of lockdown, sleeplessness, and appetites
Sunday 3 a.m.
It has been a while since Canada went into lockdown and I have lost count of how many days it has been. Hours of sleep have been reduced and disturbed while a strange assortment of appetites have surged. My nights have become my days and vice versa, as I wake up with sunlight blanking down on my face. The parched skin of my heels and sides of my feet crackle with slight electricity. It is a ravenous thirst for attention, a symbol of daily neglect, and in more prosaic terms, a result of the thermostat quaffing the moisture in my room all throughout the winter.
I apply some luxurious foot cream from L’Occitane which fails with flying colors and so, I humbly turn to my home-made concoction— my grandmother’s recipe that my mother had conveyed to me on phone, “One portion glycerin to two portions of distilled rose water. Adding a few drops of lemon is even better, but do so with a separate and smaller quantity or it will go bad.” The potion is magical as my feet are now plump and glossy. I am suddenly, but not surprisingly, overwhelmed with hiraeth. I want to go back to India. I have been wanting to for over a month now. But India has closed its international borders even to its own citizens with no news of reparation flights. I feel stranded as my air ticket languishes in silence.
My appetite for all things Indian have reached an all-time high. At night, I spend my time curating playlists and experimenting with Indian food. Lately, I have been watching Bollywood movies made in the 1980s and ’90s and consuming their rhyming dialogues and colourful sets complete with their more than frequent bursts of unrelated song and dance sequences with an ardor that is akin to a love-lorn lover. Every day I FaceTime my friend who is trapped in NYC and spend hours with her making food, talking about the contained life we all are leading, our desire to fly back to India until the point we have nothing to really talk about. The presence of someone who feels almost exactly the same way I do because of being in a very similar predicament is comforting. She is working on her paper on Omkara and I am munching on chocolate-dipped pretzels as I type.
I am cheating my daily 24 hour fast tonight but I think I have earned it as yesterday was perhaps the most productive day of my life in the last two months. I applied for a graduate students’ emergency bursary and replied to my supervisor’s email. I went out to collect mail and I was greeted by a pleasantly sunny and balmy afternoon and received my new VISA debit card. I had thrown away my first debit card back in September 2018 because it was cyan in color and felt flimsy and cheap. I distinctly remember that it did not work at the Tim Horton’s in the University Community Center and I decided that it was a frail plastic play card of sorts that one would perhaps receive with promotional bank mail. I also very clearly remember removing it from my wallet and disposing it in the waste bin. For almost two years I lived thinking that my client card is my debit card.
It is 5:32 a.m. now. My productivity comes in short, halted bursts. I am distracted. The black-capped chickadee is singing outside my room. I long for my home in India. Many years ago in Aurobindo Market in New Delhi, I chose a stuffed black-capped chickadee because of its fluffy appearance and the beautiful chirp it emitted when I pressed its chest. I pine for the arid Delhi summers with the sun beating down my head and the nearness of everything. I yearn for touch as I fold and unfold my legs under myself and try my best to evoke the comforting sense of tactility. I want to be enveloped by a beloved.
This global lockdown is lonely. And this barely scratches the surface of all those problematic things that have been exposed or created because of this pandemic. It is truly a new era of containment, loss, and aborted desires, and so I am going to go back to reading Sculpting in Time by Andrei Tarkovsky. Here’s hoping that I find some gloriously twisted beauty just like the Russians always have in the face of the direst times.
my notes from Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky, p 16-17
