'Lockdown Exercise' - An Essay in Verse, by Raghu Karnad I The Wire

Raghu Karnad, former bureau chief of the Wire, shares an exercise to help us relate our lockdown, to suppress the spread of Covid-19 in India, to the many lives trapped in a different kind of 'isolation' and distancing, due to policies of incarceration, detention and draconian arrests.

Is it week six now, or is it week five
I’m sitting in my room trying not to drive
myself crazy. I miss my friends –
without them, I start thinking
Things like, Hey, what if this never ends,
Or – Is this room shrinking?
 
  
Impossible, right? It’s impossible
                       to be held like this for another
Year? And not see a concert, a market,
                                         or your mother –
Never touch your partner’s face,
                       or go with them in the street
 
Tell me there’s no universe in which we never meet.
 
 
 
Except – there is. So I want to do an exercise.
Look around the room you’re in.
                                Now close your eyes.
Pull the walls in closer, until it’s half the size.
 
Imagine you’re not stuck in here
                                for two more weeks, but four.
Now half the size again. Take away the door.
You cannot leave this room. You lose your fan, your bed –
And once you really feel this hyper-lockdown in your head…
 
 
Stretch this tunnel of four weeks out to four hundred
 

And let it go. (It isn’t real.) But have you ever wondered

Why every day, in normal life, we send people to cells

And lock them up away from touch and sights

 and sound and smells
 
Every day. Just like that. Just like tea spilled from a cup
 
Could lockdown teach us empathy for people we lock up?
 

Normal life was great for me. I was constantly in motion
From house to house, town to town; 

mountains to the ocean

It was too much – but just to touch each person that I love
I needed physical freedom. And now I see the strangeness of
 
A fact of “normal life” – which is that even long before
Covid and the quarantine, something like a crore
Of us were locked in cells. Because we can’t do more

To reconcile our world of human laws with human flaws.

 
Maybe it’s the right thing. Maybe it should be
That they cannot raise their children. Cannot earn their fees
Should never earn forgiveness from their victims, make amends
Just sit in isolation until their sentence ends.
 
But somewhere up there on the list of our epic fails
Is that more than half the people in India’s crowded jails
Have not been convicted. We don’t even know their guilt.
But still we leave them locked up in the rooms our anger built.
 
 
 
And there’s a movement to abolish prisons altogether
Because keeping them in fetters never made a person better.
We can still go beyond our ancient code – retaliation
And learn to master: mercy, closure, truth and reparations
 
But instead, around the country, we’re not building skyscrapers
We’re building camps for people who don’t have the right papers
People working, farming, paying taxes, could be severed
From their lives, and for no crime, and locked away forever.
 
 
And when we come together in the street to say it isn’t
Acceptable – No never will we throw people in prisons
For not being on your list… they charge us with sedition.
 
Even now, while we’re in lockdown, waiting to exhale
They’re dragging kids from Jamia out, throwing them in jail.
Even now, while we’re united: banging thalis, lighting lamps
They’re still making plans to lock some of us in camps.
 
They’re jailing them in darkness.
This madness has to stop.
Could lockdown teach us to resist locking people up?
 
                            
Someday soon we’ll be in motion, no longer confined
Reunited with barristas, barbers, valentines
Then let’s remind each other
                                about those still quarantined
Away from love and out of sight
But not out of mind.
 
Written and read: Raghu Karnad
Background music: Yashas Chandra