The Shadow

At the gate, a municipal sign declares seven infections. The phone beeps. A message. Con-gratulations 4980 1392 3614 - but I’m back on Outlook. There are fifty emails. I ignore them. Then I ignore Instagram. Twitter. Whatsapp. Telegram. Death. It is eight and everything on the cat-fish-church road is shut except for the chemist. I am out for a walk. No one follows me. No threat of rape. But I am afraid. A strong cream-colored cat is allowed a piece of roti by a watchman from his tiffin. I take these long walks dressed up as a masked man, most likely another out-of-work handyman, driver, waiter, sales executive.

A motorcycle flies past. I gaze at the masked pillion till we are far from each other.

I don’t feel well. I need to sleep. Find more ways to tire me out. After taking my quota of long-awaited alprazolam from the chemist, I walk towards the gleaming metro ahead. Tran- quil. A cinnamon cat follows me but moves on to more existential worries as licking his paws. We have been here for Four hundred days. Owing to a failure. A boo-boo. The plan is for us to stay like this permanently! At least for two hundred ten days more based on the most reasonable estimates. The phone rings; it’s my mother.

Seventh call: 4.27 hours of conversation today.

 In the first forty days, we both behaved normally out of habit. Norms of guilt, personal habits, politeness, positivity, festivals were closely observed. Sattvic feast photographs shared. But when it was clear that we were not to be relieved any time soon, the standards were relaxed. The mealtimes no longer rigorous. Considerations of truth and lies temporarily paused in the daily calls describing daily food, a dream, fevers, oxygen vitals, infection, vac- cination interspersed with updates on uric acid, sugar, blood pressure. Comments on the sil- ver in my hair and follow-up tips. Gooseberry recipes, alkaline water, immunity-building herbs. Ways to further life. And sometimes unexpected, undignified death.

I take the incoming call and mom excitedly explains that she is mid-registration for an online prayer at eleven tomorrow morning and she needs me to help her sign-up. They all were to Chant, globally, eleven times for extra potency. I follow the link to find out that they are sell- ing a tenfold yield of….

Strength and protection, (obviously)

Restoration of faith and devotion,

and relief from fears and negativity.

Mom can come alive under life-threatening circumstances. She believes in the theory of the afterlife bound by exhaustion, where everything is hard because the situation is always under control. We have always been training for the end, each of us making certain declarations to one or more long-haired men equipped with secret prayer books, creepy-red-orange medita- tion-rooms, apocalyptic-time-quadrants, and the right drug cocktail. Paranoia. The Knowl- edge always locked away. That is planning. We have been at it for four hundred days now. That is planning too. But it keeps her safe for now.

The protection-restoration website is like that of a bank or a salon: banal. A lifestyle org that claims to cure all ailments including strangeness but not the Virus. Not yet. I add to cart. Mom elaborates that they will all chant the Hanuman Chalisa, that is going to ease the dark times and it is going to be the most special time for vibrations because of the Deepest solar eclipse in a hundred years.

 Sounds of an ambulance

cut through on my side. Third in the last hour.

My stomach churns. Again. Fuck this online brainwash, I whisper to Aruna.

Mom is still on the line,

waiting out the siren in a business-like fashion.

When the conversation resumes, I ask her if the grocery was delivered. She thanks me for helping her out in these tough times in a way that sounds like a copy of a copy of a copy gov- erned by DNA and karma. Then mom mentions that she didn’t sleep well last night. Common ground! Instinctively, I jump in telling her of my sleep worries. She tells me to drink Turmer- ic milk and not to think. Then there is a drop in her voice and she casually wonders when life is finally going to come to an end. That this is so much worse than even the curfews of Kashmir. The sounds of bullets. The migration. I do not know much except that it is a good time to discuss food: Online grocery shopping. Lunch. Vegetable porridge and raita. A bowl of noodles. Oats vs rice. Dinner recipes. A glass of milk and leftovers. I need to sleep. She is talking about the queues for oxygen, medicine, alcohol, vaccine, crematoriums. Hello?

Ahead on the footpath, a rat feeds along with a jumble of cats.

  I don’t feel well. We switch.

And Aruna says that death is in queues right now and that we only have our luck right now. Then she shares an immunity-boosting concoction made from boiled peanut skin. I hear their laughter: loud, ugly. They need to laugh. Then they bond on the latest superfoods, digestive ailments. Meditation. Yoga. Bad films. Vile conspiracy theories. The same old shit.

 Why do you think he killed himself?

They say he was depressed.

What about? It must be murder.

  Drugs!

