Is it the housework?

Stories are all we have as the numbers lose meaning. Two months ago, I would check multiple news websites every morning to find out the most updated figures for number of confirmed cases, doubling rates, fatality rates, and tests per million; now I cancel every Covid-19 tracker put between me and my news. In the end, whenever that comes, most of us may only remember the standout days: first case, first death, last peak, first descent, last case. But every single day in the life of the novel coronavirus stands out for someone. The virus has pushed people, in desperation, toward taking actions with mysterious or absurd consequences. Take lockdown survival — baking your own bread doesn’t come anywhere close to digging your own well. A 55 year-old man named Bhaskaran, from the village of Kottarakkara in the Southwestern state of Kerala, actually did that out of boredom and water scarcity; in Kerala’s Kooraranji village, 58-year-old Augustine cut a road through rocks with all the free time. 

In India, we fuss over things that we think only happen in India. A Google search for “it happens only in India” throws up a Bollywood song, a travel show, five Facebook pages, and several headlines. Every society has seen its rifts exposed by the virus. India has not been an exception: the saddest and sometimes the strangest things have happened.

For some weeks now, I scan the news every morning for the stories.

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Our prime minister Narendra Modi loves to address the nation — on Twitter every day, on radio every Sunday and on television every time his government is about to unleash something big. On March 24, he appeared onscreen to announce that the nation was going under a 21-day lockdown starting at midnight. India had officially recorded 564 cases by then. When the cities shut down the next morning, leaving millions who worked in factories, restaurants, taxi services, and construction sites without any income or backup plan, they were forced to migrate back to their towns and villages. But the trains and buses were not running, so they left in thousands from every big city towards their homes hundreds of miles away — on foot, on bicycles, and on the backs of those stronger than them. Some of them snuck inside spare tires to board the buses carrying essential goods; some wore a tire around them to float across rivers. So far, more than 100 workers have died trying to get home, from hunger, exhaustion, police violence and road accidents. On 7 May, while stretched out for a night’s rest on the rail tracks in Aurangabad, 16 of them were run over by a single train carrying essential goods. In early May, the central government ordered hundreds of trains and buses to run especially for workers migrating home, but they can only board these vehicles if the local governments at their points of departure and arrival agree on the required expenses and approvals, and if they show the right paperwork.

Many find it simpler to walk, but to reach their destinations alive, they are doing what’s necessary. In the city of Rajkot in the western state of Gujarat, the owner of an out-of-business restaurant came in one morning to find unusual CCTV footage from the previous night: a group of five men entering the kitchen through the terrace, going through the supplies, putting on the stove, cooking rice and potatoes, eating a quick dinner, and leaving as quietly as they came. In Rarah village in Rajasthan, a man woke up to find his bicycle missing from his veranda; what he found in its place was a note from a migrant worker saying he was sorry. He had a hundred miles still to walk and a disabled son to carry with him.

Many of those who made it back home realized they weren’t exactly expected. In Bilhari village in Madhya Pradesh, returning workers included a 15-year-old boy whose family had believed him dead. When he vanished after a petty fight three years before, they had gone to the police and reported him missing. Some days later, the police alerted them to a decomposing body found in a jungle. It could only be him, everyone thought, so the case was closed, the body burnt on a pyre as per Hindu customs, and the ashes cast into a river. Meanwhile, the boy had reached the city of Gurgaon and become a wage laborer. Then came Covid-19. “I lost my job and decided to walk back with the others. I was missing my family,” he told the police upon his arrival. They are currently investigating whose body was found the jungle three years ago. 

Some of those walking back hundreds of miles couldn’t enter their villages at all. A variety of hurdles stood between them and their homes: bamboo barricades, moats, border armies, and local diktats to spend their first 14 days atop trees or hills in quarantine. Different people faced different degrees of social isolation. Some of the villages barred Muslims from entering during the pandemic. India’s first outbreak happened to be  an Islamic congregation in Delhi, and it was all that was needed to brand the epidemic as a religious conspiracy. In certain villages, high-caste residents dug trenches around the houses of Dalits,whom Hindu scriptures designate as outcastes. India’s caste system goes back 2,000 years. It’s as relevant today as it was during 1918 when the Spanish flu claimed 18 million Indians, about 6 percent of the population. Your placement in caste system was inversely aligned with the hazards you faced and directly with the healthcare you received. As recalled by the scholar Amit Kapoor, the flu claimed 61 lower-caste Hindus per 1000 Indians. The reciprocal number for high-caste Hindus stood at 18.9.

