This feels unreal, life in the shadow of a virus. There is no precedent in my living memory or even in that of my immediate forebears. No in-our-time stories to fall back on, though I have heard it said on good authority that in the mid-1970s, when Bengal was reeling from floods, one young bride put away her newly acquired pair of high heels in the top shelf of the Godrej almirah.

No, there is no precedent at all.

In the past few days I have heard more than one person invoke the demonetisation months to deconstruct the unfamiliarity of the corona situation. Every time there is news of fresh casualty or some cautionary announcement, there is always someone whispering in my ear “make sure you have enough cash at home”, “make sure it is all in small denominations”.

I have often heard fashionable people say “such and such situation felt surreal”.

I never got a sense of the word. Well, I am getting it now. It is surreal the way the entire societal set-up is folding up by the minute. This closed. That closed. The other closed. Shifting end-date. It is surreal the way all of it is leaping out of the news feed, inching closer home. It is surreal the way a virus is dwarfing every other concern.

Months ago, I witnessed a man hold forth at a chemist’s in south Calcutta about the “well-deserved Kashmir lockdown”. He had run out of some crucial medication. Now, suddenly, a lockdown situation is not something happening to other people; we are also calling this distancing social to take the sting out, because there is no us and them anymore. Karma is a corona.

But for a lot of us, the fear of Covid-19 is still a fuzzy thing, only part understood. It is a kind of greyness that has inserted itself between life and living. A greyness made up of bats and snakes, dos and don’ts, Deep State and Deeper State.

On the inside of the greyness, life is going on seemingly as usual. Telecallers pushing insurance policies and credit cards, anniversaries and EMIs, hearings, oath-takings, defections, pointing fingers. Valid things, normal things, and yet much of it seems so far away, so unrelatable, so of another world. It is almost as if I am having an out-of-body-experience.

It is spring, and nature is all dressed up — whorls of shimul and palash — and ready to party, but no one’s RSVPing. And then there is the stubborn grey. It cannot keep the cuckoo from calling, but intercepts the heart mid-somersault. It cannot take away the spendour of the incandescent boughs, but messes with the seeing, till the new green seems bilious. It is spring, and yet there is an odd chill in the bones.

Each person is caught between disbelief and foreboding. A young app cab driver asked me if the cold he had caught from working in a bheri, or shallow fish pond, all winter could be “karuna”. A man at the bus stop went red in the face as he hollered at someone over phone for not stocking up on sanitisers and masks as directed. The fruitseller is loth to take the change I owe him for half a coconut from last week. He says, “You pay later, Didi. What will I do with money if we don’t live to see tomorrow?”

From what I am seeing around me and hearing, it is the so-called “vulnerable” elderly who are on top of the situation, in spirit if not in immunity. The walking stick is sabre and no matter the wobble from the gout, like seasoned voyagers they are focused on the navigation, the planning, the shielding of their young ’uns and their younger ’uns from panic and resignation. Some lines swirl in my head. We will grieve not, rather find/Strength in what remains behind;/In the primal sympathy/ Which having been must ever be. Such calm possibly comes from intimations of immortality.

Such calm, however, is not mine; not yet. Unwittingly, images flash through the mind. Holocaust survivor Szpilman scavenging the ruins for food in Polanski’s The Pianist. The musicians playing on the deck of the sinking Titanic. I am not consciously thinking these up; it’s reflex. And then I forget to be scared. I suspect that is how it is for most. The primary overwhelming impulse is to breathe and live, check WhatsApp till a niggling fear worms its way into the heart again. What will happen? What will be left of everything, anything?

But I admit there is an odd comfort too.

You know how each of us, co-passengers, make acquaintance with mortality in our own time, at our own pace. The realisation is like a permanent nail in the heart. Crucifact. But suddenly, because of corona, we have all been upgraded to Enlightened Class in one sweep. And it is less lonely, if not anything else.