In the Diminished Realm of the Senses

One month into the lockdown, we can say that most of us are comfortably uncomfortable. Adjustments have been made, pointy edges sandpapered, pretences discarded. We know that work-from-home is no equaliser; for some it is a wish fulfilled, for others unremitting toil, and for yet others an impossibility. By week four (or is it five, who can keep track?), we’ve mastered the correct water-to-mop proportions, acceded to the law that the sink will be dishless only once we are in bed, and that creativity in the kitchen will eventually give way to boredom. We will emerge from this either fatter or thinner, and definitely hairier and greyer. We’ve embraced a wardrobe that requires no ironing. We’ve substituted all our favourite organic brands with the local kirana store wares, and are loath to admit that we can barely tell the difference. We’ve realised that we might not be fulfilled, but we the elite are not going to go hungry. We have moulted into new schedules, like a tarantula donning a new exoskeleton; it has not been easy, took numerous heaves and upheavals, but it has been done.

Yet while we might have settled into a routine of sorts, what looms over us all is dread. Our previous convictions roam like zombies of the night, mocking us, and our naïvety. Our plans have always been doors to elsewheres. Now we see the door, but the key has been snatched away. And that frightens us. Frightens us more than we dare admit.

As we become citizens in this Land of Less, our senses are also being tweaked. We’ve always known the world through touch, hearing, taste, smell and sight. But in a lockdown as the walls have literally closed in upon us all, our senses have sharpened and dimmed. Without the grace of sunlight and breeze, open vistas and expanse, we are forced to move within. We now dwell in an altered and much diminished sensory space.

Let’s start with touch. Today people are dying alone and mourning in isolation. One reads report after report or Twitter thread after Twitter thread of families unable to bid goodbye. The last glimpse happens (if at all) over a screen. Mourners gather over Zoom for funerals. There is no last clasp of the hand, no kiss to the forehead, no squeeze to the toes. We need the huddle of our fellow bereaved to tide us through loss. Contagion denies us that. Dying and grief are solitary affairs, but at the end, we want to know that we have been in this together.

I read Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain (1977). She writes of the mountains of Scotland with the awareness of a lover. Sample this: ‘Touch is the most intimate sense of all. The whole sensitive skin is played upon, the whole body, braced, resistant, poised, relaxed, answers to the thrust of forces incomparably stronger than itself.’ Shepherd is, of course, describing the effect of the elements on the mountain. She continues, ‘Cold spring water stings the palate, the throat tingles unbearably; cold air smacks the back of the mouth, the lungs crackle.’

I read her and am roiled by missingness. Here in isolation, here in lockdown, I miss the feel of things and textures, of people and of my person. I miss the softness of my nephews’ hair, the coolth of my mother’s cotton sarees, the grip of my partner’s hand, the yoga teacher’s palm on my back, tar beneath my sandals, grass under my feet, leaf-fall skimming my cheeks, sand below my fingers, the velveteen cushion of a theatre, the debris of masala peanuts on my fingertips, the examination of fabric in a trial room, the satin-like ears of a friend’s dog, the dip of a gooey chocolate cake under my fork.

How long before I get to feel these again?

Touch is what connects us to the world, to the animate and the inanimate. Touch is how we know our surroundings. A baby’s first experience with the environment occurs through touch. Touch is how we delineate who we love and how we love. But in the times of contagion, touch has become the Grim Reaper.

Today we see all surfaces and bodies as germ-infested. Wear gloves. Don’t touch your face. Never your nose. Three feet apart. Six feet apart. Maintain distance. Abandon handshakes. Knuckle elevator buttons. Elbow door handles. Sanitise and rub. Rub and sanitise. Never ever embrace. Wash your hands. Wash your hands. Wash your damn hands. Touch today is an action to be feared, an action that needs to be undone. An act that can cause terrible damage, and could even lead to your death.

