The Morning Star
A Mumbai family's annual holiday becomes a lockdown survival story — one small flat, one uncertain city, and the hard education of self-reliance.
Overview
Holi 2020. A family from Mumbai — husband, wife, two school-going children — is at their annual break in Mahabaleshwar when something shifts. They are asked to vacate the resort. Then the country locks down, and they find themselves back in a small Mumbai flat with no script for what comes next.
Krishnan Iyer's novel follows the domestic arc of that first lockdown: the excited novelty of home-cooked koftas giving way to bread-and-butter economies; Ramayana replaced by Netflix binges; the brief, absurd hopefulness of circles painted outside liquor shops. The experience was shared across India, but Iyer renders it through one family's specific adjustments — the small negotiations, the forced stillness, the discovery that atmanirbhar, self-reliance, was not an ideology but a survival requirement.
The novel makes a case for finding the positive in inversion — when negative became positive, as the subtitle puts it — without prettifying what the lockdown actually demanded.
Holi 2020. Something sinister is in the air. Nobody has figured it out, though. A man from Mumbai, with his wife and two school-going kids, takes his annual break to Mahabaleshwar. Revelry ends prematurely. He is asked to vacate the resort, and, ultimately, lock himself down in his small apartment. The forced closure brings nervous excitement. But will it last? The waft of koftas and pulao from the kitchen, gives way to bread-and-butter. Watching Ramayan makes way for Netflix binge. Getting rations from the local kirana store to feeling hopeful seeing big circles being painted outside the liquor shop-lockdown was a bitter-sweet, albeit a tough ask. But, like that man in the small Mumbai flat, we knew-or were forced to learn-how to make lemonade when life threw lemons at us. In situations like this with not much options left, but to play 'lock-unlock', becoming atmanirbhar was the survival mantra. It means self-reliant. "It could also mean: 'You are on your own,'" writes Krishnan Iyer in The Morning Star: When -ve became +ve .
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