Life under lockdown

In Delhi, one of the world's most polluted cities, it looks and feels different now, like after a dirty window pane has been cleaned. At dawn, an explosion of chirping, flashes of neon-green parakeets darting from tree to tree. In the heat of the day, kites, enormous birds of prey, sail past my office window. At dusk, a symphony of birdsong. Intoxicating honeysuckle and frangipani overpower the trapped stench of the nala even. The road is littered not with plastic debris but with hot pink jacaranda blooms. A small number of nightwalkers stride through the untrafficked streets in masks. Walking Rebel is like running a gauntlet of street dogs, who appear from under the shade of cars, on leafy corners, in the middle of the road like a gangster, each owning a bit of block. The Jain temple and the Hindu temples, the Sikh gurudwara and the masjid are silent as tombs. Every day I watch the sun dip behind the trees, the dimming watercolor clouds like a feather brushed through paint. Trapped in a tropical garden of Eden, the lockdown reveals the time long before I arrived, Delhi in the 1970s, perhaps. In the evening, people wait in long lines for a free meal dispensed at the public schools, evoking the bread lines of the Great Depression.