After

05| Stranded

05| Stranded

Eleven hours.

Life changed in eleven hours.

With a mere television address, billions of people in the country were left locked-in, stranded, alone and confused.

It only took eleven hours for the split between people who live in penthouses, in skyscrapers looking over the sea and the ones who live in huts in the suburbs near garbage dump to accentuate and become unrecoverable.

Sithara woke up with a jerk as her phone rang violently somewhere under her pillow. Her eyes burnt as she rushed to silence it but Arryn groaned in sleep before she could. "Nothing Jaan." She tapped his forehead to comfort him again, regretting not muting her mobile.

But to her misery, the caller rang again and her husband's irritated groggy voice followed.

"I'm sorry." She muttered, pressing the red button. A sharp pain ran across her head too making her feel nauseous. Her mouth tasted bitter and her stomach churned as she tried to get up. She had hardly slept for an hour in two days now. She could literally feel her body slowly give up.

"Who is it????" Arsalan enquired with displeasure evident in his voice. Last night was hard for him as well.

"Kabir." She answered reluctantly, knowing well it would only annoy him further. Hundreds & hundreds of messages and pictures propped up on her screen every second as she tried to dial his number.

"Ask him to have a life beyond you." Arsalan remarked not being able to mince his dismay. He did not want Sithara to entertain the call.

"You sleep." Sithara was fazed out herself and the last thing that she wanted right now was to pick an argument with him.

"It must be urgent." She justified her best-friend and got up from the bed, scrolling through WhatsApp.

Her mind was too numb to read and comprehend the texts. She couldn't understand what was happening but she gasped as her eyes almost popped out of her sockets when the images began to download one after the other.

"Sithara."

"Arsalan please." She walked into the balcony, connecting to Kabir once again.

The abrupt closure of inter-city, and inter-state borders especially in the background of ceased operations at offices & workplaces had engulfed people, especially the poor and the laborers who had come to the city in search of work with panic.

Sithara's heart broke at the photos she had received as Kabir filled her up with the new crisis building in the country in the backdrop of the Coronavirus. They were images of people from across India who were now ready to walk home on foot for hundreds of miles in the absence of any plan to evacuate them by the government.

There was a sea of people on the railway stations pushing against one and other just to be able to put their foot on the last trains heading towards their village. There were people sitting on the edges of the roof of the busses, and others dangerously hung out through the windows and the doors.

"Sithara Arsalan is an acquaintance of the food security officer right??? Could you ask him to get our NGO officially listed to access the grains for distribution under the public distribution scheme han?? It's an emergency. There is no food." Kabir explained the situation to her.