Coping with the givens of adulthood: a pandemic in my 20’s (Part VI)
Part 6: The Final Chapter
I grew up in Assam. And around every Assamese New Year, like a loyal but merciless relative, the Bordoisila (monsoon winds) greets the plains with loud and lofty disruption. The morning after comprises debris of a year gone by– uprooted flora, displaced rooftops, wilted harvest. On the first day of the journey, I stepped out of the house for the first time in weeks. Standalone grocery stores, pharmacies, and medical clinics were opened from seven in the morning till noon. The streets reminded me of a morning after the first wave of Bordoisila- a skeletal remnant of their erstwhile spirit. The society association had sealed major entrances to the complex, and municipality officials intermittently patrolled the area. There was now a tedious route to the outside through numerous parking lots and wing extensions. Every face on the road was masked and all eyes vigilant. Almost all the street vendors had disappeared, except the couple who sold masks and utility bags. On one lip of the cloth on which lay the masks, there were bundles of chilies and lemons stringed together. In Hinduism, they are believed to be tokens of protection from the evil eye and misfortune. And the implicit paradox of the affair only came to me as I walked past a woman who bought both- a few masks and the ‘yarn of insurance’. Along with a small suitcase of clothes, I had packed a bag full of dry confectioneries, energy drinks, sanitizers and masks for five days. Armed with all that, and debilitating dissonance, I was not ready for what would become the most memorable journey of my life.
That May morning, steamy heat waves had enveloped Mumbai. Walking into the non-AC, non-recliner bus that would take us from Mumbai to Assam, I found myself collapsing into forethought: how am I to sleep, bend, walk or move? Government regulations stated that buses could run with 50% of its passenger capacity. Therefore, ours carried 21 passengers, one in each row. I chose a seat in the anterior end of the bus, laboriously pushed a jammed window for the breeze to come through and flumped there for good. No sooner did I plug my earphones in than I heard someone screeching. A woman, presumably in her early thirties, had taken the seat behind me. Even though I could not see her properly, gauging from her muffled voice behind a mask and the noisy crumple of rubber, I figured that she was heavily clothed in protective gear. She was screeching for two reasons- our sliding windows were hinged together, and this jammed her end of the glass; and because she was burning up from the extra layers of clothing. As she took her seat, audibly tossing a few bags on the floor, she knocked on my window from behind. “Sister, could you open my window?” Before I could politely turn her down, the woman looked at me. I stand five feet two inches tall with a petite frame and a dense mane of curly locks. So it wasn’t a surprise for me when her next word was “Oh”. After a dodgy pause, she looked at my flimsy wrists and exclaimed that I was really young.
I decided to sit cross legged on the seat for whatever comfort I could bargain and closed my eyes. A short while later, the woman behind me was talking loudly over the phone in Bengali. As an emotionally private person, I do not endorse sticking your nose into mucky business. However, judging by the scandalous tone of the exchange, I argued that this may be the time to utilize my limited comprehension of Bengali. Let us call this woman Seema. Now this is a story about Seema’s neighborhood. Middle aged, coy and unmarried Mr. *Putul had been missing since March, leaving his family- a widowed mother- utterly distraught. In the same week a young girl, Champa, also went missing. This naturally created havoc in the locality. One resident suggested that the girl must have eloped with her lover. Another suggested that Putul, on the other hand, must be eloping from loan sharks. As the neighbors concocted what looked like plot-lines from a moth eaten film script, Putul contacted his mother. Petrified of her rage, he told her that he had run away. Befuddled, his mother inquired about his whereabouts, only to find that Putul and Champa had eloped together. Through tears and blows, Putul’s mother demanded he returned immediately. But before he could oblige, the government declared a nationwide lock-down, leaving Putul and his potli (bag) on the opposite end of Assam.
