Marine Drive – Blood and Porridge

June 1, 2021June 7, 2021

Here we no-go again

Sri Lanka is currently in the middle of another Covid-19-inspired lockdown. This is a 24/7 lockdown with nobody but police, health-workers, delivery staff and other essential service workers allowed to move around outside, so it’s a curfew basically.

This curfew was imposed by stealth. Originally, it was meant to last from the night of May 13^th to the morning of May 17^th, keeping people off the streets for a weekend. Afterwards, for the rest of the month, people whose National Identity Card numbers (passport numbers if you were a foreigner) ended in an odd digit would be allowed out on odd-numbered days and those whose numbers ended in an even digit would be allowed out on even-numbered days.

However, another weekend lockdown was imposed from May 20^th until May 25^th and we were warned that a further one was planned from the 25^th to 28^th, which would keep people indoors during the Vesak Festival on May 26^th. Then it was announced that this lockdown would be extended until June 7^th, with a couple of days along the way designated as ones when people could nip out to buy provisions. And then it transpired that those days when lockdown would be lifted wouldn’t actually happen, leaving the population with a 12-day stretch of home confinement until June 7^th.

Who knows? It wouldn’t surprise me if this lockdown gets extended again beyond the 7^th. 36 people died of Covid-19 yesterday, a fairly typical daily number during the past few weeks, so the emergency remains.

Generally, since the Covid-19 epidemic began, my partner and I felt quite fortunate to be in Sri Lanka because, overall, the island seemed to have done a reasonable job of dealing with it. After a strict initial lockdown last year, from March to May, the virus seemed to be contained. For months afterwards, while the virus wreaked havoc in supposedly more developed countries like the UK and USA, the Sri Lankan death toll remained static with fatalities only in the teens.

This changed in early October 2020 with the appearance of a major cluster at the Brandix garment factory in Minuwangoda, 35 kilometres north-east of Colombo. By now, clearly, Covid-19 had got onto the island and wasn’t going away. Still, however, the situation seemed manageable. The island’s tropical climate helped. People could go out and gather in relatively safe outdoor spaces – for instance, restaurant terraces and gardens – at times of year when in other regions of the world they’d be forced into hazardous, crowded, badly-ventilated, virus-friendly spaces indoors by cold weather.

Unfortunately, on Sunday, April 18^th, at the end of a holiday week celebrating the Buddhist and Tamil New Year in Sri Lanka, we realised things were going to take a serious turn for the worse. We went for dinner and a few drinks in a hotel bar we frequented. During our previous visits, the bar had been no more than 25 percent full, so that there was plenty of space for social distancing, and the punters were careful to wear masks whenever they left their tables. This Sunday night, however, the bar was mobbed, social distancing was non-existent and faces were unmasked as folk wandered from group to group. We lasted about two minutes there. Then, feeling extremely uncomfortable, we retreated to a sparsely populated restaurant in the same hotel. I suppose most of the clientele in the bar had just returned from their New Year holidays and were enjoying a final boozy night out before they went back to work.

In fact, the New Year festivities had been allowed to take place without any restrictions. People visited families and friends across the island and, the wealthier ones at least, crowded into the beach and mountain resorts as they would in any ordinary year. This had predictable consequences. As one journalist recalled, “cases began to rise rapidly, overwhelming the state’s mandatory quarantine care facilities. Soon, the intensive care units of a delicate hospital system were at full capacity. By May, hospitals were inundated.”

As I mentioned, May 25^th was the last day when people could go outside, although strings had been attached to this ruling. Firstly, only one person per household was allowed to be out at any one time. Secondly, ‘vehicular’ movements were not permitted and you had to walk. This would presumably ensure that people visited only their local shops and strayed no more than a mile or two from home, thereby lessening risks of infection. I ventured out in the late morning, to get some money out of an ATM and then hopefully buy a few supplies in a non-mobbed supermarket.

