Abstract
I was in my shared room at the quarantine centre. The leftover lunch packet, where the number of your room is written on the cover, lies on the table; 29 non-veg. The window and the small balcony open up to a construction site where machinery’s noise is substantial. The door key, which indicates the same number as the lunch packet, is hanging in the keyhole. There will always be one or two soldiers who walk outside. The sound of the knocks on your door, by a lady military officer, which echoes along the lonely corridors, will be to check your temperature twice a day, in the morning, and the evening. As if that break in the monotony of routine is the sole expectation of life, you get excited when the knock is heard, wear the masks and wait for the fellow human from the exterior world in protective clothing to check and tell your temperature: 36.5°C, 36°C, and 37°C. This routine is carried out on the doorstep, without the outside agents not intruding even a centimetre inside the room.
I finished the institutional quarantine of 14 days managed by the Sri Lanka Army when the world marked 6 months of the pandemic calendar. The 6 months of imprisonment in a small hostel room at South Asian University in Delhi was not an easy task. It was the first clear sign of the suspension of what used to be ‘normal’ up to that point. The journey from Delhi to Colombo in a special flight organised by the Sri Lankan High Commission in Delhi and Indian Airlines took almost 24 hours. More than 2 months after Sri Lanka and India’s borders had been sealed and still remained so, it was a horrifying experience—slow, anxiety-ridden, painful, uncomfortable and unfolded like a poorly edited science fiction film. But the actual imprisonment began after returning to Sri Lanka, in a government institutional quarantine facility, under military authority. While it was a difficult phase in life, witnessing the world’s lingering moment of collective pain and being part of an unfolding and uncertain history were priceless. The world was dying and suffering from the virus as well as from hunger and poverty. The local, as well as foreign, mass migration of labour had already begun with severe consequences.
Democratic practices, as we knew them, even in the faulty context in South Asia, were collapsing, and military forms of authority and surveillance were taking over control of people’s everyday lives. The monitoring and controlling mechanisms that were used to address the coronavirus situation in Sri Lanka, at one level, seemed needed to control a potentially deadly health situation. But the unmitigated powers handed over to military institutions had the potential to oppress the already oppressed over time, given the authority and the information that the military had been provided. As a country that experienced a protracted civil war for 30 years, the Sri Lankan military was perhaps the best-organised state entity with the workforce and island-wide reach to handle the logistical terms. However, this was not a war but a public health crisis. Military forces were assigned mainly in pandemic-related work such as contact tracing, setting up and running institutional quarantine facilities and surveillance. Effectively, this was a matter of the ‘Sinhala–Buddhist nation’ being protected from the ‘virus’ by the ‘Heroes’ or ‘Gods’ of the nation—the military—in the same way it was protected by them from terrorists not too long ago!
The military entirely took over the Bandaranaike International Airport at Katunayake. Instead of the civilian airport, it was, it looked more like a military airport in the time of biological warfare. Other airport staff and military personnel in protective clothing directed passengers from the moment they stepped off the aeroplane to different queues to undergo specific aspects of the new protocol regime that was now in place. All this was carried out maintaining the globally mandated 1-meter distance between individuals wearing masks provided by the Sri Lankan state. There was an immigration counter and a health counter, where one had to fill a form detailing your primary health conditions, personal and contact details. After customs, a mobile van was conducting polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests to track COVID-19-infected passengers. This was effectively a slow-moving health and military performance that we had to undergo without food or water.
We reached the government institutional quarantine centre in Piṭipana, Hoamagama, in the Western Province at 2.30
The structural discrimination of ethnolinguistic minorities was veiled behind the idea of ‘protection’ provided by the government using the military. Few people delivered speeches, phrasing the military, on behalf of the quarantined people, and gave thank-you cards to the commander. Two kids who were around 4 years and 7 years also thanked the commander by giving thank-you cards. As I was sitting behind them, I could see one of the cards, ‘Thank you commander for save us’ [sic], with a temperature checking drawing. One of the university students from the visual and performing arts stream gifted an illustration of an army solder to the chief guest. Sri Lanka has free access to public health services for the entire population for several decades. Against this background, it is an irony to see how Sri Lankan masses not only normalise but glorify the involvement of the military in public health services.
The time and space continuum of 14 days quarantine spent in Sri Lanka under military control was a moment of extreme human solitude. From the beginning, I made an effort to capture the moments. Staring at walls and blank gazes at the construction site through the window became a daily routine. At 6.30
New dimensions of bio-politics were created under the pandemic, particularly in situations of quarantine. History was in the making with new categorisations and labelling of masses, based on being ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ concerning COVID-19, statistics on infected populations widely available in media, based on nations, regions, communities, death rates and curing rates. Within Sri Lanka itself, further categorisation was based on a person’s religion and place of residence.
Welcome to Sri Lanka under the pandemic, where we are wearing masks not only to protect ourselves from the pandemic but also being prevented from free speech and right to expression through violation of the language rights of the citizens and control by the military where they hold not only guns that are capable of checking temperature but also capable of shooting and killing people.
I have outlined my institutional quarantine experiences—what I saw, what I read on my mobile phone’s news feed and what people told me over the phone. The 12 photographs presented here are a pictorial biography that captures different moments and moods of my 14 days of monotony, reflection, frustration and anxiety in institutional quarantine.