(Names have been changed for anonymity)
In the next couple of hours, we had inched closer to the Maharashtra state border. The bright sky was sagging into a citrus blanket. The bus pulled up, and with the dry and crisp swell of hot air, a most dreaded prospect hit me in the face. We had stopped to use the loo. Fringing an almost deserted petrol pump, there were two shanties that were meant to be washrooms. The toilets faced the same wall that divided the two. And without a choice or strategy, I entered one of them. The cap of the door was smashed in, revealing my head if I stood up. And for that one moment, I was compassionately grateful of neither being a man nor a tall woman. Entering the bus again, I noticed that Seema was engaged in a conversation with an old woman. They were the only Bengali women on the bus. But while Seema was beyond prominent, the older woman was barely audible. She only spoke when spoken to. In fact, she and I were the youngest and the oldest on the bus, respectively. And both of us were travelling alone.
By the end of the day, we had reached Madhya Pradesh- the neighboring state north-east of Maharashtra. I had only packed a light lunch for one day. So for dinner, and many meals during the journey, I ate packaged muffins and biscuits. Washing the dry cake down my throat with water, a strange feeling hovered around me. Beneath all the helplessness, I was sympathizing with myself. And while that may be an outcome of the excruciatingly difficult year I had had, I did not like thinking that I pitied myself. Doubling up flat on two seats, I bent in ways I did not know I could. After tossing and turning for several hours, I sat up and looked outside. We were moving slowly, and closing up to a toll gate. We had reached Indore, the largest city of Madhya Pradesh. It was here that I first saw them- parapet sealed trucks carrying people. The trucks were carrying migrant workers back to their home states. Most of these trucks carried at least fifty people and were half the size of our bus. Some of them hung from the panels on the roof. Others were seated on the floor, packed like an army of letters.
Over the next day, we crossed many such vehicles. Sometimes, we also crossed sheds near the highway under which people rested. They were walking back home, with a small bag of everything the ‘big cities’ gave them. I saw a woman that morning; she must have been a little older than I am. She was breastfeeding her infant on the truck and biting into a roti. A little while later, I saw another truck ahead of us. A man was pushing through to the back of the truck. When he reached, he clutched the sides of his stomach and threw up on the road. The truck kept moving, and someone handed him a bottle of water. But for as long as I will live, I will remember a little girl on a bus we crossed at a toll gate. The bus carried thrice as many people as ours, and was stationed only a few feet away. The little girl must be five or six years old, and our windows were right across from each other. For a split second, the little girl and I looked at each other and she curiously noted the empty seats. In those scanty seconds, she was closer to me than anyone else on my bus. Before we moved, leaving their bus far behind, she smiled at me. I smiled back at her. As the burden of inexplicable guilt wore me down, I realized that I had my mask on.
Pulling over at what used to be a dhaba, we halted to use the washrooms and buy some snacks. The air was hot and brittle as glass. And there was a small tank filled with water next to the washrooms. By this time, my clothes were clammy and my face red. After an uncharacteristically quick judgement, for the first but not the last time, I bathed in a public bathroom. This, coupled with a shower in Bihar the next day, was one of the coolest and most relieving baths I have ever had. The latter was aided by a bulky industrial pipe sneaked away by a generous lady, who also held the pipe-blocked door in place. This account may go against the constructs of sophistication that the elite society considers not only valuable but essential. But I truly confess to no qualms or regrets for having broken that convention. In the past few months, I had realized that life comes down to a very few things. And a year ago, I would have argued that this statement was only hypothetical. But we are living the utopia.
As hours rolled into days, the people on the bus clustered into various groups. There were the women in the front, who were also roommates and always shared inside jokes. There were the men at the back, who sometimes needlessly squealed out of boredom, and took smoking breaks in the cabin. And there was Seema, the old woman and their friend who tagged along with either. The groups discussed a variety of issues over the course of the journey. One person advocated for smokers, sourcing a Harvard study which apparently stated that ‘smokers NEVER get infected with Corona virus’. Then there was the hotelier who was confident that the Prime Minister must not be blamed for the plight of the migrant workers. He was also of the opinion that it was illiteracy, and illiteracy alone that had led to the ‘careless’ migration. Seema’s days always started and ended with a phone call to her boyfriend. This would wake the women ahead of me, who despite taking issue with the disturbance, resolved the matter by ranting with each other. Seema would then turn to the rest of the bus, proudly sharing how her 50 year old boyfriend was intimidated by her. During one of their fiercer arguments, she screamed so loudly that it elicited a cry from the old woman who never spoke. But as the group dynamic evolved, there was also a visible shift in behavior.