When I emerged onto Galle Road, Colombo’s main thoroughfare, it was devoid of traffic and disconcertingly silent and still for a minute. Then a set of traffic lights behind me must have changed from red to green because I was passed by a small fleet of cars, tuk-tuks and motorcycles heading north towards the city centre. But after they’d gone by, silence prevailed for another minute. That was how things continued while I trekked along Galle Road to the ATM. Every so often there’d be brief spurts of traffic that the lights had accumulated and then released.

Only shops selling food or medicines were allowed to open today. Thus, there was activity around the little grocery / general-purpose shops that cluster near the entrance to Kathiresan Pillayar Temple on the eastern side of Galle Road in Colombo’s Bambalapitiya district. One shop-sign there I hadn’t noticed before was the luridly coloured one for the ‘Irissh’ Super – which sounds like it’s owned by an Irishman who slurs a bit when he’s had too much to drink. Further along, small queues of about half-a-dozen people waited to get inside the street’s pharmacies, like UniChemist, and mini-supermarkets, like Sathosa.

Having got cash from the ATM, I thought I would try the branch of Keells Supermarket on Marine Drive, which runs along the coast parallel to Galle Road. I have to say that by this time I was starting to suspect that not everyone was following the rules. As those knots of traffic passed me, I would notice the occasional middle-aged couple riding together on a motorbike, which made me wonder how strictly the police were enforcing the rule about only one member of each household being allowed out. Though perhaps what I was seeing on those motorbikes were two mature, but still horny, members of different households taking advantage of the situation to pursue an illicit love affair. Meanwhile, while I approached Keells, I noticed a suspicious number of cars pulling into its forecourt – this on a day when you weren’t supposed to travel by car. Still, the tuk-tuk drivers seemed to be toeing the line. The whole time I was outside, not one slowed and stopped and asked if I needed to go anywhere.

After seeing the small queues outside the minor supermarkets on Galle Road, I expected to have to wait for a time outside Keells, but I got in immediately. It was busy, but not too busy. The shelves and trays in the produce section had mostly been scoured clean, but there were reasonable stocks of everything else.

I carried my shopping home along Marine Drive, which was busier with traffic than Galle Road. The police stations of Colombo’s coastal districts, south of the city centre at least, are positioned along Galle Road and the drivers were probably using Marine Drive instead because they figured there was less chance of them being stopped and checked. However, Marine Drive’s pavements were practically deserted and the shops along its seafront were almost all shut. My local off-licence, the Walt and Row Association Wine Store, was shuttered – it was only food and medicine on sale today, strictly no booze. Similarly silent was the Westeern Hotel, the passageway leading to Harry’s Bar at the back of the premises sealed by doors with rusty metal bars. Actually, the nation’s pubs had been ordered to stop doing business as early as May 3^rd.

It proved a melancholy walk and I couldn’t help but feel melancholy about the situation overall. Not just in Sri Lanka, where the authorities had taken their eye off the ball and a lot of people had acted selfishly and / or foolishly in April, resulting in this current crisis. In countries like India, Brazil and the USA – where ridiculous things have happened, like Republican politicians getting vaccinated on the quiet so as not to upset the brainlessly delusional anti-vaxxers who make up a large part of their support – arrogance, complacency and both wilful and genuine stupidity have resulted in massive Covid-19 spikes and huge but avoidable death-tolls. In Britain, despite a successful vaccination programme so far, there looks likely to be a third wave of infections while Boris Johnson’s hapless government dithers on whether or not to end Covid-19 restrictions later this month.

The sad thing is that the Covid-19 pandemic, serious though it is, doesn’t constitute the end of the world. However, manmade climate change is making itself felt in our lives now and threatens to transform the planet in ways that could be catastrophic to our civilisation later this century. If people generally, and politicians in particular, can’t get their act together to deal with Covid-19 in 2021, what hope is there for the decades ahead when we’ll really need to get our act together?

June 24, 2020

Locked-down Colombo

A few weeks have now passed since Colombo, the city where I live, emerged from Covid-19 lockdown.

