Life under COVID-19

Lately, I spend my evenings on the balcony overlooking a lane that once reverberated with clamorous activity. It’s cooler and breezier out there. And ,now , noiseless . Ideal for book reading. After a while an awareness of lurking solitude seeps in. I am alone, enveloped in a pervasive stillness all around, time effluxing languidly unmolested by human activity. 

It feels queer to see the lane flooded white as the streetlight comes on, but none treading it. The car parked by its side  gathers dust, it hasn't moved anywhere for a week. Men and women dangling carry bags with veggies bought from the bustling sabji bazaar by the overbridge, a few rows of houses away from where I live, do not pass by on way home. No young boys and girls walk past to coaching centers or return from it. There is no traffic, no pedestrian. The kirana shop next door has folded up and  bears a deserted, spooky look. 

Lights from open windows spilling onto the lane purvey a sense of life but one that is clammed up - voices from within muted, sound of teevees muffled. The barking of a dog somewheres, sometimes breaks the stillness. Breeze blows, night advances ,nature cycles on. Else, nothing. It is eerily hush, a stillness of the grave. But the living live boisterously till doomsday. Wherefrom then this quietude ? The evening is just an hour old, 1900 hours. 

I keep staring into  this quaint , deafening lull , a cessation of human activity that nothing in my living memory measures up to. Nothing moved in last half hour or so, save the flipping of pages of the book in hand. There is the midnight stillness of a populace abed or the enforced  curfew in times of strife. I am aware of both but neither is absolute. There is the movement of stragglers, late arrivals in the first instance and police patrols in the second. But this one is different, a new existential condition ,an undefined stillness. It is the stiilness of 'absences'. 

A silence induced by absence of activity,  as if people have  swallowed 'Stillness Pills’ and gone into premature hibernation in homely cocoons. 

One brought on by COVID-19 . To remind us of a harsh reality - nature still holds unfathomable mysteries,  the three aces in the gamble of 'Teen Patti'. It beckons us to return to its ways or face the consequences ; to learn its lessons and stay safe.