Begin Again

Countries that have eased the lockdown give us a glimpse of the life after once the restrictions are rolled back

- Kathakali Chanda

Seen here is a restaurant in Beijing. The capital of China started inching back to normalcy in mid-April, with its restaurants and malls reopening

Zhang, a freelance interior designer from Beijing, was in her hometown of Heze to celebrate Chinese New Year when the city of Wuhan, the first epicentre of the novel coronavirus outbreak, was put under a watertight lockdown to combat the pandemic that would later affect over 30 lakh people across continents. As the government amped up controls on the rest of the country and clamped down on travel, Zhang’s return to Beijing was delayed. When she did manage to take the train back on March 19, she had to upload every minute detail of her whereabouts on an app before boarding and take hourly temperature checks through her nearly-four hour journey. Once in Beijing, Zhang went into immediate self-isolation. “I didn't even go down to the garden of my building compound to collect my delivery orders,” she says.

In mid-April, Beijing was inching back to normalcy—its parks had opened, so had malls and restaurants, and traffic on its ring roads, a barometer of the city’s frenzied pace, had picked up to two-thirds of normal. Zhang, too, had gone out to socialise with her friends for the first time in two-and-a-half months. But the battle scars of a public health crisis remained—and not just in the masks they were mandated to wear every time they had to step out.