Noise has been sucked out of cities. In the first week, the silence of my neighbourhood unsettled me. It was a quietude one would otherwise hear only on Holi afternoons, when the city sunk into a bhang stupor after a morning of revelry. Now every day is on snooze mode. Mornings in the neighbourhood are usually a series of cries. The fruitwalla, the juicewalla, the sabziwalla, the gamlewalla, the kabadiwalla, the naali saaf karne walla. The sevpuri walla on the weekends. Over the years, I’ve learnt to identify the vendor with his voice. Each of them had their own brand of advertising. A few would just holler out, “Sabziiii,” while others would reel out entire lists.

Today, I miss those voices. I haven’t heard a thelawalla in over a month. To hear him would be to know that we are limping back to ‘normal’. To hear him would be to know that he is once again free to walk the streets and enter the neighbourhood. In this silence, the sound of a car reversing out of a driveway seems an aberration. This lull amplifies voices. For the first time I become aware of raised tempers and pitched voices from neighbouring houses. Mothers scolding children. Children screeching back. Husbands standing on balconies and yelling into phones. Has it always been this way? Or is the silence letting me in on secrets?

In this altered soundscape, however, I continue to take comfort in the seeti of the pressure cooker. I notice the woots and whistles from adjacent kitchen windows. It is a sound that heralds the arrival of a meal, the appearance of hot, fresh food.

I take pride in the fact that I can enjoy a meal on my own. But it’s now been more than a month since I shared a meal with another human being. Meals alone taste different. Conversations season dinners. Devoid of company, a meal is an errand to complete and not an experience to savour. I haven’t descended (as yet) into eating straight from the saucepan and over the sink. I still sit at the dining table and serve myself on a plate. I do not rely on a screen for entertainment. I have come to realise that to truly enjoy a meal is to share it. Flavour is not an absolute, instead it is a measure of how much others appreciate a common dish.

COVID-19 has upended the business of eating out. Selecting a restaurant, choosing from a menu, revelling in a conversation over food and alcohol is a quintessential urbane experience. The hum of a restaurant, the clinking of glasses and forks, the spores of conversations that float by, the bonhomie across a table, are the essential pleasures of city life. Restaurants provide us refuge and a roof under which we meet new people, dine with old friends, wage arguments, make peace, forge friendships and build community. The virus threatens to alter all of that.

I come across a headline, ‘A high proportion of people infected with Covid-19 report loss of smell and/or taste’. In illogical moments of panic, I console myself that as long as I can taste and smell, all is well. But compared to the outside world, whether it is the city or the forest, our homes are scarce on aromas. At times, a whiff of an apple cake baking in my oven, or the roasting of semolina for suji ka halwa from my landlord’s house will waft by. But the most overpowering smell of today is the disinfectant. The Dettol in the moping water, the soap on one’s hands and the chemical smell of sanitisers that snags in one’s throat.

I think back at all the smells that punctuated my ‘pre-lockdown days’. The perfumes of friends. The 9 am smell of my home in Chennai when my parents sit down to breakfast. The woody waft of tobacco from a colleague’s cigarette, the tang of steel on my palms once I leave the metro, the grease of potato frying from the chaat seller on the walks from the station, the buttered toast aroma of popcorn at a cinema hall.

Then I remember the fragrances of the natural world, and I feel thwarted. A year ago, at this time, I was travelling in Japan. One’s sense of taste, smell and sight feasted on this holiday. I recall the wet cedar at a natural park that overlooked the Hida mountains; the burst of orange, when we punctured the skin of the fruit with our thumbs. It was the season of the cherry blossoms and our overhead canopy was often paper-like petals. In every direction that we turned, we could find a thing of beauty and pleasure. Whether it was the pine trees of Kinkakuji temple in Kyoto, the yakitori dinners of Tokyo or the wooden alleys of the heritage town Takayama.

Today, when my sight and sites are bound by four walls, the travels of the past seem dream-like. My vistas have been curtailed to the proximate. I can choose to find epiphanies in the flowering of my champa plant, or the tailor bird that has woven a nest in my porch. I know I have it good. I know I am comfortable. But it is the diminishment of my senses that feels like loss.

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