Even now, walking about the city has a slightly eerie feeling of unreality. The traffic isn’t quite as heavy as it was, though it’s gradually returning to the standards of the congested bad old days. But some business premises remain closed, fewer pedestrians are using the pavements and nearly everyone is wearing a mask.

Not that I’m complaining about the masks, of course. When it comes to the wearing of these, I’m in agreement with Arnold Schwarzenegger, who memorably tweeted the other day, “The science is unanimous – if we all wear masks, we slow down the spread and can open safely. It’s not a political issue. Anyone making it a political issue is an absolute moron…” That sounds even better if you read it aloud in the Terminator’s accent.

I say ‘lockdown’, but in fact what we had for nearly two months in Colombo was a curfew, where you stayed indoors and supposedly weren’t even allowed to nip outside for a spot of exercise. Hence, whenever I went down to the front door of our apartment building to pick up a delivery, I’d be greeted by the sight of our neighbour from upstairs burning off calories by riding her bicycle around and around the building’s small concourse. Sri Lankan people seemed generally to accept and put up with the inconvenience of this. I suppose it’s partly due to unhappy past experiences. Events like the 30-year civil war, the 2004 tsunami and the Easter Sunday bombings last year have made them appreciate the importance and necessity of emergency security measures.

The curfew was imposed on Friday, March 20^th. There was an experimental half-day lifting of the curfew four days later, which gave folk a chance to get to the shops and stock up on supplies. (By this point, Colombo’s food retailers hadn’t yet set up a coherent online system whereby people could order things from their homes and have them delivered.)

On March 24^th, curfew-lifting day, I got up and headed out at about 7.00 AM, my goal being do some shopping at the nearest supermarket, Food City on Marine Drive. When I arrived at Food City, I discovered that a queue had formed outside, which was slowly being threaded into the premises by a group of shopworkers and policemen. I walked alongside that queue for the whole of the next block, counting the people as I went. The queue actually turned 90 degrees at the far corner of that block and continued up a side street, and by the time I reached the end of the queue I’d counted 173 people. Everyone was trying to ‘socially distance’ themselves from one another by keeping a metre of space between them, so it was a long queue of 173.

The queue inched along and more than two hours passed before I got into the supermarket. The shopworkers and police at the entrance were making sure that only a couple of dozen people were inside the shop at any one time, to enable social distancing. But I’d expected a long wait and brought a book along and I spent those hours in the queue reading. In fact, a long, grindingly slow queue was probably the best context in which to read this book, for it was Anne Rice’s 1975 gothic opus Interview with a Vampire. Yes, when you’re queuing for food in the middle of a pandemic, even Ms Rice’s florid and overwrought prose seems pretty bearable.

The people I saw outside and inside Food City behaved responsibly, but March 24^th’s curfew-lifting didn’t seem to be a success. Later that day, I saw reports in the media about crowded shops, markets and vehicles across the city and the country where the infectious and opportunistic Covid-19 virus would have enjoyed a field day. Afterwards, when the authorities re-imposed the curfew, they kept it in place for a long, long time.

In fact, the only time I ventured beyond the edges of our premises during the next seven weeks was one day when I realised that I needed to get cash. By now Colombo’s retailers had managed to set up a working delivery system, but not everything could be paid for online and / or with cards. Sometimes you needed to pay the deliverers with physical money when they arrived at your door. So off I trudged to the nearest ATM, not knowing what to expect.

This experience did make me feel like I was journeying through a city in the grip of a pandemic – a pandemic portrayed in an apocalyptic sci-fi / horror movie. Traffic on Marine Drive was no more than a trickle. The only people I saw who weren’t in vehicles or uniform were the staff at the Lanka Filling Station – a few vehicles were nosing onto their concourse to get petrol – and a couple of guys on the far side of the road, next to the sea, loading white Styrofoam boxes of fish onto the back of a delivery truck. All the businesses along the road looked like they’d been shut for an eternity. Oddest of all was the sight of our local branch of the KFC, which I’ve rarely seen not busy. There was something utterly grim about the sight of all its chairs upturned and set on top of its tables, their jutting chair-legs forming a prickly metallic forest in the shadowy, unlit eating area.

