Colombo’s Coronageddon, and the Art of Surviving Distanced Foodlines
Amid nationally co-ordinated strategies, there are moments of logistical bungling on an epic scale.
In times of community quarantine, supermarkets have become the newest alter of worship — Asoka Siriwardane (author’s dad)
Now and then, my parents whip out a story from an intriguing vault of inter-generational memories.
These personal histories are often encased around political events: those of my grandparents during the last days of pre-Revolutionary Iran and later the German Democratic Republic on its last legs, my folks during IRA-flecked London, the first Gulf War (that I myself bore witness to as kid), and securitised Colombo during times of civil war in the 1990s.
The earliest first-hand accounts hark back to the Second World War, when my father was but a wee boy in Ceylonese Colombo. Japanese air-raids and nightly blackouts were a common occurrence. At the time, urban folk who had the luxury of retreating to country homes and family estates would leave the city lock stock and barrel, with the hope of feeding off the land.
My octogenarian father never thought he would live to witness an ordinary foodline during times such as these. Indeed, it must have been harder for well-heeled babyboomers who had consciously shed the mindset of wartime scarcity.
Besides, the prospect of exodus to a benevolent countryside was always an option. Not this time.
Islands of Isolation
From the first time it was made known to the world, Sri Lanka’s response to the COVID-19 outbreak has been that of zero-tolerance and suppression. It was a policy of mass quarantine, and the draconian measures of colonial infectious disease laws and regulations (of the 1950s) would be revived, if necessary. Till date, conditions such as chickenpox and measles, however mild, warrant hospitalisation by law.
When the epicentre of the pandemic moved to southern and western Europe, travellers flocked in by the thousands. Spaces in the Eastern Province and the central highlands were converted into mass quarantine centres. The South African plea “Stay on your Continent” became an all-too-familiar sentiment among Lankans, and unsurprisingly so, given the island’s laudably extensive universal public healthcare system.
Their principle of universalised public healthcare is simple. Neither a homeless person nor the wealthiest tourist would be turned away, and they could walk out post-treatment without forking a cent. No one asks if you are insured. If there are shortages in beds, hospitals would still struggle to accommodate you, even if it meant you had to share a bed, or be placed on a corridor. Gratis all the way, and that is remarkable for a small upper-middle income country.
Island states that sit at geostrategic crossroads are often patterned by the same Janus-faced predicament: insularity and the potential to self-isolate, and of embracing hubbed connectivity at the same time. Shut borders and stamp out potential communal transmission from within, beseeched the Government Medical Doctors’ Association (GMOA). For a country that recently came out of a protracted armed conflict, mobilising the military alongside hundreds and thousands of medics (both practicing and retired) at the onset of a pandemic, was a relatively straightforward endeavour.
The Social Experiment
Public curfews have been Ceylon’s/Sri Lanka’s go-to solution in the face political unrest. Like in the aftermath of the ISIS-inspired Easter bombings in 2019, blanket curfews lasted several days, but were often eased during the day to allow people to get about their daily business.
Curfew time is literally house arrest. You cannot go for a run, let alone walk a dog, play on the street, or get your groceries. Apart from emergency trips to hospitals and pharmacies, you would require a police-issued curfew pass. If you were among the elderly or have a chronic condition with a long-standing medical prescription, you might be up on the deal and get to enjoy a walk a pharmacy and back.
With the present count of tested coronavirus patients at 106 (and no deaths on record till date), the island imposed a Wuhan-style lockdown to nip the possibility of community transmission at its early stages.
Tellingly, policymakers opted for the more familiar term “curfew.”
But this time it was different. There was no daily easing of the hours, that often had people retreat into their homes by nightfall. Indeed, viruses do not adhere to set working hours. In effect, it was both a lockdown curtailing movement between districts and national borders, augmented by 24hour back-to-back domestic curfews.
These are days in sweltering pre-monsoonal March and April. Curfew is briefly lifted for six to eight-hours every fourth or fifth day. And the axe falls again for another unspecified stretch of days.
These six to eight hours of “relief” mean that you cannot travel too far. They offer slivers of time in which the public may secure their bare necessities — stocking on groceries, getting out bank notes, trips to the post office, topping up fuel and such.
It’s no small wonder that when you are confronted with even of the world’s smallest metropolises (1.5 million, of a national population of 21 million), you would still expect a scramble or cripplingly long queues for almost everything. For many, it would be a race against the clock, to get as much done. Of course, standing amid such crowds defeats the purpose of physical distancing in the first place. You do not need an urban planner to know that most city infrastructure is ill-equipped to cope with highly localised human densities. It’s a matter of simple arithmetic and demographics.
With some returning home with as many as two onions, mobile supermarkets have been proposed as the most feasible solution against the likelihood of a longer lasting lockdown, well past Easter.
The Economy and Sociality of Foodlines
If you were just released after four days of community quarantine, with just six hours to get your life sorted before scampering back home, what would you get done?
Many of the smaller grocery stores in Colombo had shut. For many, it was prudent to strategize on which queues your family or housemates ought to join — for cash, food, or fuel.
My dad starts his non-curfew morning with a speed walk, and it is probably wise to jog to the supermarket because lines start forming the minute curfew is lifted at 6am. Some supermarket chains open at 6.00 on the dot, and others an hour later.
Here’s the deal: to limit social shopping and longer lines, only one member of each household is allowed to forage. There is rationing at three measures of everything (i.e. three kilos of grain and other fresh produce, and tins, tubs and packets of everything else by the three).
