Passing Catastrophes
Or what happened to COVID-19?
This piece first appeared in the 2023 issue of Room 16 - a magazine run by the Centre for English Studies, JNU. The theme of the issue was ‘SPACES’. You can find the issue here. I had written this short piece after a regular visit to the metro station. I was rereading this piece recently and was embarrassed but more than that I was surprised by the writing style of that younger self who was just starting to write (This was only my second piece of writing ever at that point). My sentences were short and jagged and there was hardly any space for introspection in the character I was crafting since bare observation prioritized my vision. I write much differently now yet I am relieved that I still look at the same things. But I wanted to share this piece here for some other reason; so that you, who have been reading my work, and I, who has been writing all this, could revisit that time which seemed outside time but still haunts our present.
~
I tapped my metro card on the ticket machine. A beep. I passed through. The muffled voices of people on the recharge counter made me reconsider if my card balance would suffice for the day. A woman on the escalator disappeared as I kept my wallet in the bag. It always unnerves me, this decision to either take the stairs or move smoothly down with the escalator.
I disappeared too. The metro train had not arrived yet. To while away my time, I observed the people around me, most of them engrossed in their phones. A boy leaning on a pillar took out one of his earbuds and moved to see if the train was approaching. A small cautionary poster on the pillar caught my attention. I moved closer. It was a covid-19 alert poster asking the passengers to maintain distance on the escalator. Useless.
The train arrived. A gush of dry air filled the platform. Since it was Sunday, I was happy to see vacant seats in the passing coaches as the train slowed down. I do not know why but that brief pause before the gates on the platform and the doors of the metro open, always seems longer than anticipated. Few passengers got down. I sat in an empty row of seats. The compartment was mostly empty. Smooth and shiny, the presence of these blue seats seemed more pronounced than every day. With a recurring beep, the doors closed. I bent to tie my shoe lace properly. That is when I saw it. A circular white sticker with slight dirt on it beside the aluminium pole. To my surprise, there were more. My eyes followed a recurring pattern of these white stickers straight to the end of the metro cab. Some of them were perfectly circular, some had scratched edges with remnants of green patches, others were dissipating. Their presence seemed odd to me. My mind could not appreciate bad, vain aesthetic.
I reached Hauz Khas. Switched to yellow line. Less vacant seats. More stickers. But wait. Among the usual white, this coach had few stickers that were completely green with legible interiors – an image of two soles of the feet with “MAINTAIN DISTANCE” written between them. It struck me. They were markers of keeping distance during covid. My eyes could not stop searching. More remnants manifested. I saw the silver seat in front of me. How could I have missed it? A larger yellow sticker adorned every alternate seat in the coach. It said “Do Not Sit Here. Help to Prevent Covid-19”
Help? Distance? The words kept circling in my mind. A deep sense of unexplainable unease - though not acute - gripped my heart. I was reminded of a past that I had completely forgotten in all these months since I shifted to Delhi for college. All those weeks, months, years of solitary stay locked in a house came back to mind. The ubiquitous everyday lament to go out and see human faces returned. Suspicions of a plagued body resurfaced.
I reached to feel the surface behind my back. Sticker. It was in Hindi, evincing the same cautionary tale. Its surface was intact but had developed creases and scratches from rubbing against thousands and thousands of resting and restless backs. I shifted to the adjacent seat without the sticker.
Iterative beep. Doors opened. More plagued bodies came in. Fewer departed. The coach became slightly crowded. The train moved. A kid sat facing the glass window, amusing himself with the passing lights of the tunnel. The sticker caught his attention. He tried to remove it, only to fret later and give up.
I wondered if the presence of these stickers troubled anyone else. They were invisible to everyone as they had been to me a few moments ago. Their caution and abundance served no purpose. They were inconsequential to the people and to the metro rail authority. No one had bothered to remove them. Futile, I guess, to that other authority as well, the failure of whom these remnants are reminders of.
Iterative beep. Doors opened. Central Secretariat. The angst in my heart subsided as I stood up to exit. Before the doors closed, I could not help looking back into the coach, to see them again, these mute companions who had been travelling with me all these months. I saw a school boy’s foot on a green one, trying to rub his shoe against the sticker while talking to his friends. I smiled. And left.
Tap. I had enough balance and an escalator waiting.
Coming out of the metro station I looked up to see the setting sky. There was more caution to attend to but no stickers to alert.
~