A hush has fallen over India, as the countrywide lockdown to slow community transmission of the Coronavirus disease, or COVID-19, has had people retreat indoors. Yet the hush does not have the feel of quietude but of eeriness, because people have chosen to silence the noises peculiar to our residential colonies. Our neighbours do not play music or TV at a high decibel level, or let children holler and thud around. Even the comforting sound of the pressure cooker whistling has surprisingly become rare. We have become collectively anesthetised.

Noise, in India, symbolises normalcy and happiness. Tourists express the bliss they experience in remote mountain getaways by making noise. Silence, to us, is synonymous with sadness and gloomy seriousness. We are mourning life as we knew it. COVID-19 is undermining, bit by bit, our certitude, which is anchored in the belief that we are destined to live until we are at least 70 or 80 or 90 years old. We script the minutiae of our lives, down to keeping aside money for our old age. Premature death had always been for the unfortunate.