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.<br /><br />Is it week six now, or is it week five<br />I’m sitting in my room trying not to drive<br />myself crazy. I miss my friends –<br />without them, I start thinking<br />Things like, Hey, what if this never ends,<br />Or – Is this room shrinking?<br /> <br /> <br />Impossible, right? It’s impossible<br /> to be held like this for another<br />Year? And not see a concert, a market,<br /> or your mother –<br />Never touch your partner’s face,<br /> or go with them in the street<br /> <br />Tell me there’s no universe in which we never meet.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br />Except – there is. So I want to do an exercise.<br />Look around the room you’re in.<br /> Now close your eyes.<br />Pull the walls in closer, until it’s half the size.<br /> <br />Imagine you’re not stuck in here<br /> for two more weeks, but four.<br />Now half the size again. Take away the door.<br />You cannot leave this room. You lose your fan, your bed –<br />And once you really feel this hyper-lockdown in your head…<br /> <br /> <br />Stretch this tunnel of four weeks out to four hundred<br /> <br /><br />And let it go. (It isn’t real.) But have you ever wondered<br /><br />Why every day, in normal life, we send people to cells<br /><br />And lock them up away from touch and sights<br /><br /> and sound and smells<br /> <br />Every day. Just like that. Just like tea spilled from a cup<br /> <br />Could lockdown teach us empathy for people we lock up?<br /> <br /><br />Normal life was great for me. I was constantly in motion<br />From house to house, town to town; <br /><br />mountains to the ocean<br /><br />It was too much – but just to touch each person that I love<br />I needed physical freedom. And now I see the strangeness of<br /> <br />A fact of “normal life” – which is that even long before<br />Covid and the quarantine, something like a crore<br />Of us were locked in cells. Because we can’t do more<br /><br />To reconcile our world of human laws with human flaws.<br /><br /> <br />Maybe it’s the right thing. Maybe it should be<br />That they cannot raise their children. Cannot earn their fees<br />Should never earn forgiveness from their victims, make amends<br />Just sit in isolation until their sentence ends.<br /> <br />But somewhere up there on the list of our epic fails<br />Is that more than half the people in India’s crowded jails<br />Have not been convicted. We don’t even know their guilt.<br />But still we leave them locked up in the rooms our anger built.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br />And there’s a movement to abolish prisons altogether<br />Because keeping them in fetters never made a person better.<br />We can still go beyond our ancient code – retaliation<br />And learn to master: mercy, closure, truth and reparations<br /> <br />But instead, around the country, we’re not building skyscrapers<br />We’re building camps for people who don’t have the right papers<br />People working, farming, paying taxes, could be severed<br />From their lives, and for no crime, and locked away forever.<br /> <br /> <br />And when we come together in the street to say it isn’t<br />Acceptable – No never will we throw people in prisons<br />For not being on your list… they charge us with sedition.<br /> <br />Even now, while we’re in lockdown, waiting to exhale<br />They’re dragging kids from Jamia out, throwing them in jail.<br />Even now, while we’re united: banging thalis, lighting lamps<br />They’re still making plans to lock some of us in camps.<br /> <br />They’re jailing them in darkness.<br />This madness has to stop.<br />Could lockdown teach us to resist locking people up?<br /> <br /> <br />Someday soon we’ll be in motion, no longer confined<br />Reunited with barristas, barbers, valentines<br />Then let’s remind each other<br /> about those still quarantined<br />Away from love and out of sight<br />But not out of mind.<br /> <br />Written and read: Raghu Karnad<br />Background music: Yashas Chandra
