II: Perspectives on the lockdown from Delhi’s night shelters

Compounding a sense of incoherence

A sense of incoherence in their biographical narratives seemed to be a deeply entrenched part of life at the shelter but most residents could cope with it. Within the shelter, the atmosphere was shrouded by a thick layer of anonymity which allowed people to pass under the radar as far as their timelines, identities and whereabouts were concerned. Aman Sethi fretted over a similar tendency in A free man (Sethi 2011)—a biography of a worker at Sadar Bazaar in old Delhi—as he was never able to produce a coherent timeline of the life of the worker he was interviewing. At the night shelters, it would often seem that the incoherent plotlines that the residents drew up when I asked them about their pasts were part of a challenge to tell a more inventive story with the traditional rules of jugalbandi (competitive storytelling) firmly entrenched in the attempt. But Mahesh was a recent entrant to the shelter, and that fact compounded with the simultaneity of COVID-19, came to define his predicament.

Mahesh, aged 19, arrived in the city having run away from home after a fight with his parents. He spent the first few days of his stay, rummaging for food and shelter around gurudware. ¹ Going outside the shelter, however, required identity documents, especially when visiting colonies to help put up wedding tents and other wedding-related preparations as daily wage labourers.

Mahesh described to me how the lack of work during the pandemic (the first time he had been unemployed for a period of nearly 3 months) became mortifying over a period of time. He said, ‘It is impossible for me to digest food without work; eating free food makes for severe indigestion; food earned by one’s sweat imparts much more than just physical energy’. The period of the lockdown was devastating for Mahesh because the shaadi (wedding) market closed down, and most other work was in any case hard to come by.

Despite the presence of basic amenities at the shelter, he described his experience as a breakdown of time itself (toote hue se pal)—and a shock-engendered inability to integrate this fragmentation into his psyche. Temporality appeared ruptured, and this became apparent in his inability to create a coherent sense of self (cf. Blanchot 1986). What emerged was an experience of time where past horizons were lost and the future appeared in the form of a pure ‘nowness’, not unlike the sense of suddenly being placed in unfamiliar surroundings. Mahesh was haunted by a spectral present that gave him neither any context for recording the passage of time nor a gradual transformation where he could improvise a story for each occasion in the manner of shelter veterans.

Park residents unaffected by the crisis

I encountered Pallav-ji, an elderly and determined squatter, living in a park outside another DUSIB shelter at Kashmere Gate, near the pillars of a flyover which passed through the park. He had built himself a place in a nook by one of the flyover’s pillars with a small bed of bricks and a wealth of blankets. The park below this flyover is interesting as despite the shelter being located within its precincts, many of its residents preferred the outdoors even in the coldest winter to staying inside the shelter.

Pallav-ji proffered witticisms and acuities about the conditions of agricultural labour in the country over the last 20 years and the drastic shift in the persona of the workers due to the industrialisation of farm work. The migration of labourers from rural areas and the reverse recent exodus of labourers during the lockdown back to the village from the city did not attract him. He declared his determination to continue in his present condition of non-labour living on the food distributed several times a day around nearby temples and in the shelters run by charitable citizens and NGOs contracted by the Delhi government. Thus, COVID-19 had spelt little change for him. Indeed, he did not even take the precaution of wearing a mask.

Pallav-ji’s views were a part of an ideology of non-labour expressed by other squatters here, and it was more than the fact that they got kicked out for smoking and drinking in shelters. While at the shelters the duration of experience was one of long segments of worklessness with short spells of work, in the park, time seemed to elongate itself, expanding into long sunlit stretches. It continued along this rhythm through the weeks of the lockdown (samay tham sa jata hai—time seems to stand still). Worklessness for Pallav-ji did not lead to a breakdown in the perception of time as it did for Mahesh.

Indeed, the park looked like a day in slow motion. In the morning, upon one of the grass-covered mounds, a group of squatters gathered, and bidis, chai and a newspaper did the rounds, generating lively conversation among them. The entire day seemed to be spent in attempts to outtalk each other. Mukund-ji, lean and sallow, with a dishevelled beard and a pointy monkey cap often joined in with his ‘Bol Bachchan’ (a play on the word vacchan [a promise or truth-speak] and the name of the famous Bollywood actor) here in a kind of daily truth saying on all political matters in the declamatory style of the eponymous actor. The day was spent in prolonged sunbathing as winter set in. The period of the lockdown was just another stretch like the preceding one, the experience of a slow, expanding day.

This little patch of land in front of the park which lay along the bank of the Yamuna River, however, came under the scanners of the city media and was made visible to the city during the period of the lockdown. One of the adjacent shelters had been burnt down, and a large number of the residents were left without a roof over their heads. As it happened, these shelters had been deployed during the lockdown as one of the primary sites to deposit squatters during the pandemic. A large security force of city policemen had cordoned off the area following speculation that the burning of the shelter was the act of an inebriated group of squatters brought in from the outside. In any case, the mild disruption that occurred was soon forgotten in the park, and in Pallav-ji’s account, the days had resumed their slow-motion existence almost immediately after.

