The day after the first lockdown was announced in India, a flurry of messages started coming in from people known and less known. Messages of concern, gentleness, empathy. It felt urgent to capture this- how amidst the uncertainty and fear, the overriding instinct was to reach towards each other in tenderness. It felt as if we were writing our history in every moment we leaned across walls, windows, time-space to ask “how are you?”.
(March 25th 2020)
I am an illustrator and theatre practitioner currently based in Delhi, and living alone. When the first twenty five days of isolation were announced, my immediate strongest instinct was to draw what I was feeling. The strangeness of it. The unstable sense of reality.
(March 28th 2020- the first in the Crow series)
I began one of the most sustained and frantic stretches of daily drawing in my life thus far. Trying to use a minimal style, a faintly autobiographical approach, and creaturely characters that sprouted out of the blank page, a series emerged. Visual characteristics became more specific- speech bubbles, settings. A comic then.
(March 29th 2020)
At the same time, mass migrations were starting across the country as daily wage workers tried to return home from cities that no longer supported them. Safe at home, privileged in isolation, I watched from my screens as police brutality was unleashed upon anyone caught out during the lockdown, as the first heart-breaking pictures of workers walking hundreds of kilometres home were published.
(March 30th 2020)
(April 1st 2020)
Meanwhile, the absence of any living soul strangely magnified the existence of other creatures I encountered. I yearned for friends, family. The comic was increasingly becoming wish fulfilment.
(April 2nd 2020)
Colour was also creeping in now. I wondered if the large bird was eternal in these comics because it was a Corvid. Was even my subconscious brain a terrible punster?
(April 3rd 2020)
(April 8th 2020)
Even the days I didn’t feel like drawing, the compulsion was too strong. It’s important to note here that this was much more a coping mechanism than an attempt to be “positive” or “productive”. I felt breathless if I wasn’t drawing, processing.
(April 10th 2020)
I watched from the window as the season changed.
(April 11th 2020)
In all these days, I had not done what little paid work I had, nor had I looked for other paid work. Somehow, “it’s a pandemic, I’m allowed to rest” would not silence the growing anxiety.
(April 13th 2020)
The outside world turned on. More accounts were emerging of violence, indifference and neglect towards vulnerable communities and people by the government.
(April 14th 2020)
The comic was now feeling more and more like taking refuge in absurdity.
(April 19th 2020)
When the lockdown was extended, therefore, I no longer felt capable of sustaining the comic as I had so far. A week passed drawing vastly different things.
(April 25th 2020)
What didn’t stop was the drawing, though the pace slowed significantly.
(May 10th 2020)
(May 21st 2020 After Cyclone Amphan struck)
(May 26th 2020)
Slowly words returned. New routines formed. Work came back in fits and starts.
(May 27th 2020)
(June 1st 2020)
What can I say about drawing the lockdown? It began as a frantic exercise in private and personal articulation and became inextricable from my experience of this global pandemic. It has been both, journal and refuge- a point of connection with people on social media where otherwise silence would have existed. It has been hours of drawing that filled otherwise empty and panic-stricken days. It has fundamentally shaped my approach to my practice.
And even as restrictions across the world are lifted while the disease rages on- I’d say it’s ongoing.
