‘Easy Tiger! The government will know we’re doing it…’ his eyes twinkled in the moonlight streaming through the bedroom window, as he held up the bio wristband.
She looked at hers and giggled. It was true. The government would know – the increase in their heartbeats would alert the monitoring systems and sound an alarm. But they couldn’t take their wristbands off, they weren’t allowed to. They had to wear them 24x7, even while showering.
’Don’t you wish we could go back in time?’ she asked, snuggling closer to him underneath the covers.
He shrugged. There was a time when he felt that the world was crumbling, and he would have done anything to bring it back. But that was more than five years ago, when the Coronavirus had just entered the world. In the last five years, the virus had mutated numerous times, outwitting each medicine and vaccine ever invented to beat it. With each mutation, it became more efficient and deadlier, until humanity gave up and just accepted it.
He didn’t know how he felt any longer. Was he really happier then or had he just adapted to the now? He didn’t have to go to work. He could wake up whenever he wanted. He had stopped paying down his mortgage, and the bankers had stopped asking. He and his wife had burned through their savings. But really, there was nothing to spend on now, even if they had the money. There was nothing being produced anywhere in the world. All factories had been shuttered, and the workers had run away. You don’t pay me enough to put my life at risk – they had all said.
The last five years had taught them that didn’t really need the things they thought they needed earlier. A vacation in Paris? Avocadoes flown down from Mexico? New sets of clothes each month? NO with a capital N. The virus had really grounded them. After all, what was the point of toiling day and night to make things that other people did not need, in order to buy things that they did not need? Pointless.
Now, they didn’t have to plan for tomorrow, because they did not know if there would be a tomorrow. Once you got over the initial discomfort of it all, there was a primal thrill to living this way – like you were living in the savannahs. He pulled his wife closer to him and growled.
She turned away moodily and sighed, ‘Everything is so pointless now.’
Why did she have to be so whiny, always? He most certainly would have dumped her in a pre-coronavirus world; but now, he had to tolerate her every second of every waking day. She was the one outcome of the virus he resented the most. He turned the other way and pulled the sheets over his head.
*
The quiet of the night was interrupted by the wailing of loud sirens. ‘Dammit!’ he cursed as he jolted up in bed. This was the second time the sirens had gone off this week alone. He ran to the window. A pack of wolfs had repossessed the children’s playground downstairs. They looked towards the moon and howled, in soulful heart wrenching cries. They were grieving. They knew. ‘It’s our building this time,’ he groaned as he slumped back into bed.
What was the need for the government to blare the sirens every time someone died? Fear? It was after all, the most effective control mechanism. They wanted to remind you that the end was very near, unless you behaved yourself. They had the sirens installed in each neighbourhood with a direct feed to the bio wristbands of the residents. Whenever a heart stopped beating, the bio wristband alerted the government’s monitoring systems.
There was a time, many years ago, when people revolted. They said that freedom was their fundamental right, and they jumped out of their windows when the government deactivated the elevator shafts to stop people from leaving their homes. Radicals – you find them in every society. But that was before the last big wave hit and culled half the population. The revolt had led to the government introducing ‘Reclamation Day’, which was one day a week when you could leave the confines of your home to spend a few hours outside. At your own risk, of course.
*
She awoke the next morning to the sound of birds chirruping on the windowsill. Week 262 – Cockatoos and Parakeets, she quickly noted in her diary. Week 1 had started with boring pigeons, but the sightings had become increasingly exotic with time. The man-made city boundaries were blurring and nature was reclaiming the planet.
This was how she kept time. By the quality of change in the world outside her window. Because nothing ever changed inside her own house. She turned her head to find her husband still snoring.
It was then that she heard the voice. Young, raw, real. It was coming out of the garbage chute. She shook her head in disbelief. It seemed that she had had one glass too many last night. It was often difficult to abstain from excess, now that they had converted their second bathroom into a distillery. A moment later, she heard the voice again – a distinct sobbing, coming out of the garbage chute.
‘Hello, is anybody there?’ she asked, hesitantly sticking her head inside the smelly chute. She sounded crazy, even to herself. A bag of clothes came hurtling down towards her. ‘Ouch!’ she exclaimed as she quickly withdrew her head.
‘Oops, sorry!’ a small voice echoed down the chute. ‘Those are Mummy’s clothes. They’re smelling a lot, so I had to throw them away.’ The voice seemed to be coming from the apartment upstairs.
‘Where’s your Mummy?’ she asked.
‘She won’t wake up, she’s been asleep for two days. I took her clothes off. She’s smelling a lot.’
She gasped and dashed to the bathroom-distillery and threw a bucket of freshly brewed vodka over herself. Then, she shakily took out the last remaining test strip from the bathroom drawer and peed over it. Red line meant positive, blue meant negative. She waited for what were possibly the worst ten minutes of her life, and then a blue line gradually appeared.
‘Wooo hooo!’ she cried and threw her arms up in the air. Her husband appeared at the bathroom door and looked curiously at the test strip. ‘It’s NEGATIVE!’ she screamed excitedly, as she flung her arms around his neck. ‘You wasted the last one,’ he snapped as he took the virus test strip from her and flicked it in the bin.
‘You remember the sirens from last night? It’s the lady upstairs.’ she cried. ‘She’s left behind a young kid … he’s all alone up there … doesn’t even know what’s happened….’ The virus always spared children. No-one understood why. A gnawing sensation grew in the pit of her stomach. Tears welled up in her eyes and she choked back a sob as she whispered, ‘Where will he go? What will he eat?’
Her husband shrugged. ‘Not our problem. The government will take the kid away when they come to clear the bodies.’
