This seems like a good time to read Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee’s book, The Town Slowly Empties, as the pandemic-related events of 2020 seem to repeat themselves in 2021, only in a scarier form. Bhattacharjee’s memoir harks back to the beginning of 2020, when life as we knew it suddenly changed. Written in the form of a journal, it begins on March 23, the day the national lockdown started, and continues until April 14, when the lockdown was extended till May. The intimate and the unanticipated frame Bhattacharjee’s reflections. When life is “reduced to a few rooms” and our bodies ...