Healing circles

The pandemic is weak. It pummels humanity by the thousands each day. Yet the circles stand undented, writes Nisha James

The image was striking. An elderly gent on a run down scooter with a gunny bag tied around his face.

This was apparently meant to draw sniggers from the well-heeled from behind their N95 masks, sitting comfortably ensconced in their upscale apartment behind the protective walls of some gated community by name White Meadow or Windsor Castle or some such.

But the sniggers aren’t new. The world is not flat, nor has it ever been.

Years ago, within the secure walls of a small convent in Tilak Nagar, Delhi, girls of all ages, clad in the same pale blue and white “modest” salwar suit would be huddled up in different circles during the lunch break, each circle an impenetrable fortress.

The circles would never intersect. What kept them so magically apart, one could not tell.

Many years were traversed between Tilak Nagar and Lajpat Nagar. The salwar suits were gone, yet the circles endured.

A decade hence, the winding car street of the temple town, filled with a sea of humanity absorbed in their gay prattle, led to the grand dining halls, also separate. Even the divine cannot meld the circles. They stand steadfastly apart.

The pandemic is similarly weak. It pummels humanity by the thousands each day. Yet the circles stand undented. In fact, more prominently apart if anything.

The contrast is even more crystalline on the empty roads — luxury cars zipping by at breakneck speed, flashes of the same N95 mask, against a backdrop of the dregs of society — the indigent, the abandoned and the unsound.