‘The wolves downstairs have a bigger heart than you,’ she murmured bitterly. ‘At least they are capable of grieving.’
*
The gnawing sensation did not go away the next day, or the day after that. She kept glancing nervously at the garbage chute, as if expecting it to speak again. ‘Do you think they’ve come to get him yet?’ she asked her husband repeatedly, and he shrugged indifferently each time.
They had planned for a child a few years into the lockdown. A child would give her a purpose. And a new way of keeping time. But before they could act on their plan, the government made it illegal to have a baby. Who would take care of the child after the virus claimed its parents? Besides, the doctors and nurses had run away from the hospitals, and there was no-one left to deliver new babies.
She slinked towards the garbage chute and shouted, ‘Do you want French fries?’ They grew their own food. There was a potato or lettuce head growing underneath every LED bulb in the house. There weren’t too many creative things you could conjure up out of potatoes and lettuce. French fries were her best bet.
‘The smell doesn’t go away. It makes me vomit. I don’t think I can eat anything right now,’ the voice said.
‘Don’t worry, the government will come soon and take your Mummy away,’ she replied.
‘Where?!’ there was clear alarm in the voice.
She bit her tongue. Diplomacy was clearly not her forte. After a long thoughtful pause, she continued, ‘To a place called heaven. Where Mummy can leave the house whenever she wants and play with friends every day. She can eat anything she likes, and it doesn’t have to be potatoes! She can run in the grass and go to the beach. Mummy will be very happy.’
‘Wow!’ the voice exclaimed in shocked disbelief. ‘Will I go to heaven with Mummy?’
‘I don’t know.’
She couldn’t sleep that night. ‘Where does the government take them?’ she asked her husband. He groaned in exasperation and shut his eyes. She wanted to believe that the government took good care of the orphaned children. After all, they were humanity’s last chance to propagate itself. But there were just so many of them now. A parent dropped dead every few minutes. How would the government find enough space for all of them and find enough people to take care of them?
‘Why don’t they just give them to those who aren’t allowed to have children?’ she asked the silent night.
*
Thump, thump, thump … the noise was giving her a headache. Was it morning already? She opened her eyes to find her husband dancing on top of the dining table, in what appeared to be some sort of a victory dance, flapping his arms like a wild chicken. His cheeks flushed with excitement as he waved an envelope at her.
She tore open the envelope and read: In exercise of the powers conferred by Section 7 of the Epidemic Act, the Government has hereby decided to abolish the Property Law in its current form. Following this announcement, no person or institution shall have any claim on title or rent of property not presently occupied by them.
She looked up and stared at him blankly.
‘Don’t you see?’ he asked. ‘They want to level the scales. They want the rich to stop hounding the poor for rent.’
She looked down and read the notice further: Title of a property currently occupied shall immediately transfer to those who occupy it. Title to a property which lies vacant shall immediately transfer to the occupants of a neighbouring property.
‘…And they don’t know what to do with the empty houses of all the dead people.’
‘So we get the apartment upstairs as well?’ her body stiffened with absolute disbelief as the words washed over her.
‘Yes, yes, yes!’ her husband yelled as he scooped her into his arms and swirled her round and round. ‘Do you remember the night shifts we used to do to pay off our mortgage? Now we get TWO houses, just by sitting around and doing nothing! Thank the virus!’
She suddenly knew what she had to do.
*
Finally, she had the child convinced. It took much imagination and countless hours to forge the bond. Stories and games. Bags of food in sterilised packets snaking their way up the chute, from her house to his. Sleepless nights filled with soft whispers and secret confessions. Now, he needed her and she needed him.
‘Promise me,’ she appealed, ‘that no matter what happens, you won’t come out from underneath the bed when they come to get your mother.’ She conditioned him repeatedly, ‘DON’T come out, no matter what.’
‘But I don’t want to be left alone. It’s scary,’ the child pleaded.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll come and get you very soon,’ she replied soothingly.
Then one day, the government came and took his mother’s body away. Perhaps, it had taken so many days because there were many bodies to clear. The child hid underneath the bed as instructed and waited for them to leave. After that, he ran towards the chute and whispered in a shaky voice, ‘Mummy’s gone. When will she come back?’
‘She won’t come back. I’ll be your new Mummy now.’
There was a long silence and then the voice exploded. ‘LIAR! I DON’T WANT A NEW MUMMY!’ ‘Listen to me…,’ she implored, as bitter tears of guilt and shame pricked her eyes. But the child wouldn’t stop screaming. ‘BRING HER BACK!’ She could hear him pounding the aluminium door of the chute violently with his fists. She pressed her hands against her ears, trying to block out the deafening noise which was giving her a throbbing headache. ‘I’LL NEVER SPEAK TO YOU AGAIN …’. Then, she heard the thudding noise of footsteps quickly receding away.
That was the last she heard from him. He never came back to talk to her. Over the next few days, she spent most of her waking hours slinking near the chute, in the hope of catching the faintest sounds of movement from upstairs. They never came.
The elevator shaft which connected the apartments with each other had been deactivated by the government long ago. She wrote long desperate letters to the government, imploring them to expedite allotment of the apartment upstairs, but to no avail.
She knew she was running out of time. Each day away from him was another day without food for him. How long could he survive alone? She looked down the long dark tunnel of the elevator shaft and fantasised about jumping in. She could try grabbing the metal rods at the edges of the shaft and climbing upstairs. She dangled her foot into the tunnel, flirting with the idea, and suddenly froze as she heard the sound of sirens wailing again.
*
Tanvi Saraf works as a banker in Singapore. She is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology and post graduate of the Indian Institute of Management. She is currently working on her debut novel which she hopes to publish in 2021.