On the first two days of the journey, Seema and her friend would religiously sprinkle diluted disinfectant on the entire bus. Sometimes, Seema would also chant a little prayer while doing so. The men would sit on their respective seats and only interacted verbally. But as interactions increased, people became more comfortable with each other. This led to a laxness in body language. The men started sharing seats, touching headrests and taking more smoking breaks. The women, on the other hand, started sharing things like lotion and tissue paper. To them, there was no obvious threat resulting from such actions; they would still sanitize their hands or their seats. But owing to growing attachment that could develop purely by being in such physical proximity, other factors were affecting their actions. For instance, for the sake of politeness, a woman ‘did not mind’ me not sanitizing the phone charger that she lent me. To openly sanitize an armrest touched by someone could be considered rude, so I took to continuously sanitizing my hands instead. Another factor for this slackness could also be basic human neuro-psychology. Despite being a brilliant master, our brain is also considerably delicate. When exposed to extremely anxiety-provoking situations, such as travelling in a bus for four days during a pandemic, it can get desensitized to the stressors. In simple words, the fear of infection may produce decreased worry over time by means of multiple coping mechanisms- denial (I was not that careless), rationalization (we’re showing no symptoms, so we’re safe) etc.
And so, with immense personal discomfort and adjustment, we continued travelling. We crossed Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and West Bengal in a span of three days. Eventually, we reached Srirampur in Kokrajhar, Assam. Here, our buses and vehicles were tagged with destination stickers. Of the 21 people on board, 10 were from Guwahati in lower Assam, and 11 from Jorhat- 300 kilometres north of Guwahati. However, to reach Jorhat, we had to cross Guwahati. Therefore, our bus was to stop at both destinations. From the moment we entered Assam, our buses were lined up and escorted by police vehicles. At every district border, we were stopped, taken account of, and a new police vehicle was allotted. This was done for two reasons- to trace vehicles entering the state; and to prevent any lapses in execution of movement and testing. In simple words, the government of Assam did not want to risk another Putul- Champa misadventure. The bus first stopped at Sarusajai at night, an athletic stadium in Guwahati which was turned to a COVID-19 quarantine center. No one, except those to be screened and tested in Guwahati, was allowed to get off the bus. I had to get off in Jorhat, and therefore, I had another night to spend travelling.
It’s a presumption, and a reasonable one, that the most memorable times in our life are pregnant with reflection. But until the bus was almost empty, and I had the time to lie down, I had not thought about anything but reaching home. When I entered Assam, the morning did not flicker into a bright day. That is not to say that I was upset upon arriving. It was a realization of the fact that nothing was ever going to be the same- not home, not movement, and not the human touch. But most importantly, I was not going to be the same person that I was before. Earlier, I stated that life comes down to a very few things. And this is not an afterthought of the five days I spent learning how to sleep in a fetal posture. It’s a culmination of the rather unrelated events that led up the last night on a non-AC, non-recliner bus from Mumbai to Assam.
The term Bordoisila comes from a bittersweet combination of Bodo words. Bar means wind, Doi means water and Sikhla means girl. It is rooted in the legend of a young, married woman who hastily returns to her maternal home. In her scurry, she destroys everything on the way. This is believed to be an embodiment of Mother Nature, who brings the season of spring and prosperity. I had, therefore, almost forgotten that while the sikhla brings destruction, she also brings a New Year. This does not represent the world after Corona virus, but something about me. I come from a moderately privileged household. And even though I haven’t lived a sheltered life, I haven’t lived an exceptionally difficult one either. But in my own blanket of choices and stories, dear reader, I will remember that when it came down to a loo-stricken afternoon with no rescue, I was pleased with nothing but a splash of cold water to wash my face. And that at the end of the day, all I needed were two yards to sleep on, ten people to love, and a blank page to write about them all.
The end.
