Running a one room household is a forty minute job. On a good day, Suvarana optimises this time to thirty-four minutes. Leaving the spare six minutes on the clock to enjoy her favourite part of an otherwise mundane routine. She cleans, chops, cooks the vegetables, debones and fries palet, boils rice, grinds spices and simmers pulses on a stove. Then, as lunch simmers and her husband lazily rolls out of bed, she picks the jhaadu and sweeps the three hundred feet worth of white tiles she called home. While her husband packs himself a hot lunch dabba before leaving for work, Suvarna moves on to the best part of her morning chores- a bath. On days the geyser can warm two spare buckets, she allows herself a luxurious shower and smothers her hair with a leave-on conditioner.
During such moments, while her sore muscles enjoy a good rest, the good woman dreams of a life filled with lazy afternoon naps. In the past, the mighty Gods in heaven have denied many of Suvarna’s simpleton dreams, Suvarna assumes that is because the Gods are made to address more important issues. Yet, this one wish has inexplicably caught their fancy. The world has gone on an unprecedented pause, the kind that’s far too simple for a complex society such as the one Suvarna inhabits. Now, she lives in a strange lockdown where nobody leaves their home and ventures out on the streets, or goes to work. Everyone is simply counting the days when their savings will run out, or an unknown virus will kill them.
Now, Suvarna and her husband laze in bed all day, like they’re little children. She no longer rushes to the fish market, squatting on the pavement under the scorching sun, screaming ‘paplet, kobi, bombil. Her tonsils don’t itch from all that screaming. Even her bones are enjoying the stillness they need after all these years of carrying her weight around. Still, Suvarna isn’t grateful for this miracle of all miracles. In fact, Suvarna is worried sick. And because she’s worried sick, she can’t think straight. And because she can’t think straight, she can’t get to the bottom of her newly acquired sneeze. You see, her fantastical morning baths with piping hot water have left a damning effect on her home walls.
MOULD.
The longer Suvarna’s baths grow, the more the entire house steams on account that exhaust fan no longer works. The electrician who could fix the problem lives just four floors below her, though he refuses to interact with anyone in the building as is obligated by the social distancing code he believes will save the world. Other neighbours avoid engaging with this good woman because of her loud and wheezy sneeze. The only way to end this disgrace is to the kill the mould. One effective way of accomplishing that is scrubbing the walls with vinegar. The other effective way is bleaching powder. Neither of these items make it to the list of ‘essentials’ available at the grocery store within the radius of her curfew. So Suvarna does the next best thing in quarantine- she braves ringing her neighbour’s doorbell. The first one- Mrs Gaitonde is an agreeable lady. That’s because her hearing aide no longer works and she doesn’t care about speaking over someone else even when she sees their mouths in motion. Needless to say, Suvarna’s doorbell goes unheard by Mrs Gaitonde.
The next apartment is the D’mellos. Suvarna hesitates ringing their doorbell for moral reasons- they cook beef and she didn’t approve of it. She doesn’t wonder why a fish eater should object to a red meat eater’s preference, because she believes there is some kind of spiritual degradation in eating bigger animals to smaller ones. Suvarna is so convinced by this belief, she thinks the fish she sells is more vegetarian than any green, leafy vegetable. But beef eaters are potential friends in times of trouble and nothing troubles Suvarna more than her sneeze. She rings their bell anyway and hopes they wouldn’t know of her secret grouse.
The kindly, sweaty Mrs D’mello opens the door, clearly in the middle of cooking a meal that smells of sweet potatoes, caramelised onions and sizzling animal fat.
‘You live two floors above, no men?’, Mrs D’mello has none of the caution found in people these days. She even opens the front door leaving little distance between herself and her neighbour. Suvarna nods feeling an itch grow around her nose.
‘I have seen you sell that paplet. Why are you not selling it to me, haan? How many times I tell that husband of yours to tell you.’
Before Suvarna can apologize to this friendly neighbour for her hypocrisy, she does the unforgivable-
A sneeze flies out of her mouth at 20 miles per hour, bifurcating into droplets that splatter over Mrs D’mello’s arms and chest.
For a second, both ladies are stunned. Then, Mrs D’mello shuts her door and Suvarna walks away as other neighbours (including Mrs Gaitonde) peek out of their grilled double doors, identifying the source of germs on their floor.
‘I’m not sick’, she wants to say. ‘It’s the mould’. But she fears opening her mouth for what may come out of it. She spends the rest of the day without telling her husband why she’s sulking, despite his repeated inquiry.
That night, Suvarna dreams of bleach. She dreams of bathing herself in bleach until her organs are sparkling clean as a freshly scrubbed white wall. The next morning, she awakens with another sneeze. Miraculously, there’s a small bottle of bleach by her bedside.
Turns out, her thoughtful husband has a better equation with the D’mellos than she’d assumed. They give him the bleach in return for some of the paplet that Suvarna has stored in the deep-freeze in case of hard times like these. Suvarna pecks her husband’s cheek in gratitude, spending the rest of the day scrubbing out every last inch of fungi hanging on the wall. Finally, at the end of tiring day, the house smells like a chlorinated swimming pool. Though there is no mould, her nose tickles from the irritation of this new, strange smell.
She sneezes again and there is only a loud achoo. Not even her kindly husband dares to say ‘bless you’.
Colloquialism:
*Paplet – pomfret
*Kobi – prawns
*Bombil – bombay duck
