# During These Days Of Pandemic The morning arrives like a thief, stealing away the night. I have grown used to this now. The sky doesn't look the same anymore—there's a weight to it, a thickness that wasn't there before. Or perhaps I have simply forgotten what lightness feels like. The news comes in doses. I ration it the way one rations bread in a siege. Too much and the mind buckles; too little and one feels untethered from the world. There is a strange arithmetic to it—the numbers climbing with a terrible regularity, as if someone is keeping score in a game whose rules I have never understood. My neighbor hasn't emerged from his apartment in weeks. I know this because I listen for his footsteps on the landing. The silence has become a presence of its own, a guest that overstays its welcome. I leave vegetables at his door sometimes, wordless offerings that disappear by nightfall. We communicate in this currency now—in the language of absence. The city has become a ghost of itself. The streets are clean, unnaturally so. Without the shuffle and press of crowds, the concrete seems to forget its purpose. The shops keep their gates half-drawn, like eyes unwilling to fully open. A few automobiles pass, moving with the hesitation of creatures in an unfamiliar place. Time moves differently in these days. Hours stretch like taffy, and then suddenly a week has vanished. I cannot tell if I have been still or if the world is moving too fast. The television speaks in urgent tones about the invisible enemy, and I find myself wondering if fear itself has become the real infection. My daughter calls from the other city. Her voice through the speaker sounds like it is traveling through water. I tell her I am fine—this has become the required script. She tells me to be careful, to wear the mask, to wash my hands. I have become fluent in these rituals. They are the new liturgy. The book on my table has been unfinished for thirty days. I cannot concentrate. My eyes move across the words but the meaning does not stick. It is as though something inside me has become resistant to narrative, to the idea that stories still matter when reality itself has become incomprehensible. Yet there are small rebellions. Last Tuesday, I made the recipe my mother used to make—the one with the seven spices and the slow-cooked lentils. The smell filled the apartment like a prayer, and for an hour, I was not afraid. The body remembers what the mind has tried to forget. Food tastes like memory tastes like home. The nights are the hardest. Sleep comes reluctant and broken. In the dark, the news numbers multiply like insects. I wonder about those we have lost, whether they went quietly or with struggle, whether anyone held their hands. I wonder if their last thoughts were of the ones they loved or of the fear itself. But morning always comes. Even now. Even on these days when the world seems to be holding its breath, waiting for a mercy that may never arrive. I feed the birds on the balcony. They have not stopped coming. This small act—the scattering of seeds, the watching of wings—feels like an act of faith. They trust that I will be here tomorrow. I do not know if I believe in much anymore, but I believe in this transaction. The birds and I. The continuation of small, ordinary things. This too shall pass, they say. But I have stopped believing in the future tense. I live now only in the present—in the gravity of this day, this breath, this fragile, tenuous now. The pandemic has taught me nothing except this: how little we ever really knew about our own fragility, and how much we need to believe that fragility itself is temporary. Whether that belief is wisdom or delusion, I can no longer tell the difference.

I hold fast to the last rays of the sun, watching them slip away beyond the wall that swallows the entire garden whole, that narrow space between the mosque and where the garbage waits. That dreadful garbage truck! Now it's simply a new ritual, a necessary meditation like hot water you brew and always forget to drink.

A few handwritten pages each morning. I think of Jibanananda, I think of Tagore. How they dreamed, what they made, what occupied their minds, what troubles large and small they carried. How they felt the cool touch of dawn as they watched wind move through the leaves. To have glimpsed them from afar, to have seen them at their work. And I do this exercise that splinters me from myself, divides me in the most perfect way. The rest of the day unfolds as it must, now that I've left between these pages what would otherwise have kept me awake through long hours of night. There's a tremor in the thought that we may never be ourselves again.

Never as we were when we first met, before the world broke open. Never easy in our gestures, never bold, never free in our smiling. In how we wished to see ourselves, to find one another. In ordering a simple black coffee, no sugar. Sitting at a table, sheltered by trees, without the terror that some harm might reach us if we stayed out after dark. Drinking cup after cup of coffee, growing cold, becoming only memory now, becoming only what remains. To be yourself and yet to play at being you. To think before you speak, yes, but also before you move. Measure twice before you step outside. Measure twice before you imagine any future.

Our gestures have lost their weight. Not as they appear now, scattered and hurried, quickly translated through the dictionaries of our own lives.

With these small gestures we cannot save the world, not unless we can align what we truly want from life. We cannot applaud separate acts of the same performance. We cannot admire the sculpture while despising the sculptor. We imagine ourselves at the edge of an existence where nothing can wound us, where pain is only a story we once read, something we dreamed, something with no real shape, no true meaning. Yet—and this is strange—we always want to begin again, to shoulder the role of demigods, saviors of what we do not believe can be saved. We try anyway, with a hunger and despair that burn with equal fire.

Those who lead us through the light are the same as those who drag us into the darkness. You cannot love without tasting the fear that heights bestow—that irrational dread when a railing-less precipice thrusts you toward your own becoming. The fall hovers at the threshold, but in the final moment you find your footing, recover in less than a second, reclaim mastery over yourself, over your own thoughts especially, and you step back from the edge and the vertigo. But it was close. What exhausts us is what shapes us more deeply than we dare admit.

Those moments that demand everything, those brief surges of fervor that hollow us out—these are the fragments that compose and unmake us. It is the dance we perform with ourselves, the one we owe ourselves if we are to endure. And we wish to endure. Despite the missteps, we dance before the mirror with the light burning behind us in the darkened room. No one witnesses us; we dance unfettered, free, to music of our own making. This dance that liberates us, transfigures us, restores us. A dance misunderstood by others, yet vital, necessary to our very breath.

I will not repeat myself. We are never the ones who wake in the morning, yet we manage to commit errors that others cannot forgive more than once. So I will not repeat myself, even if I stumble the same way countless times again. But I will be another each time, clinging to a Jibanananda no one has ever known.