Depending on the size of the supermarket store, five to 20 people are allowed in a a time. Our Keells and Cargills branches limited their trolleys to 15. A newly emptied cart meant another person from the queue, possibly stretching as long as two miles, could finally be let in.
We queued for four hours in total, having got to Keells at 6.35am. The doors opened at 7.00, and there would have been about 400 people lining up in front of us.
Thinking back, that foodline was among the calmest and most zen-like queues I stood at. Partially because it was being policed. I’ve spent quite a bit of my life queuing at airports. There was no sense of aggression in the air, for people had resigned to waiting for as long as it took. There was no point expending energy in anger or frustration, and making those few hours even more unpleasant for those around you.
Survival tips
Preparation — Make a detailed list of what you would expect to find, in the order in which they can be located at your local supermarket. You are not going to add a bottle of laundry detergent and backtrack for a few tomatoes.
The night before, charge your mobile phone to the hilt. Not because you are going to play Bubble Story. You might need backup queue assistance at some point, or be picked up.
Have sufficient water, but not of a bladder-bursting quantity. Sunglasses. Bring your own bags, and a lightweight foldable stool if you’ve got one, like the ones birdwatchers use. They barely take up space in an ever-lengthening line.
Getting there — Don’t bother driving yourself. Outdoor carparks are often used to economise on space for an elaborate queuing plan, enforced by a mini empire of vigilant policewomen and men. Folk got themselves dropped and picked up again.
Know your queue type — Ours was an “intestinal line” possibly stretching about two to three miles, given six-foot distancing. At first it was hard to locate where the line began, as it snaked its way up and sideways, along and back around the building, until finally the last five rows were folded against one another like airport queues at airport immigration control desks.
Muzzle Up for the Mask Fascists — The Ministry of Health and the GMOA are crystal clear on whether all members of the public ought to be wearing masks when up and about. No, not everyone, but if you have a common cold or flu, muzzle up. Surgical masks are of course leaky and they are rarely in supply these days. Besides, there’s a global mask shortage for healthcare workers who need them most. But lately, you’d find Mask Fascists strutting around, mostly the military, nabbing the unmasked. We were singled out and yelled at. A good Samaritan had some spares in his car.
While you are at it, entertain yourself. Look around you and admire the sheer creativity of people in improvising their own muzzles. Some can be provocatively performative. Many make do with scarves, dishcloths, hankies, and table napkins.
A woman had reused an old bra cup, re-stitching the straps around her nape. There were inverted yoghurt tubs tied in place with twine. A dashing old gent wore a bit of toilet paper held down by the metallic rims of his glasses and fastened in place with some masking tape. An hour or two later, the tape lost its stickiness, and the toilet paper flapped about in the breeze, like a Bedouin face veil. Ingenious.
Make friends with the person in front and behind you — Because chances are that they will really care about maintaining physical distance. Long queues are great moments at forging temporary social intimacy. #
There might be coppers and military men marching about barking reminders on physical distancing. Your nearest queue-mates will be compassionate about it. But be warned: towards the end of the line, as we inch closer to the doors, the distancing naturally decreases. Folk get impatient, and then comes the real urge to faint or possibly collapse from a heat stroke. Fight it off because heck, you’ve withstood this for four hours. It is just a matter of minutes now.
Being mindfully present — There’s mindful eating, mindful shopping, and mindful spending. There’s also mindful spatializing. How you control the wheel path of your cart, keep your limbs to yourself, and resist the tempation to feel the smooth porcelain-like contour of a gleaming bell pepper.
Follow the shopping list line-up for its almost like a treasure hunt map. You might encounter empty shelves, but there might be other miraculous, unlikely finds. Peppers had hit rock bottom. Fresh produce was the hardest to find. The scarcity psyche of anyone emptying an entire shelf containing the last remaining stumps of coriander befuddles me. For fresh veggies and fruit, make sure you weigh them all because boy, would they be displeased if you had to abandon the cashier’s line leaving an unattended trolley, just to head back to get an overripe papaya weighted. Elementary, I know. But still happens.
Every minute you spend lingering and pontificating is a minute lost to a hundred more out there, waiting for a cart to be freed.
A side note (before mobile supermarkets are the norm, and they get their logistics right)
Those who stand to win in the end are those who have never had to queue and often had things regularly delivered to them long before times of corona. It’s all about grocery social capital know, mediated via links to smaller and family owned suppliers. Shops may be closed, and these fancy supermarket and online sites get their stuff sold out. We are not talking food shortages here, but of distribution.
Unless you are a political lackey, those with the most potent forms of social capital these days are arguably folk with direct links to two groups of people who can freely roam the dead streets on lockdown (with the exception of medics): the police, and garbage collectors. Some may offer to be grocery mules. A long-standing doctor’s prescription would serve as a curfew pass, and you can get a few things done on your way to the local pharmacy and back.
Yet, if you are one of those people who like swanning through the air-conditioned confines of supermarkets, dissecting your labels, and feeling the velvety skin of your fruit in the anticipation of selecting a few, then you are in for a hard time during this long season of Coronageddon.
Uncanny and extraordinary experiences make for the rich tapestry of life. And this little virus has served up a few humbling lessons. Like on social levelling, and the art of living with just enough.
Disclaimer: this piece by no means recounts a commonly shared experience locally. Besides, chain supermarkets anywhere in the world are but tiresome and lacklustre places to shop. There have been home delivery networks planned over the coming days. There are accounts of state-paid food hampers delivered to low-income neighbourhoods within cities on lockdown.
