We Are All Frugalwoods

The last time I bought fresh flowers was on March 13th–pastel pink oriental lilies, leggy chrysanthemums, and a Tamil newspaper-wrapped ball of jasmine from a woman who has been stringing flowers at her perch outside a Ganesha temple for 18 years. We chatted briefly about her impending visit to her village in Thanjavur. Neither of us expected to spend the next few weeks cooped up in our respective sanctuaries. As India went into lockdown, flowers were among the first indulgences to disappear from our lives. Not only were they an ancillary lifestyle commodity, their evanescent beauty was ironic at a time when we were doomstruck and busy loading up our larders with food that would store well. Organic raw milk from native cows was making way for shelf-stable cartons, the only cheese in the refrigerator was the salty taste of nostalgia by Amul, the last bottle of olive oil was liquid gold. Millets and stevia were out of the question, it took several calls to kirana stores to even score some jaggery. In the days leading up to the lockdown, when e-commerce was still delivering non-essentials, a shipment of chocolate and fine tea had arrived. It felt like a minor infraction, even if the 21-year-old who had dropped it off had been happy to ride the surge—with 70-80 deliveries a day, at Rs 30 per parcel, he had made two months’ rent in just a week. After the lockdown came into force, he continued to make food deliveries for Swiggy—and this, within one of Bengaluru’s red zones. If waste-nothing-want-nothing had become the middle-class credo of restraint, risk-nothing-gain-nothing was already the guiding principle of the service industry. Valued at $3.6 billion, Swiggy recently moved into newer categories such as grocery delivery and a local courier service.

With all but kirana and chemists’ shops shuttered, supply chains broken and a fear of contact rendering the outside world off-limits—my own farthest physical probe has been to water the trees a few feet from the gate—urban millennials were, for the first time, discovering the virtues of frugality and industry, values their parents prided themselves on. For some of us, this was a time to hooverise—and not because we were staring at a scarcity of the kind that had made Herbert Hoover campaign for Meatless Tuesdays and Wheatless Wednesdays across America during the First World War. Dispensing with one meal, or dunking arid bits of home-baked bread in soup, saved time and effort, and freed us from feeling absolutely smacked when we ran out of our favourite cereal. Admittedly, it also helped stave off the pangs of guilt we felt at the unearned security of our own comfortable quarantines.

A SURVEY by the Health Ministry has now shown that the lockdown triggered food insecurity among Indian households, with 44 per cent of respondents reporting eating less than before or skipping meals. The study attributes this to a ‘fear of the disease and uncertainty about the future with no clarity on either the span or the scope of the lockdown’. Those of us who were devouring a full menu of the misfortunes of the poor—from migrants starving on the streets to farmers dumping produce they could not ferry to a market—found moral purpose in sharing food with neighbours and frontline workers, paying our house help, cook and dhobi and asking them to stay home, endeavouring to support local businesses, and shedding the apathetic torpor of modern-day urban living. An epochal event was changing the contours of humanity, and we had a front-row seat if not the motor of modern history itself.

Forced to shrink into a thin, liminal place between living and existing, we looked at the city, which had offered us a multicultural setting for juggling our various selves and languages, in a new light. To be sure, each day brought with it a fresh moral conundrum. To Dunzo produce from a seller 14 km away if the rider could make Rs 220 from the trip—or to live on potatoes for a day. To be sclerotic and order fresh coffee beans roasted by a local cafe, or to go instant and give in to the Dalgona craze. Other choices were easier. To give up a portable fan from one’s study that the house help was in urgent need of. To initiate a community bulk buy of melons from a farmer in Tumkur. All decisions quickly boiled down to the Benthamite principle of the greatest happiness of the greatest number.

On April 24th, when the hydrangea in the northeast corner bore a stunted blue flower, I snipped it, dunked it in an embalming concoction that florists often use to trick you into buying days-old flowers, and left it out on the balcony table in an old juice bottle for the neighbour to enjoy. We were each making every bloom count–from my torch ginger and scraggly spider lilies to his hibiscus and button rose displays. Luckily, the magnolia champaca tree across the road was in full bloom and if you left the windows open long enough, you would be rewarded with a dull, delicious headache. Too much of a good thing—like the anxiogenic consumerism of recent times. But now, even the gods have had to contend with sprigs of holy basil and the occasional butterfly pea flower from the terrace.

The unremitting explosion of fashion and personal technology has ceased; the anarchy of social appearance afflicts us no more. According to McKinsey & Co., the global industry for personal luxury goods will shrink by 35 to 39 per cent in 2020, compared to the previous year. Living with less, involuntarily or otherwise, cuts both ways, of course. To take the example of the simplest of pleasures, the $8.5 billion global trade in cut flowers has rapidly withered. Thousands of women working in flower farms in Kenya and Ethiopia have lost their livelihoods and are on the verge of sinking into poverty. But one cannot will a plant to stop blooming, no more than one can divert resources away from essential commodities to ship flowers across continents. For the first time in its 71-year history, the Dutch flower park of Keukenhof will not open to the public. Weekly virtual openings will showcase the blooms on social media instead. If millions of precious tulips were destroyed at Dutch flower auctions, acres and acres of marigold and chrysanthemum closer home have been reduced to cattle feed. With no large social gatherings on the cards this summer, the South India Floriculture Association expects to bear losses of nearly Rs 100 crore this season.

On my first errand post lockdown, I hope to channel Clarissa Dalloway buying flowers for a party on a June day in 1923 after the war is over—‘turning her head from side to side among the irises and roses and nodding tufts of lilac with her eyes half closed, snuffing in, after the street uproar, the delicious scent, the exquisite coolness. And then, opening her eyes, how fresh like frilled linen clean from laundry laid in wicker trays the roses looked.’ The outside world is disorienting and this is as far as she strays from the comfort of home, even as Septimus Warren Smith, a traumatised young war veteran, wanders the streets in a less privileged part of London.

Whether it is for an errand or for a livelihood, when we emerge from quarantine and plunge into the city, our parallel struggles, our intersecting fears, may keep us from lapsing into old habits. Some of us would stop buying imported wine and designer bags; a vast number will struggle to make ends meet as the economy limps back to a semblance of normalcy. But here is hoping we do not forget to stop and smell the roses.

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