Walking
After years of indolence, we have finally begun walking in the morning. At our age and with our bones creaking from inaction, this is the best, safest exercise. G. and I go to the park nearby or to residential colonies with little vehicular traffic, looking for a patch of sunshine to warm our limbs into activity. Can you believe that over the past two weeks, we actually had few bright and sunny mornings? No, I can’t either, not in Chennai. But that was the case, and when the sun burst through steel-grey clouds, we rejoiced. The slight lingering nip from our “winter” (do not laugh) gave a crisp tang to the mornings.
People-watching is a little difficult when you’re walking and trying to focus on the exercise. However, a few gems do grace your path even if you aren’t consciously looking for characters. Take the group of elderly men, ostensibly from the Knowledgeable Chennai Crowd category, who conducted a learned, unmasked conversation as they walked three abreast to their cars. Then the one on the right turned and spat on the road, waved to his friends, and walked off to his Audi, which he proceeded to drive top down through the colony.
It is also hard to eavesdrop when you’re focused on not contracting a virus. You stay as far as you can from people, and you can’t really say hello to someone who is walking straight towards you with only a passing glimpse at their eyes, because who knows if they’ll end up being spooked or understand that you were only being courteous? I remember walking in the Sussex Downs with my Irish friend, P., and his hearty greetings to anyone who passed us. It felt odd not to say hello, he said, when I asked him about it. My attempts here have been met with mixed responses, and I think I’m a bit of a coward now. (Tip on working from home: don’t do it for so long that you forget what your voice sounds like when you’re not on a conference call and how you look when you smile.)
There was a time when I used to observe passengers on buses and trains and create stories around them, but what with working from home and lockdowns, chances for people-watching have drastically reduced. (I also lost some of my power of imagination — don’t let growing up do this to you!) On walks, material is restricted to the man who walks backwards, the woman who scrolls through her mobile phone while her kids play cops and robbers in the park, or the family that takes up the narrow paths around the shrubbery, so that you are forced to make sudden, dizzying turns in the maze. There are a few regulars, but as irregulars ourselves, we have not made the acquaintance of any of them. Further, when the rain brought out the creepy-crawlies, we were consciously trying to avoid stepping on the snails.
Sometimes, for variety, we return home via the main road. The sights and sounds easily make us forget that we are still fighting a virus. The roadside stalls where a lot of people get their breakfast do roaring business. Traffic packs the main roads. People huddle in front of the kirana store for their morning bread, milk, and eggs. Policemen take their positions in preparation for a politician’s arrival, an hour of bandobust for a minute of driving by. Devotees trickle into temples while the flower-sellers string their jasmine across the road. The “normal” winks at us and is almost reassuring.