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In the cities, too, equally absurd rules determine who can enter which place. Most of these are set and passed by Resident Welfare Associations (RWAs), community organizations of neighborhoods, apartments, and blocks. Like tyrants across the world now, they give themselves more power with each new day of the pandemic. They let you know they have you covered, often literally, with disinfectant. In my south Delhi colony, the RWA chief makes the rounds on his bicycle with a retinue of foot soldiers: a hazmat-clad man who sprays disinfectant on the houses pointed out by the leader, a tech assistant  shooting the action on a mobile phone camera, and the second-in-command who suggests houses worthy of the holy shower. In various neighborhoods, RWAs have fixed times for when people can leave their homes and put up barricades and guards to screen outsiders. Mainly, these are meant to deter the working class. The maids must show permission letters, the drivers must get tested, and the golf caddies must remain in their quarters. But the residents have been found to smuggle in outsiders, so punishments had to be devised. No electricity and water for those who drive out post curfew; a 11000 rupees  ($145 ) fine for those who bring in guests. Why 11000? 11 is an auspicious number for Hindus — 11 pieces of wood are offered to a sacred fire at one time, 101 coins are handed to a Brahmin in charity. Indians are particular about numerology. On 3 April, the prime minister appeared on television to request every citizen to turn off their lights at 9 pm on 5 April for 9 minutes. As decoded by multiple news programs, WhatsApp forwards and even TikTok videos, there was a lot of 9, yet another auspicious number, in his speech. He appeared on television 9 days into the first lockdown, spoke for 9 minute and 9 seconds, and asked for a 9-minute blackout on 5 April, a date that adds up to 9. 

Sometime between one lockdown and the next, the country was carved up into zones— green for low, orange for medium and red for high rate of infection — and people were ordered to stay put. But not everyone did. In Ghaziabad, a man jumped his zone to bring home the woman he had secretly married shortly before the first lockdown. He had told his mother he was going out to buy groceries; his mother has yet to accept the bride. In Kerala, a man drove across the state hidden in a vegetable truck to switch between two wives. In the process, one of them found out about the other and fought with him. Things heated up, and he decided to file a police complaint against the woman who found out, which resulted in him being arrested for breaching quarantine protocol. In Patna, a man married his girlfriend from the same zone when his wife refused to risk a return from her parents’ house in a different zone where she had happened to be at the time of the order. He has been arrested for bigamy. In Ernakulum, a man ran away with the wife and children of a friend who had invited him to stay with them as long as he was stuck in their village because of a lockdown. When the police intensified the investigation based on the complaint of the woman's husband, the duo along with the children presented themselves before the police in Muvattupuzha.

I have so many questions. Why are the police arresting people even as the jails are releasing prisoners? Are Indian men more afraid of being at home without a wife than catching the virus? Is it the housework?

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In spite of the barricades, zones, and protocols, things are getting mixed up as they are likely to in a country of 1.3 billion people. In Hyderabad, the police rescued a child from a kidnapper in the middle of a lockdown and handed him over to the mother, but the child tested positive for the virus, so everyone was packed off to the nearest quarantine center, including the kidnapper, the child, the mother, and the police officers. In Mumbai, a hospital mistakenly gave the dead body of a 29-year old Muslim man, a worker, who had just been tested for Covid, to the parents of an 18-year-old Hindu girl who had died of an illness on the same day. The girl’s parents cremated the body the same day as per Hindu rituals, too afraid of infection to even look inside the bag.

As of this morning, India’s official death count from Covid-19 stands at 7,745. Death isn’t far from anyone’s mind right now. In some cases, living people are being treated as dead. At a government facility in Bihar in East India, the returning workers in compulsory two-week quarantine were given shrouds to cover themselves with at night because the authorities probably budgeted for essentials. Meanwhile, the temperatures are rising dangerously as the Indian summer breaks records. Thousands die of the heat wave every year. Humans are not alone in suffering: in one day, 52 bats reportedly dropped dead from the heat in the city of Gorakhpur.