{"id":123,"date":"2020-06-24T03:43:54","date_gmt":"2020-06-24T03:43:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bloodandporridge.co.uk\/wp\/?p=123"},"modified":"2020-06-24T03:43:54","modified_gmt":"2020-06-24T03:43:54","slug":"locked-down-colombo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bloodandporridge.co.uk\/wp\/2020\/06\/24\/locked-down-colombo\/","title":{"rendered":"Locked-down Colombo"},"content":{"rendered":"

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A few weeks have now passed since Colombo, the city where I live, emerged from Covid-19 lockdown.<\/p>\n

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Even now, walking about the city has a slightly eerie feeling of unreality.\u00a0 The traffic isn\u2019t quite as heavy as it was, though it\u2019s gradually returning to the standards of the congested bad old days.\u00a0 But some business premises remain closed, fewer pedestrians are using the pavements and nearly everyone is wearing a mask.<\/p>\n

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Not that I\u2019m complaining about the masks, of course.\u00a0 When it comes to the wearing of these, I\u2019m in agreement with Arnold Schwarzenegger, who memorably tweeted<\/a> the other day, \u201cThe science is unanimous \u2013 if we all wear masks, we slow down the spread and can open safely.\u00a0 It\u2019s not a political issue.\u00a0 Anyone making it a political issue is an absolute moron\u2026\u201d\u00a0 That sounds even better if you read it aloud in the Terminator\u2019s accent.<\/p>\n

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I say \u2018lockdown\u2019, but in fact what we had for nearly two months in Colombo was a curfew, where you stayed indoors and supposedly weren\u2019t even allowed to nip outside for a spot of exercise.\u00a0 Hence, whenever I went down to the front door of our apartment building to pick up a delivery, I\u2019d be greeted by the sight of our neighbour from upstairs burning off calories by riding her bicycle around and around the building\u2019s small concourse. \u00a0Sri Lankan people seemed generally to accept and put up with the inconvenience of this.\u00a0 I suppose it\u2019s partly due to unhappy past experiences.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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The curfew was imposed on Friday, March 20th<\/sup>.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 (By this point, Colombo\u2019s food retailers hadn\u2019t yet set up a coherent online system whereby people could order things from their homes and have them delivered.)<\/p>\n

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On March 24th<\/sup>, 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I walked alongside that queue for the whole of the next block, counting the people as I went.\u00a0 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\u2019d counted 173 people.\u00a0 Everyone was trying to \u2018socially distance\u2019 themselves from one another by keeping a metre of space between them, so it was a long queue of 173.<\/p>\n

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The queue inched along and more than two hours passed before I got into the supermarket.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But I\u2019d expected a long wait and brought a book along and I spent those hours in the queue reading.\u00a0 In fact, a long, grindingly slow queue was probably the best context in which to read this book, for it was Anne Rice\u2019s 1975 gothic opus Interview with a Vampire<\/em>.\u00a0 Yes, when you\u2019re queuing for food in the middle of a pandemic, even Ms Rice\u2019s florid and overwrought prose seems pretty bearable.<\/p>\n

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The people I saw outside and inside Food City behaved responsibly, but March 24th<\/sup>\u2019s curfew-lifting didn\u2019t seem to be a success.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Afterwards, when the authorities re-imposed the curfew, they kept it in place for a long, long time.<\/p>\n

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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.\u00a0 By now Colombo\u2019s retailers had<\/em> managed to set up a working delivery system, but not everything could be paid for online and \/ or with cards.\u00a0 Sometimes you needed to pay the deliverers with physical money when they arrived at your door.\u00a0 So off I trudged to the nearest ATM, not knowing what to expect.<\/p>\n

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This experience did make me feel like I was journeying through a city in the grip of a pandemic \u2013 a pandemic portrayed in an apocalyptic sci-fi \/ horror movie.\u00a0 Traffic on Marine Drive was no more than a trickle.\u00a0 The only people I saw who weren\u2019t in vehicles or uniform were the staff at the Lanka Filling Station \u2013 a few vehicles were nosing onto their concourse to get petrol \u2013 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.\u00a0 All the businesses along the road looked like they\u2019d been shut for an eternity.\u00a0 Oddest of all was the sight of our local branch of the KFC, which I\u2019ve rarely seen not<\/em> busy.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I was allowed to continue to the ATM on the strict proviso that I returned home immediately afterwards.<\/p>\n

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During April and into May rumours about when the curfew would be lifted were plentiful, but it wasn\u2019t until the week beginning May 11th<\/sup> that a modicum of normalcy returned in Colombo.\u00a0 Not only were businesses allowed to have some \u2018essential\u2019 employees back at their workplaces (as opposed to \u2018working from home\u2019), but the general public were permitted outside on one weekday according to the final digit of their ID card number.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 For me, this meant I could finally escape house arrest on Thursday, May 14th<\/sup>.<\/p>\n

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I was actually working from home for most of that day, so I didn\u2019t get to venture out until late in the afternoon, which in the pre-Covid-19 era would have coincided with Colombo\u2019s homeward-heading rush-hour.\u00a0 This time the experience felt nowhere near as desolate as when I\u2019d trudged to the ATM the previous month.\u00a0 Most of the city remained closed, however, and considering what time of day it was, the lack of traffic on Marine Drive was astounding.\u00a0 I was also shocked when a train rolled past along the nearby coastal railway tracks.\u00a0 In the normal world, the train would have been stuffed with end-of-the-day commuters.\u00a0 The more adventurous ones would be hanging out of the doorways while Colombo whooshed past below them.\u00a0 But some carriages in this<\/em> train barely contained a soul.<\/p>\n

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I felt melancholy walking around Colombo that day because I passed a few businesses to which I\u2019d given my custom in the past \u2013 okay, pubs<\/em> \u2013 and they looked practically derelict.\u00a0 I wondered if they\u2019d ever reopen.\u00a0 One example was the Western Hotel, which\u2019d optimistically put potted palm trees out along its fa\u00e7ade shortly before the virus and curfew arrived.\u00a0 Another was that mainstay of Sea Avenue, the Vespa Sports Club, its colonial-era bungalow standing silently in the middle of its empty courtyard.<\/p>\n

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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.\u00a0 So I was able to enjoy a socially distanced blether with him.\u00a0 He told me that the restaurant was taking orders and providing takeaways and money was thankfully starting to trickle in again.<\/p>\n

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Now, a month later, the Min Han seems to be fully back in business and I\u2019d advise all Colombo-based lovers of authentic Chinese food to head there immediately.\u00a0 It\u2019s highly recommended<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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One other feature of traversing this strange, semi-deserted version of Colombo was how, in places I\u2019d walked through practically every day of the past six years, I noticed things in the quietude that I\u2019d never noticed before.\u00a0 For example, there was a flowery Christian shrine near the Seylan Bank on Duplication Road.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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So those are my memories of locked-down Colombo between March and May 2020.\u00a0 It was an economically brutal experience for the city and for the country as a whole.\u00a0 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\u2019ve been only 11 deaths.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Or worse, what happened in the USA with Donald \u2018Drink Bleach\u2019 Trump at the helm.\u00a0 Let\u2019s just hope that, after all the sacrifices made, and with life making a hopeful return to normal, Sri Lanka doesn\u2019t have to deal with a resurgence of that bloody microbe in the near future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    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.\u00a0 The traffic isn\u2019t quite as heavy as it was, though it\u2019s gradually returning to the standards of the congested bad old days.\u00a0 … <\/p>\n

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