When I was 13, the country I grew up in, faced a month-long lockdown in the middle of winter.

There was no viral outbreak, no toxic chemicals leaking from unfettered reactor cause.

This was man-made, stemming from a threat of war by an immense foreign power.

Television sets sang with patriotic jingles and presidential addresses and the

susserers of hushed whispers, blanketed cities and districts and neighborhoods

like a shroud in the night.

Where once winter was marked with festivities adorning every corner of the boulevard,

it now cast a freezing breath over empty gardens, shuttered windows and deserted streets. Hundreds of millions brought to a standstill because two men couldn't agree on peace.

My neighborhood was in a commonplace middle income locality, with squat two-story houses peppered

amidst high-rises and grey government quarters.

The narrow streets traced away through tight turnings and passed unkempt old garages, littered with garbage

from weeks of no maintenance.

I remembered walking to school through those lanes when things were normal, and how the old

kindergarten by the central square would loom up on me, yellow

and red, plastered with paintings of old cartoons.

Now everything looked the same, drab and dismal, alone and abandoned.

On the first week of the lockdown, we had to make our scheduled trip to the ration store

to get our weekly quota of rice and lentils. Four sets, one each for my mother,

father, grandmother and I. It made for miserable meals and offered nothing sweet but it was sustenance. I offered to go

but my father wouldn't let me. The authorities would only allow one family member

from each household to purchase rations on specific days of the week,

and he didn't want me to get questioned by the police if they stopped me.

...