Despite its close proximity to our building, the ATM I was heading for was actually in a different district of Colombo, across the Kirillapone Canal that forms the boundary between Wellawatta and Bambalapitiya. And a security checkpoint staffed by three armed soldiers and ten police officers and consisting of a tent, desk and wheeled metal barriers had been set up by the canal bridge. I noticed how this had also become the gathering point for the local population of crows, who usually assemble hungrily and hopefully where human beings assemble too. So I had to traverse this checkpoint, show them my passport and explain where I was coming from, where I was going to and why. I was allowed to continue to the ATM on the strict proviso that I returned home immediately afterwards.

During April and into May rumours about when the curfew would be lifted were plentiful, but it wasn’t until the week beginning May 11^th that a modicum of normalcy returned in Colombo. Not only were businesses allowed to have some ‘essential’ employees back at their workplaces (as opposed to ‘working from home’), but the general public were permitted outside on one weekday according to the final digit of their ID card number. If that last digit on your ID card (or, if you were a foreign resident, your passport) was a 1 or 2, you were allowed out on Monday; if it was a 3 or 4, you were allowed out on Tuesday; and so on. For me, this meant I could finally escape house arrest on Thursday, May 14^th.

I was actually working from home for most of that day, so I didn’t get to venture out until late in the afternoon, which in the pre-Covid-19 era would have coincided with Colombo’s homeward-heading rush-hour. This time the experience felt nowhere near as desolate as when I’d trudged to the ATM the previous month. Most of the city remained closed, however, and considering what time of day it was, the lack of traffic on Marine Drive was astounding. I was also shocked when a train rolled past along the nearby coastal railway tracks. In the normal world, the train would have been stuffed with end-of-the-day commuters. The more adventurous ones would be hanging out of the doorways while Colombo whooshed past below them. But some carriages in this train barely contained a soul.

I felt melancholy walking around Colombo that day because I passed a few businesses to which I’d given my custom in the past – okay, pubs – and they looked practically derelict. I wondered if they’d ever reopen. One example was the Western Hotel, which’d optimistically put potted palm trees out along its façade shortly before the virus and curfew arrived. Another was that mainstay of Sea Avenue, the Vespa Sports Club, its colonial-era bungalow standing silently in the middle of its empty courtyard.

More encouragingly, I happened to pass my favourite Chinese restaurant, the Min Han on Deanstone Place, just as one of its owners, Mo, materialised at its doorway. So I was able to enjoy a socially distanced blether with him. He told me that the restaurant was taking orders and providing takeaways and money was thankfully starting to trickle in again.

Now, a month later, the Min Han seems to be fully back in business and I’d advise all Colombo-based lovers of authentic Chinese food to head there immediately. It’s highly recommended.

One other feature of traversing this strange, semi-deserted version of Colombo was how, in places I’d walked through practically every day of the past six years, I noticed things in the quietude that I’d never noticed before. For example, there was a flowery Christian shrine near the Seylan Bank on Duplication Road. Or a depiction of Mariah Carey, lurking sinisterly in the undergrowth near the entrance of the disused Indra Regent building, a little further south along the same street.

So those are my memories of locked-down Colombo between March and May 2020. It was an economically brutal experience for the city and for the country as a whole. But I think it was a necessary experience because three months after Covid-19 appeared here, the total number of cases have been kept below 2000 and there’ve been only 11 deaths. Compare that with the shambles of a response to the crisis that went on in the UK, mis-orchestrated by bumbler-in-chief Boris Johnson. Or worse, what happened in the USA with Donald ‘Drink Bleach’ Trump at the helm. Let’s just hope that, after all the sacrifices made, and with life making a hopeful return to normal, Sri Lanka doesn’t have to deal with a resurgence of that bloody microbe in the near future.