I now know what being under house arrest might feel like, though I am sure that mine has been a PG version of the uncensored adult experience. Yet, as I enter its fourth week, I have begun to contemplate life after the lockdown.
Of course, I am acutely conscious that my reflections about this future bear the hallmarks of my privileged status which disconnect me in every imaginable way from the teeming millions of my fellow citizens whose reflections will be focused on whether they will eat today, as they have for many days now. I am so far removed from their reality, that I may as well be living in an altogether different country. But my reality is what it is.
For the record, I enjoyed a salad for lunch today, followed by a siesta, then some intellectual stimulation with a genteel novel (A Gentleman in Moscow) and scholarly writing, and I now look forwards to ending my day by Zoom-teaching my class of students, scattered around the world.
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In my Goan bubble, I am almost embarrassed to admit that this lockdown is turning out to be quite the experience. If I can forget my outrage at the suddenness of its announcement, leaving no time for over a billion people to prepare for three weeks of losing their freedom of movement; if I can bury my fury at the sheer incompetence and callousness displayed by the state authorities in ensuring essential services; if I can hide my profound grief at witnessing the epic migrations of the poor and harried, evoking images of Partition; if I can swallow my pride as the rest of the world gawped when the extreme nature of the lockdown exposed in full view the sordid underbelly of India’s grotesque inequalities; well if I can do all of that, then this has been quite a memorable ride.
Indeed, in contrast to the first week, when I was counting the minutes to waking up from this nightmare, the light at the end of the tunnel suddenly seems like an oncoming train. I am finding myself grappling with a number of questions about the good things that I have unexpectedly come to experience. What, for example, will happen to all the beautiful birds and animals which have repossessed the streets and rivers? What will happen to the flourishing of sarcasm and wittiness in response to our predicament? What will happen to the orderly way my fellow citizens stand in queue, waiting patiently in the blazing sun for their turn to enter the air-conditioned super-market? What will happen to my leisurely walk to the village baker, untroubled by anyone other than the odd dog? What will happen to not having to shave or wear long pants to go to work? What will happen to Zoom-yoga?
But, most of all, I worry about what will happen to the growing solidarity in our country that I have witnessed to defeat this invisible enemy.
I hope that, of all these things, it is this national solidarity which sustains. I hope that our amazement at seeing snow-capped mountains from dusty towns 200 kilometres away and spotting beautiful birds in our backyard makes us lifelong warriors for the environments that our old ways threatened to the point that even the coronavirus itself was a symptom. I hope that our successful adoption of doing so many things remotely means that fewer air and road-journeys will be needed forever.
I hope that our new-found respect for our public health care system will sustain and that we will demand a much higher share of national spending to strengthen its ability to respond to the next epidemic. I hope that we will feel as much compassion for the millions who die of the diseases of poverty, from TB to diarrheal diseases, even if our own families may not be exposed to them. I hope that we will be able to empathise with the anguish felt by those in our country who are placed under lockdowns with the constant threat of being humiliated by our gallant police.
I hope we will continue to offer a shoulder to lean on to the elderly, the disabled, the homeless and the day-wage labourers who live and work in our neighbourhoods.
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Then there is the concern that the lockdown has not actually defeated the virus: it has only kicked the can down the road as the vast majority of our population remains unexposed to the virus and therefore just as vulnerable as it was before the lockdown. I hope that the several weeks of breathing time the lockdown has afforded the country will have been utilised effectively to ramp up the district level machinery to identify, test, contact-trace and quarantine, the key pillars of the longer-term battle to beat this virus.
And, equally important, as the staggering social impact of the lockdown grows day by day, our nation will also need to look beyond our obsession with this particular virus and marshal all our economic resources to attend to the expected surge of poverty related mental and physical health problems.
But, I get this nagging feeling that we will, as individuals and as a nation, quickly revert to business as usual within days of being unlocked. Like the unrepentant prisoner who re-offends hours after being released from jail, we too will relapse. To not washing our hands with soap even after it’s been in all kinds of unmentionable places; to spitting anywhere we please; to trashing our environment to build our dream-homes, flying around needlessly and pillaging the earth to mine its natural bounty; to letting our public health sector go to seed through inadequate funding, poor governance and zero accountability; to looking the other way when people living in other parts of the country are locked-down and brutalised by the police; to treating the routine news of the scores of people who die due to some disease in some remote, godforsaken part of our country as a mere curiosity.
Yes, I must admit I am probably kidding myself but at least I have the right to dream for a better India. In the end, perhaps the least I can hope for is that my fellow Indians will not forget to be respectful of my space when standing in a queue. And that I can finally visit my barber.
Vikram Patel is the Pershing Square Professor of Global Health at Harvard Medical School.