Virus changed the meaning of home, exposed social chasm

In a corner of the leafy Lake Gardens area in south Kolkata is an old one-storey house owned by the Boses. The matriarch of the family, Sutapa, is in her 70s and has lived by herself for almost 30 years. Her days are spent between the morning newspaper, the afternoon soaps, and the evening walk and adda with her neighbourhood friends, most of whom are senior citizens too.

Last June, she welcomed new guests – her son and daughter-in-law who moved back from Mumbai after being laid off, as companies across the country shed jobs to survive after Covid-19 crushed the economy. Sutapa was initially glad for the company but soon realised the new occupants were more lax about the virus, and didn’t follow rules she had laid down for the house.

During the nationwide lockdown, Bose changed the orientation of her living space. The passage between the door and the living room transformed into a sanitation area, the ACS were switched off and longshut windows were pried open. She shifted into a smaller room but with a balcony and attached bathroom, put the television next to her bed, and removed her favourite fourseater sofa from the living room to discourage visitors. She paid her help, Malati, extra cash for putting a table and chair in the bedroom – for the occasional reading, letter writing, and bank pension work.

“The first day of lockdown, I went downstairs for my evening walk and saw the street was deserted. Someone said, didi go back. I hadn’t realised how much I craved those two hours with my friends,” said Bose. She identified a long corridor inside the house for her walks, and continued her evening routine until Durga Puja in October, when she finally started stepping out more regularly.

For a week after the lockdown, Malati helped Bose around the house, but soon, a stricter crackdown made any travel impossible. The rooms quickly lost their functional independence: the bedroom was the kitchen and the living room. When her son arrived in June, the second bedroom doubled up as a freelance workspace and the dining table was the new play area for their child.

When the younger residents were careless with sanitising or called their friends over after the curbs were lifted in August, Bose refused to come out of her bedroomkitchen-living room. “That room became my whole world and I was never gladder to own a house,” she said.

Malati’s year was more difficult. A domestic help at five households, she lives in the rows of slums that line the nearby railway track. She braved the lockdown initially for work but soon found that she – and other helps from the slum – were being looked at with suspicion for being possible carriers of the virus. One building refused to let her enter and the families even abused her. In another, friends told her that the owner had Covid-19 symptoms but was refusing to get tested.

With increasing crackdown, by the middle of April, Malati was no longer going to work. Instead, she and her husband were sharing their two-room shanty with their two children. With no income – her husband is disabled and unable to work – and her children’s local school closed, she not only found it tough to make ends meet, but also to observe any Covid-19 guidelines.

“I came to know of many precautions one must take to stop the virus. But look at our condition, we struggled to get even rice and our water is not clean. How will we sanitise our hands?” she asked.

In three months, she burnt through most of the money they had saved for their children’s high-school education. By June, she was back at work in the neighbourhood but salaries were depressed. Still, she supported the lockdown and was thankful that she didn’t contract the virus. “Every time I go for work, I see so many new furniture and contraptions to keep the infection at bay. I am struggling to even buy a second-hand phone to help my children follow school lessons at home,” she said.

Covid-19 transformed not just our homes but their purpose. The television screens turned to home workout tutors in the morning, conference tables for Zoom meetings in the day, and movie screens for binge-watching at nights. Dining tables became work desks and balconies the new parks. Virtual Saturday night parties was the new going out.

But this was also a time when the home lost its ability to make someone feel secure. The refuge suddenly became a space where one could bring in a life-threatening virus. As the world distanced itself, we clung to our homes and tried our best to make it more secure.

A year into the pandemic, many of the curbs that kept us indoors during the summer are gone. But experts point out that the transition in home design and psyche may be permanent.

“Homes can no more merely serve the basic purpose of containment or a place to sleep after work. They need to be empowered with the ability to speak to outdoors and cater to the multifunctional demands of the hour,” said Shraddha Kumar, a professor of urban planning at the Xavier University in Bhubaneswar.

The transformation is already visible in the design of new homes – balconies, terraces and courtyards are more important, interiors are less rigid to accommodate more transformational spaces, entrance lobbies are designed as sterilisation spaces, and focus has increased on ensuring privacy of home residents.

The neighbourhood is changing, too. Aware that any future surge in infections can render them islands, localities are trying to be self-sustaining, and balance a quality social life with maintaining a personal bubble in public spaces. “With the change in the way we live, work, socialise and communicate, our neighbourhoods also need to go through a transition to cater to social distancing without social disintegration,” Kumar added.

But the disease and the lockdown also brought in sharper focus the growing gap between affluent neighbourhoods and the low-income shanties that often ring them — as mirrored in Malati’s struggles to ensure basic sanitation in her home.

The outbreak exacerbated multiple other challenges faced by these marginalised communities: low income, inadequate infrastructure, lack of identity documents and state entitlements — that make complying with physical distancing and lockdown rules difficult.

Experts suggest a raft of proposals, including community quarantine (not just central or home quarantine) options, support for livelihood loss, factoring in existing problems – lack of clean water, for example – into health policy and ensuring that community health workers, not police, is the first response of the administration.

“The vulnerabilities that such neighbourhoods face have always been there, Covid didn’t create them. We’re talking about access to basic social infrastructure like water, sanitation and adequate housing that should mark a basic social safety net always… the key has to be to have universal access to core human development needs be a non-negotiable, regardless particularly of the tenure status of a settlement,” said Gautam Bhan, a professor at the Indian Institute of Human Settlements, Delhi.