Fiction: A young man falls in love with a woman on the rooftop across during a Covid-19 lockdown

“Just come home,” Ma cried into his ear every evening. “I don’t care how you do it, just come back from that godless, disease-ridden place.”

“How can I, Ma?” Chetan would try to reason with her, whispering even though he knew his voice wouldn’t carry to the old man. “No trains are running. No buses are, either. Do you want me to walk like those poor labourers who have lost everything?”

“What lost everything?” she would shoot back. “They’re returning to their families, to their home. We are your family, not that old man you work for day and night.”

“You don’t know what you are saying, Ma. Those people didn’t have a choice.” He paused, taking care to speak calmly. “Their employers stopped feeding them. They had nothing; no food to give their families, no way to survive … Even now, as they walk thousands of kilometres in this heat, they have to rely on the charity of strangers to live. Maybe a chai-wallah will give them a few biscuits or a passing car will give them some water, but it’s a miserable situation.”

“I don’t know, I just want you home.”

“Think, Ma, please,” he said. “The old man treats me well and he pays me well....

Read more