside the window I sat next to. Sometimes, I’d catch the sound of music from a bar down the street, or shouts, or slogans, mostly traffic. I felt it so close, and so far. Like that perfect square of blue, or the occasional wild winds kicking up dust in the hockey field.
I felt such great yearning then, just to make contact, to touch the earth. To feel myself a part of that noise, however cacophonous, to not see myself as alien, forever hovering, never knowing how to get any closer. O brave new world!
Like so many other people of my age, I had read Huxley’s Brave New World among various other planned-utopia-but-really-dystopia novels, and had concluded that all utopias were the seeds of dystopias. So the brave new world I wanted to dive into was not ideal. It was just the one in front of me. The one with people on the streets and rain and puddles and insouciant dogs and neon reflections in the water.
I had such a strong memory of that time, through so many months, that I could almost see out of that same window, hear that very song. I almost froze, looking back, because traditionally that’s what is supposed to happen when you look back, you turn into a pillar of salt.
Now, I am a little more present in this world, practicing mindful walking once a day to get myself to make contact again, to come back down, to stop hovering. While not in denial, I wouldn’t say that I’m in a state of acceptance, either. I’m in a state of impatience, to catch every last speck of life.
I try not to miss a patch of dead leaves when I walk. I try not to miss even the edge of the sunset. I fret and pace for hours on days when I’m too tired to go out. To have the chance to squeeze the very last drops of juice from a fruit, to watch the beginning and the end of a day, this is also a luxury.
