During bewildering times such as the present, the divide between fiction and reality is increasingly blurry and we turn to stories to make sense of our predicament. With our brand-new #DystopianTales series, we bring to you exclusive short pieces on a world that seems to be falling apart.

Breaking News and Broken People 

by Amitava Kumar

I don’t know, I wasn’t there. I was here.

So, unlike the others, especially the anchors on TV shouting at us, let me say I know little.

That is now our human condition: how little we each know.

My mother-in-law gave me a Google Home Mini as a gift. I have put it in my kitchen in my house in upstate New York. ‘OK, Google, please play Mohammed Rafi.’ ‘OK, playing Moa-med Raffy on Spotify.’ I hate that electronic voice—but what I’m really saying here is that my Google device knows more about me than I do myself.

Another detail from our current dystopia: my wife read somewhere that the virus can last on surfaces for up to seventy-two hours. Groceries and perishables we wash or wipe down with disinfectant but you cannot do that with paper. We lay out in the hallway all our mail as well as our daily newspaper. After three days, we open our mail, and it is the same with newspapers. This means I am reading news at least three days late.

Do I feel bad about this? No. I have lost all sense of time. Days blur into each other. 

Besides, everything is falling apart. Things are getting worse. To read the news from three days ago is like going back to better times. Not exactly like being present at the dawn of Creation—but close. No, but really, this is what I mean: suppose it was 24 March, and I was opening the newspaper, which that day in my house was from 21 March, and on that day, countries like Laos and Myanmar were still free from the virus. It was as if on 21 March they were still safe, in another century, except the reality was that on 24 March, when I was reading the 21 March newspaper, both Laos and Myanmar had reported their first confirmed cases. This makes all the news I’m reading more unreal than usual.

So, as I was saying, I wasn’t there. I was here. Like everyone else, under lockdown, staying put at home. But today, a friend in Delhi, a journalist who was, like me, born in Bihar, sent me a photograph on WhatsApp. 

The first item I noticed in the image was a red Hawaii chappal.

I think abandoned footwear tell their own forlorn story. A solitary chappal or shoe narrating a tale of hasty exit—not from a glitzy ball, like fair Cinderella, but from life itself. A grim reminder that you were never invited to the world’s royal gala.

Then I saw the rotis scattered on the cinders laid on the ground. Also, a lemon. One blue mask, now useless. A pair of black trousers—but no, there was also a torso attached to it, only partially hidden by the green leaves that someone must have pulled from a nearby field to cover the dead.

I’m sure that none of the twenty men, who had only been trying to get home, had any money on them. So, no currency notes fluttering in the breeze. There must have been in one or other of the pockets an Aadhar card or a ration card. A photo of a child or a wife left behind in the village where they were now headed. A tiny passport photo which is the shallowest grave a person can find to bury the story of a whole life that never gets into the news. But I couldn’t see any of those things in the image that had arrived on my phone. Only the train tracks meeting in the distance, as if they had reached their destination. But that too, as any schoolchild knows from science lessons, is an illusion.

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Amitava Kumar is the author of many books, including The Lovers: A Novel (Aleph) and Writing Badly Is Easy (Aleph).

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