Morning walk: Deprived, my day now starts without a beginning

It’s what i miss most. Our housing complex has a garden large enough to bow to the new deity of ‘social distancing’ – preserver, destroyer, and creator of a zillion videos. But the lockdown has locked up my daily morning walk there. So, reconciled to the extended pause, my mind rewinds to its gifts.

That morning walk in our Dosti garden was the first chord of the day’s orchestrations. It allowed the quality me-time i could never manage in my flat despite living alone; the calm to face the tyranny of cellphone, laptop, doorbell, and ‘Gawd, i must catch that damn plumber’. But my solitary walk was also a connection. Stepping into the crisp, wider sunlight it was also a daily plug back into our secluded community, and as important, the raucous, real, providing world beyond our excluding gates.

So this is what i miss. The morning walk with its passing pageant of wintered branches, tentative greening, monsoon lushness, and finally the dried leaves, dust to dust returning. The fragrance of creamy champa and coral-stemmed parijat; the phantom scent of the raat ki rani lingering like post-coital languor. The perfumed garden preparing me for the fumes of the day.

This is what i miss. The morning walk apart and yet a part of. Of my fellow residents who strode in subdued twos or chattering phalanxes.  The 1,000-watt smiler, the polite nodder, the grumpy loner’s anti-social distancing. The doctor, the broker, the corporate communicator. The elderly father and son; what did they talk about so earnestly each day? A Mom steadying the equally shaky bicycle and confidence of her pony-tailed princess, or Dad proxying the parental embrace with a lesson in over-arm bowling. The teachers and techies already on their way to work. In the basketball court, the no-nonsense coach pushing his earnest little wards to ‘Keep going. Left-hand dribble I told you, no?’ And, ah! at his lean times, our flute-playing tennis coach, the limpid notes elevating down-to-earth Sewri with a surreal waft of divinity.

This is what i miss. The morning walk which reassured me that the world as i knew it hadn’t disappeared overnight. Like now.

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Alec Smart said: “Mumbai – from maska-pav to mask-a power.”