One of the many ways in which the understanding of the home may be approached is the fact that the home is able to offer us an environment where we may perform our most intimate acts. We feel we are at home when the apparent distinction between the inside and outside of the body resonates in a way that both mirror each other almost perfectly. The physical manifest of the home is then able to echo and reflect desires that are felt inside, and eventually be shared with a common world outside. In reality however, the walled units that we come to inhabit are hardly a representation of ourselves. We occupy conflicted territories with overlapping desires, varied ideologies, different practices and our own personal schedules. These several-ities are hardly recognized with the singular space of the physical shelter. The rooms we come to occupy as houses allow us to live merely a fragment of our own selves. Where do the other selves get lived then? How do they manifest otherwise? What is the locus of the home if lived in mere fragments? How do we assemble them and attempt a picture of the home?
The Covid 19 lockdown has impressed upon us the above questions more sharply, for it has taken up the privacies that were not necessarily lived within the outline of our apartments, rather scattered into the recycle bin of the city space. In lending anonymity, invisibility and blurring of the body, the city extended to us latent personalities that could thrive through alienation. It would contain a thousand alter-egos which could emerge and disappear, be constructed and forgotten, could be recreated and rejected, reinvented and re-lived. In doing so, unknown pockets of urban space become meaningful in the register of a provisional home. In constraining people within their apartment boundaries, Covid has partly taken up the agencies over our parallel selves – those that were hidden into the vast alternate world that vectored our home. The restraints of home boundedness have resulted in an implosion of these multitude of dimensions within our personalities that were indexed into a different geography. Where do these lives get lived in the imposed self-quarantine? What new personalities emerge within the clash of dissonant selves, and spaces within the sphere of the geometric home?
While for some, living outside the outline of the house may be a metaphorical idea of the home, for many in the city, it is the hard reality. This only becomes more apparent when we consider the population living in squatter settlements, or denser low income areas. Here, members of a family consciously choose to step out or remain outside the home to allow space for the other, or escape the limiting shell of their shelter. Intermingling with the community outside one’s physical domesticities offers security to the home-makers. For the old people, it would be a way to find their own breed, but more importantly unburdening their families off their distinct social lives. Staying outside the home is thus also a mechanism through which the tension of social space is released into the excess of the city. Covid has confiscated the tool of disappearance which sustained the home, for people living in dense, small settlements.
We no longer can be naked – in a way of performing a self that could afford for itself unfiltered pleasure. Within our geographies of quarantine, we must wear a social garment. On portals of virtual communication, we must screen bodies through the interfacing windows. And more literally, we may not touch, or be touched by people we encounter outside our zones of captivity. If nakedness also is indexed in our personalities, then the masks Covid has forcefully made us wear index the various layers of social, physical and personal insecurities that it has exposed us to. The multitude of homes that otherwise bubble and burst amidst the exchanges within these domains have flattened into thin air. As of today, we live in atmospheres of division – red, orange, green, regulated through several mediated machineries. These divisions are here to stay for long – as ghosts of the pandemic that will hallucinate and erupt during forthcoming times of crisis. How do we foresee the new differences that have already begun to surface (on) the human body? What will be the revised geography of shelter for these newly differentiated bodies – through caste, class, religion and contagion? How will these bodies be (re)covered? And how can they remain naked?
The Covid lockdown has sensitised us to the overlapping time schedules, and programmatic conflicts that arise out of the different ways in which humans bundle up forms of work and leisure. The home is a place where ways in which its inhabitants carve or forge their protocols of work and leisure in the axis of time - those that may produce inherent conflicts. Cooking while listening to the radio is an essential everyday practice through which a mother may inhabit her home. The music and chatter on the radio is an essential ingredient for her work, through which she is able to access a world that she remains disconnected with due to her domestic moral obligations of feeding her family. However, the leakage of radio sound into the space of another person, now in the home, but used to the insulated and neutralised environment of an office may render him/her unproductive. Such an overlap may be addressed by occupying isolated spaces within a large house, but in smaller apartment setups, employing ways of personal isolation may indicate unanticipated social and moral signals. Timetables of domestic chores and individual official work get intrinsically entangled with each other within families living jointly. Spaces of the home are engendered across time in different ways. The resolution of these schedules may mean the bulldozing of one home over another. How do these work-live relationships, those that combine with different degrees come to cohabit within a singular space? Who is to compromise - and what inherent ideologies and power structures get exercised in such assertions? What are the protocols for allowing liberal environments to flourish within the home? The lockdown introduces us to ways in which people prepare unique programmes and design their everyday, as well as make it livable. However, negotiations within such a space may present us with solutions that look in very different directions.
Living through the pandemic has led to the discovery of new walls within the domestic space, and the dismantling of invisible divisions between the selves. Relationships and responsibilities rearticulate themselves within the ritual of the family. We all make a home in different time cycles - those that have coalesced into a new hybrid that standardizes in a way that produces micro displeasures. The accruement of such feelings result in unknown repressions that leak out in undesired situations. Such interactions hint at deviations in mental health that cause ruptures in social relationships. Although human beings contain these changes within their empathetic selves, the world perhaps will have to face the pent up rage in different irrational forms - a mediation over which may be necessary and crucial towards abating physical and psychological damage of the world. What infrastructures do we have for such mediation?
Covid regulations have restricted immediate and direct access to our “home” – that which we make in tracing the city at our own terms. It prevents the inhabitation of fragments that enliven our latent selves. The sheer immobility within our domestic spaces has compelled us to resign from our ability to think actively. In the new static floor, the mapping of change is limited. The pandemic has stunted our means to chart new material and intellectual geographies. Many have lost their intellectual stimulus to immobility. Some have realized the centrality of movement for escaping into one’s everyday. Although, this is an opportunity to defamiliarize oneself to one’s unembraced domesticity. Corona is the new Big Boss, and we are its (un)willing Trumans. It has brought so many strangers together within a small area. It has forced us to forge new equations to live together, find new solidarities and assemble a complete picture even in the evident fractures of existence. It is this reconciliation that perhaps indicates the terms at which we may re-enter one’s homes again as we step outside.
