Indian Unfolding: Musings Of A Small Town

How coronavirus changed lives

It was a winter morning when it happened. My sweater hadn't seen the sun in days. It was my week off and we decided that we'd spend it in bed.

We took turns drinking the last of our coffee left.

My husband had started forgetting things, and everytime I cooked food, he insisted that I open the windows, and would start thumping the fixed glass.

And I had given up on eating outside, you could never trust the air quality at restaurants after a while.

So we would just order food, the boy downstairs knew our tastes.

It had been a month since I had taken my mask off. So I went to the balcony where the plants were.

My oldest money plant was given to me by my mother. "It's never bought, only gifted by someone," she had told me numerous times when the air was clean. I had resisted the first few years to respect her words, bought many Areca Palms and Aloe Vera instead, but they never grew as tall.

The apartment to the right of mine didn't have any plants in their balcony. The family that it was alloted to was very well to do, one the city's richest, owned many bars and restaurants here. The couple said they were so used to strolling through yards of gardens that a balcony could never be good enough for them.

And their kids were scared of the height. They have been told that they live on 7th floor instead of the 70th and they believe it. They go 20 floors down to attend school, but could never figure out.

I tried gifting the woman a money plant once, but she thought that I wanted something in exchange so she ordered me a cylinder.

In my thirties, I was jealous of people who could afford to have kids. But now after 15 years of having seen hundreds of people giving false hope to their own children, I have no regrets.

I guess, in the end they were always right about 'all the wealth in the world being unable to buy you happiness.'

But it's good to have wealthy people live beside you. At times when we would be out of coffee powder and would have to wait for our salaries to come in to buy another batch, we would just pass by their main door in the evening and remove our masks for a moment to smell the coffee.

Like most people, my husband too had been very reluctant when the relocation bill was announced. It had been me who signed us up for this apartment. "We should get our pick of a building on the edge of the city, if we don't want to suffocate," I'd told him. "Like that would save us from suffocating," he'd smirked.

They said that immediately after the first round of allotment is done, the government would assign apartments to families by themselves. No one believed that they would actually have to leave their homes and shift into much smaller spaces.

But soon after we shifted, the air quality index started getting worse and soon one couldn't see past 30 meters. In the forms they had said that the fort is only a 500 meters from your building. But I assumed that was a lie. Every once in a while, we would step into the balcony, take off our masks, and stare into nothingness. My husband always pointed down in the direction where the fort must have been, if the government hasn't pull it apart yet and salvaged it's stone. I always told him how ironic it was that one had to look up from rooftops to see it and now could only ponder whether it actually exists somewhere far below them.

But today, for the first time in 20 years, it was actually visible, in all its eternity. I ran to fetch the kids next door, to show them where people once lived.