In the grip of chaos

Fear anxiety paranoia panic. We feel this with increasing intensity. “Shh”, we say, looking over our shoulder even when no one's said a thing. The house, the lane, the city, the country, the planet—no place feels safe.

Suddenly, everything is against us. Gender, colour, caste, surname, opinion, laughing at the wrong joke... anything can set anyone off anywhere anytime. Plus, Covid-19 seems to have been here forever. It is getting more and more difficult to remember pre-virus times. It seems like a fairy tale, our previous existence, when we frolicked among cafes and pubs and bookshops and the balcony of a friend’s friend. Those were innocent times, when we shook hands with strangers and hugged just anyone hello. Then the world was full of potential friends, now anyone you encounter could be fatal for you. It is laughable really to think that we actually had plans once upon a time.

A beach visit has to be plotted like a midnight elopement with a star-crossed lover. A takeaway turns to ashes in the mouth. The memory of a thing is more delicious than the thing itself. The sense of abandonment is inevitable, though we know that the world has not moved on without us. It is of no help, when we examine our prison bars, to know that the rest of humanity too is imprisoned.

While it is true that we rarely prepare consciously for anything in life except perhaps the next meal, it is also true that a buffering of this magnitude could never have occurred to us. For those who were born pessimists, whose lips arced downwards even when they won the Nobel Prize or beheld their first grandchild, it is the golden period of “I told you so”. They knew all along that nothing good would come out of the sunshine and the flowers and the kids taking a gap year.

For those who never saved or travelled home or tentatively expressed an interest in a special someone, this is “what the hell just happened” time.

It is true, brothers and sisters, that we traverse an uphill path under a blazing sun with no tents or trees to rest under. That bleakness itself seems to get bleaker with every step. Social chroniclers have put away their pens, diaries are left blank without entries. Is there anything left to say?

The courier guy coughed all over the envelope just when I put out a hand to take it –instead of inhumanly asking him to leave it at my doorstep–and now I fear my misplaced politeness will be the death of me.

Also, is it just me, or does everyone sound like they are rambling? On social media and in WhatsApp forwards, are we shouting and whispering about the right things? Books on dystopia were always a good read. But now that it has actually descended upon us–in a rain of confusing headlines both global and mofussil–dystopia feels like a cooked up word on Scrabble.