This is part of an exercise for a writing course I took during the Covid19 lockdown. We were asked to write a story that starts after a three-year long pandemic-induced lockdown, without using adjectives or words with more than two syllables.
I don’t know if it was the choking that woke me or the stench. The choking stopped when I adjusted his posture. The kid gulped in the air. That is when the smell hit the top of my head.
It took a few seconds to even breathe. Coming to my senses seemed to take longer. For a while, we were only staring at each other.
It didn’t smell of gas. It wasn’t drainage. Or a dead animal from the outside. Now wide awake, the wife and I gestured to the kids to wear their masks. We sniffed our way out of the bedroom. The smell in the kitchen was intense, but it wasn’t the source. The larger hall was better but only slightly. We got us a couple of masks and added a drop of Dettol on them. It was not pleasant, but it felt better.
Should we go out? She shook her head and pointed to the window. We opened the curtains for the first time since waking up. It should have been dark, but it wasn’t. Dozens of headlights of cars waiting in a queue to get out of the complex. Was everyone leaving? Why?
Like us, there were some others staring out of their windows. An old man two flats away was gesturing. He was making the “third umpire” signal cricket umpires make.
We came back in and turned on the TV. The news channels were showing a man in a white beard with his hands joined, first on his forehead, then a gesture with palms facing downwards. The texts beneath said: “Strange odor causes panic. People urged to stay put. Millions on the streets. PM urges people to stay calm.” The texts and the visuals were similar across channels. But there did not seem to be any detail on what the stench was.
The WhatsApp groups were buzzing. Every text was about the stench. Someone was advising others to go out in the open, far away from other humans. Many said they were out on the roads and driving around. There were pictures of traffic jams and crowds.
We looked out of the window again. The parking lot was now almost empty with most cars queued up to leave. The watchmen were trying hard to ensure sanity. The people in the windows had left, likely on their way out as well.
The wife pointed to the “war of the worlds” bag, prepared and kept ready ever since the virus outbreak three years ago. Yes, I gestured with the thumbs up sign. We had to move. We didn’t know where, we didn’t know why, but we had to leave. The stench was not just a stench any longer. Nausea was already creeping.
We grabbed some more things as fast as we could. Leftovers. More water. The laptops. Devices. Power packs. Candies. Books. Jewelry. More cash. Underwear. Diapers.
We went down to the lobby. The stench was just as powerful as it was indoors. There was a family or three. None of us made eye contact. All were waiting for the cars to pick them up.
I doubled to the car with the larger bags and slid in. The stench was not yet inside the car. It took me several minutes to cover the twenty feet to the lobby, but the family piled in quickly and slammed the door shut. We could finally take our masks off.
It took us a while to get to the main roads. We thought the traffic would be worse there, but it was not. It didn’t take us much to figure out why. Vehicles were parked here and there with doors and windows open. People were retching. Some were convulsed. At the traffic lights, a few knocked on the window glass, gesturing for water. Some others, in worse shape, waved us on, as if to say, “go faster. Get out of here.”
The wife taped all our masks to the AC vents. The children lay blankets all over our bags. I stepped on the gas.
After three years, we were out of the lockdown. But something else was about to happen.
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