While the practice of non-labour (desoeuvrement) by the residents of the park might not be charged with what Blanchot (1988) terms ‘political communism’, ² their sturdy determination to avoid work and live on the city’s charity evinced an actively practised ideology that met with scarce change through the lockdown. People living in the shelters often described this kind of lifestyle as reprehensible, saying that apart from those residing in the shelter designated for the invalid, anyone with arms and legs should work. Those living on the charity of the government and refusing work were a nuisance in their view. They tended to be marked out by the shelter’s guards as ‘trouble-makers’, particularly if they were young, and yet these shelters supported a strange existence of drifters uncharted in the city’s imaginarium that remained largely unaffected by the COVID-19 crisis.

The darkness of no information

Rohit Mishra has been a caretaker at one of the shelters in Daryaganj for over 6 years, a rare feat compared to the shorter tenures of DUSIB personnel at the shelters. He worked with a team of 16 volunteers during COVID-19’s lockdown phase.

The shelter is run by an NGO—Society for Promotion of Youth and Masses (SPYM) —which hires employees and caretakers who manage its upkeep. Rohit, however, went well beyond his given role as a caretaker at the shelter during the lockdown by scouring the city looking for and taking in those who were stranded through this period. He ensured that they all got tested (for COVID-19) at the shelter. He also helped stranded migrant workers find the means to return home during the latter phase of the lockdown.

Vicky, one of the volunteers at this shelter, describes the time of the lockdown as both ominous and confusing. He said:

The hardest part was the lack of information about the illness. We had just one positive case while we were rescuing people during the lockdown. We took him to a hospital and the horror of the hospital beds stayed with him and us. He was in hospital for a week and he described how every day the beds would empty out as the patients died. None of us could comprehend the illness and it caused all kinds of problems at the shelter too. People were always irritable and angry here particularly if someone sneezed or coughed. The illness was surrounded by a dearth of information engulfing us all in its darkness. It was as if the disease was a ghostly person rather than a medical entity.

A nightmarish existence

The dilemmas stemming from the lack of information about COVID-19 were echoed by several others. Binod, a resident of another shelter in Daryaganj, described it, thus:

Here we were at the mercy of modern medicine. Anything could have happened but by God’s grace we had only three cases. Imagine if there had been more cases in a place like this, where new people come in and go out every day, and sleep in congested conditions. Nothing that the media reported was helping us. The scientific image of the virus reproduced by the media seemed like a caricature—a ball-like thing with pustules on it but this kind of imaging actually obfuscates what the illness is about on the ground. It is not about how people die of it or how they might be saved from it. We didn’t know what was critical through the lockdown and this lack of information meant that everyone was paranoid. All we knew was that one day the whole city was suddenly closed down and we couldn’t go anywhere after that. We were locked in with this beast.

Binod says that in some cases, this led to xenophobia, as inmates came to believe that people from Nepal were more prone to spreading the illness. He said:

I almost got into fights on many occasions while defending myself. The people around me would say that being Nepali I ate all kinds of meat and so I am more likely to pass on the illness. This misinformation was spreading because we didn’t know much about the disease.

Binod spent the entire lockdown in another shelter in Daryaganj with residents from his village. In this shelter, unlike the one mentioned above, no facilities were provided for migrants to return to their homes. Binod remarked: ‘Living in a shelter was like a death sentence then. A number of people walked in and out of these places which had no proper medical facilities. I thought that I would soon be a goner. It was a strange state of mind’. A sense of waiting for an escape from a disaster, Binod began to experience time as an unending wait. The immediate experience of waiting in Binod’s case transmuted itself into a kind of ‘limit-experience’ (Blanchot 1986), a perpetual confrontation with a fragmentary and absenting self-consciousness. ‘There was neither work nor a way to get out of the city’, explained Binod. ‘Every day I and my party felt locked in the shelter with nowhere to go; for long hours I would stay lost in the labyrinth of my thoughts and then suddenly surface to the danger that I was in’.

Several reports on the pandemic have described the psychological consequences of increasingly staying indoors that may have an impact on mental health. ³ In the shelters, such psychological impacts are compounded by the circulation of people and the impossibility of maintaining the required social distancing measures. While on the one hand the person remains tied to a spot with nowhere to go, on the other, there is a constant impetus to get out of the place and reach for a safer spot. Moreover, since there was no clear intimation on how and when the lockdown would end, as the succeeding phases of the lockdown passed, it began to seem to Binod that the pandemic could last indefinitely. It was, thus, an unmitigated relief for him when he was able to return to work. He said that it felt like a ‘nightmare had passed in front of his eyes and finally disappeared’.