If I didn’t exist, they would make a perfect unit. She makes Mom feel safe. Not too interested or disinterested in Science. Not too do-not-give-a-fuck-about-her. Not too sexy. Recently she had been on a disciplined detox away from all rituals and into experiments with meditation, yoga, alternate medicine, and self-care. It’s strange but it is no stranger than the day that she told me that I suffer from a frightful illness of the mind after popping the last of my alprazo- lam to see what is the hype was about. She is always abrasive. She came out to her mother who was terrible about it, but Aruna decided that she was done with it. I cannot imagine do- ing the same. There are the days that my skin is overrun with nerves, carrying a cocktail spiked with failures, Science, loneliness, and analyzing if we all need the shadow - to show that we love. So I get angry, and then brood excessively over the consequences. About luck. About Patterns. About creating a home in the shadow in-between the sun, the moon, and the uncomfortable conversations.

The air smells of day-old trash.

I tell mom that I’ve sent her the final registration details. She suggests that I should join the chant too. My mouth says “hmm” and elongating the mm, I reverse moonwalk into a shadow and hide in a long pause that follows. Deflect. As she had done the time when I tried ending things. Her end of the world toolkit has nothing for me except for bad memory, silent retreats, and the pre-written chants. In the past, I would have been paralyzed at this request. But the visuals of hundreds of burning pyres have made it easy to support her minor passions. I hear the exchange of words. “Chant the Chalisa tomorrow” from her and “Cool. Bye. Goodnight,” says Aruna effortlessly her skin: Teflon. Magic. Aruna can just say yes when it’s a no and vice versa. She isn’t bothered by the brainwash. She cares too. And has faith in the future. And always thinks that she is not doing enough. Aruna and I have had a good routine going now sharing uncomfortable phone calls, messages, emails. We had been rationing the whiskey long before bunker time. Two pegs per person per week; she had still drunk it all by day fifty-six. But she managed to find more from people who owed her favors and had spent a night collecting the booze bottles even after a seventy-hour work week.

I think of the time I found my pleasure spot while sitting on my hand to make it numb. The tingle that followed. The smell of that spirit with whom I had a lifetime of adventure filled with cheese, alcohol, music, re-runs, colors and drugs, which always dutifully dropped me calmly into the lap of a future time where G O D is an acronym for physics, capitalism, and story. Prayers just local, accidental laws. Where once the eclipse is over, the light will return to the earth and everyone shall rejoice, cleansed of the impurity that the darkness brought in, and everyone will still pray some more and offer donations (now all conveniently online) and that nothing might change or break. She, me, the sun, the moon, the earth, and time. This fast of hers. The length of the eclipse, our bodies, the effects on our bodies. All that would be left behind is an aftertaste of our conversation.

On the right the beach is empty except a police van. The crows glide against the strong wind.

Aruna is checking the unread messages when she sees it. Congratulations 4980 1392 3614, TEM Hospital may have extra doses of COVID-19 vaccine when the clinic closes today. Please respond AVAILABLE to confirm you can be on-site by 9:00 p.m. The first 3 AVAILABLE responses will receive a text with instructions.

Sudden state of excitement. “Available”, I type. The phone beeps again.

You have been selected to arrive at the TEM -COVID-19 vaccine clinic to wait in the standby line by 9:00p.m. Doses not guaranteed. Please arrive at Main Hospital Lobby on the 3rd floor, MCGM, Bungalow street.

 I book an Uber and on the way to the hospital stare out at the city that never slept. Straight ahead are two lit-up billboards.

 One asks citizens to not be afraid. The second sells a cake inside a bar of chocolate.

I am about to arrive when I start to wonder how it was really possible. When do hospitals hand out vaccines like it’s a lottery, over text? I had registered. But didn’t the site crash that day? It’s April 1st tomorrow. And how did I get selected as one of 3 responses too? I must investigate, check the parking lot for bodies, goons, bad luck. Google the phone number for common scams. Meanwhile, should I tell the driver to go back? Then I see the queue.

Stickers being distributed to get in line for the vaccine. It’s REAL.

I wait in line for twenty minutes but they run out of the vaccine. I go home, eat, take my pills, and start Terminator-2. Aruna is snoring. The next conversation with mom is roughly twenty hours later. She sounds better than yesterday. She mentions seeing an old Shammi Kapoor comedy. I ask mom if she liked the film. She says that she dozed off watching it and had an amazing sleep. I tell her I slept to the Terminator. I don’t mention the missed vaccine.

She asks me if I had chanted. I say “yes”, after which she asks again to recheck. “Yes!” and then she tells me that Mehta uncle’s wife died. An ambulance took them at eleven. And that perhaps she has been spared because of my prayer. I know I did not protect her. But I feel lucky and then, I again turn the conversation towards food.

Sonal Sher lives in Mumbai where she writes fiction about alternate realities when she is not deconstructing old Hindi songs. Her work has been published in Chicago Review, Scrivener Creative Review, The Conium Review, Quip Literary Review, Pratham Books' StoryWeaver, The Hindu, and Emrys Journal.