It is 20 minutes past six. Over a flowering flame tree, the evening sun is preparing for its dramatic exit. A 20-something year old and her sister are trying to emulate this scene on their drawing sheets, sitting on their terrace. They wave to a little girl zooming past them on a bicycle. In a corner, a six-year-old helps his mother pack dried rice vadagams into a container, and then offers to share them with the rest.
Seventeen days into lockdown, neighbourhoods seem to have accepted badminton games on empty corridors, singing lessons on balconies and conversations across compound walls as the new normal. Faced with unfamiliar, and unsettling isolation, people are seeking comfort by finding ways to reconnect with their neighbours, even as they diligently try and follow personal distancing rules, whether they live in crowded neighbourhoods or gated communities.
The Italians sing patriotic songs from their windows; the French exercise together watching a trainer from their balconies. In India, interactions currently involve passing freshly made batches of molagapodi and steaming samosas across windows. Previously detached neighbours now smile and wave at each other from their terraces, many communicating for the first time in years, as life slows down. Children yell and chat across roads. Neighbours help each other out with buying groceries and medicine. Apartments band together to look after their elderly inhabitants. Young people make offers on social media to check in on strangers’ parents and grandparents, from a safe distance.
All underlining the importance of community, and how this lockdown is strengthening neighbourhoods in unexpected ways.
Terrace socialisation
Terraces seem to be the new clubs, as people wave at each other from rooftops across the city. Fifty-year-old K Ramachandran heads up every evening at 5.30 pm to do his stretches and yoga. Mid-stretch, he says, “Now that I can’t be doing this outside, I have adapted to the situation. It’s much more breezy here! I come up everyday and spend about an hour exercising.” He also smilingly admits to ignoring the possibilities of the space all these years. “It’s almost like a different world up here.”
At Coimbatore’s Parsn Sesh Nestle apartment complex, a balcony safari, of sorts, is in progress. “The peacock went that way!” a little girl shouts to her neighbours, helpfully pointing right. She is standing in the balcony of her home on the second floor, calling out to everyone who passes by below. This has become her window to the world. Her best friend’s balcony is right next to hers, so they spend most of the day standing there discussing what they ate for dinner, how many peacocks they spotted that day, and what the moon looked like the previous night. Another parent in the same building has made cloth hammocks in their balcony for their two daughters, so they can lounge as they join in.
Generosity in full bloom
Meanwhile, as groceries continue to be a challenge, Sujitha Manu’s neighbours in Pothencode, on the outskirts of Thiruvananthapuram, have a steady supply thanks to her kitchen garden, which is in full bloom with red amaranthus, brinjal, snake gourd, tomato and more.
“We used to have a weekly organic bazaar on Saturdays. That has been cancelled.So I give it to my neighbours and friends. Every day, they call me to find out what’s available and I share the harvest with them,” says the State award-winning kitchen gardener.
In the same way, Ushakumari GS, a primary school teacher, and her husband, Suresh Kumar L, a retired Government employee, who live near Government Medical College in Thiruvananthapuram, share the produce of their kitchen garden which includes poultry and pisciculture, with their neighbours in Medical College East Residents’ Association.
- Terrace romances have always been in vogue. But, in the lockdown season, some have found ingenious ways to make romance thrive in these unprecedented times.
- A New York-based photographer asked his neighbour out on a date, after he saw her dancing in her balcony, by flying a drone up to her on which he taped his phone and pressed the record button in TikTok. In what became an instantly viral video across social media platforms, the couple shared their first date on their respective balconies via FaceTime. The second date saw him rolling over to her home inside a plastic bubble to take a walk side-by-side.
- A Spanish couple, who had spent months planning their wedding, were disappointed on learning that their wedding ceremony would not see the light of day, but soon realised that nothing could stop them. Alba Diaz and Daniel Camino got married leaning out of their balcony, while their next-door neighbour led the ceremony. Several people came to their balconies to be witnesses. She even threw the bouquet to a friend who lived opposite her apartment.
“We can’t consume all the vegetables we grow. For instance, we harvest about 10 to 12 kilograms of ivy gourd. At present, we are able to give our neighbours all kinds of vegetables. Patients from the Regional Cancer Centre nearby reach out to us for eggs, which we give free of cost,” says Usha.
Stating that since the Chennai floods of 2015, Harsha Koda, secretary at Sabari Terrace, Chennai’s OMR says, “This, perhaps, is the longest time people have remained confined at home. He says they help each other via WhatsApp. “If someone is out for a grocery run, a message is sent to the common WhatsApp group, and others can add to the list.”
In Mumbai, restaurateur Gauri Devidayal, says she collates orders for bread from her apartment block so her restaurant, Mag St Bread Company can send everything in one order, and minimise deliveries. In at attempt to promote social distancing and make deliveries easier for small businesses, apartments, and neighbours are also clubbing together to order basics like gas cylinders and water cans. And since many of the restaurants are doing less business, they are finding ways to be good neighbours: making meals for the policemen and other essential workers in their areas.
If you’re lucky, you live next to a neighbour with fancy ingredients to spare, like Chennai-based Japtej Ahluwalia, best known for Double Roti, who posted a picture of a pizza he made with mozzarella cheese from their central kitchen, on Facebook. Realising that people are craving “something cheesy”, he announced that anyone who wants the cheese can DM him, and pick it up.
A semblance of normalcy is what these unexpected connections are creating at this point. At a time when social media has become our window to the world, something as simple as a smile from across the balcony is enough to remind us that we are all in this together.
(With inputs from Akila
Kannadasan, Saraswathy Nagarajan and Shonali Muthalaly)
