Suspending the city. Silencing the stranger

One of the biggest calamities of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the city – the right to the city, the right to livelihood, the right to move, the right to being public. The city, historically, has not only emerged as the key location for the exchange of ideas and technologies in a globalizing world, but also the site to possibly earn a livelihood with some semblance of dignity, if not more.

-  Kaiwan Mehta

In the idea of the lockdown, especially in the harsh and strict way in which it was enforced in India, people were pushed into the insides of their homes, and ‘stay home, stay safe’ became a mantra and a greeting. But there were also people who had no ‘inside’ to immediately hide inside in, hide from that virus hunting you down; they got hunted by the authorities, and policies which in the insistence on one single formula – hide yourself – would not imagine any other possibility for health security, nor did it imagine that our lives are not simply about inside and outside. There were people that were precisely caught between this inside and outside – they were in nowhere-land – the migrants that occupied highways and state borders in inhuman conditions, walking the earth that was neither home, nor city, neither inside, nor outside, neither livelihood nor an iota of dignity. Those shoved inside their homes, we still do not know if family and home are safe completely and forever, if statistics of domestic violence, mental health, and sexual abuse are anything to go by.