Now that we know what today can be like, can we ever go back to yesterday? She addressed her question to the silver toaster on the counter. In response, it threw up two pieces of toast. Burnt and crisp. She took a bite.

Chew, swallow, gulp. Taste? An afterthought.

The toast was eaten. Tea, coffee, and cigarettes consumed. It was too early for wine.

Hers was a ground-floor studio without a balcony. Only a window which looked out to a once-bustling Dubai street. Now it was silent. Forlorn. The birds few and far in between visited every now and then. But mostly she was on her own.

It had been four weeks since the lockdown.

*

A sparrow descended on her window. Flapping its small wings, the shadowy grey patterns like shutters opening and closing, like the aeroplanes that no longer littered the sky. It chirped a shrill good morning and cocked its head to one side as if surprised to see her. Still here? it seemed to say. ‘Yep,’ she replied. ‘Still no flights. Trapped like your friend, the caged bird. Trapped in a golden cage.’

Nodding, the bird flew away.

*

She turned back to the toaster. Shrugged. Then took a deep long breath. Who would have thought? she said. Running a pale pink finger over its edge and brushing off the crumbs, she said, There now, that’s better. No more embarrassing crumbs in your beard. What do you say Mr. Toaster, eh? How about a little thank you? No? Well, fuck you!

She lit another cigarette. The building was strictly no smoking and the windows did not open, but she had worked out a way to silence the smoke detector. She dipped the mop in cold water then held it upside down underneath the smoke detector, jamming its sensors. And then she smoked. Hungrily, urgently.

The cigarette shrank in her hand and she thought, what now?

*

There was no milk. There must be milk for the cereal. Cheerios without milk is like . . . she paused remembering how her boyfriend would say, like Dubai without tourists. And now there were no tourists. And no boyfriend. They were stranded, continents apart. He unable to fly back, she unable to fly away.

Home. She savoured the word. Tasted it. Then spat it out. How she had wanted travel. How excited she had been to come here. Her first time out into the Gulf. And the last. She would never leave again. If she made it back. Would she?

Of course, she would. She would survive Covid. She was young, she was careful. She washed her hands in the kitchen sink. Hummed the tune of happy birthday and counted up to 20. Then she sat down on the floor to do her breathing exercises. 

Wait. There was something outside. She inched closer to the window and saw a pair of eyes staring into hers. Almond-shaped, pools of liquid chocolate. A gazelle’s eyes.

They both drew back at the same moment.

Fear. She sank with fear. Down to her knees. No, it wasn’t beautiful. It was like that movie The Road. There was an animal outside her flat. A gazelle on the manic streets of Dubai, the city that never stopped.

But now it had. And time had stopped with it.

She shut her eyes. When she opened them again, the animal was gone.

But the plague hadn’t. Had she imagined it all?

*

She traced a cross onto the carpeted floor and prayed for yesterday.

She decided to step out for some milk.

Outside the air was clean. No smoke from cars choked the air. No factories painted the sky grey. No traffic drowned out the sounds of nature. She inhaled it all in. Then coughed. Her lungs hurt. She was not used to such purity. Deep. Deeper. Deepest. She sucked in the air, let it expand her. She imagined herself filling up like a balloon. And then, when she was so full she thought she would burst, she let it all out, very slowly.

Now that we know how clean the skies can be, she found herself thinking, can we ever go back?

*

At the store, a man stood outside. He held up a white instrument to her forehead. A shrill beep and she was allowed in. Masked, gloved, she approached the milk as if approaching a threat. Wipes, sanitizers, protective clothing. She picked it up as if it was a bomb.

*

In the line at the store, she stood inside a little red circle that indicated the six-feet apart distance. An Indian woman stood in a similar circle behind her, a blond man ahead of her. The Indian woman was talking loudly to another woman who stood six feet behind her in another one of those circles. I was visiting my husband, now I can’t go back to India, she was saying. But government extending my visa. Free of charge. But still how to pay for food and stay. So expensive Dubai, no? How you manage?

Was it eavesdropping if the person spoke so loudly? She looked at the carton for answers but it seemed to stare back in disdain. She decided it probably did not get along with the other cartons either. At the counter, she added cigarettes to her purchase.

*

Back home, she discarded the masks and the gloves at her doorstep. Wiped the milk again, showered, and changed. Had she dodged it this time? As if suddenly remembering something, she dashed out of the shower and cleaned the surface of the counter on which she had placed the milk. She remembered the gazelle staring into her eyes. Now it was the empty stare of a cardboard carton. It had seemed so real. Had she imagined the animal?

She turned on the TV for company. And the radio and the stereo too. In the cacophony of voices, she felt cocooned by people. The milk no longer seemed a threat. There were no animals outside her window. No tourists. A cure was coming. Soon today will turn back into yesterday.

Yesterday, yesterday, yesterday, she chanted. Visualization. Positivity. Affirmations.

*

Who knows how long today will last? Or what tomorrow would bring? It was best to hold on to yesterday. Yesterday, she sang, all my troubles seemed so far away . . . And she stopped. Her voice was grinding, even to her own ears. She looked outside at the abandoned streets, the empty roads, and let out a little scream. How is this even happening? What fucking use are all these fancy phones, 3D TVs, flying to the moon shit when they can’t stop a virus!

She poured herself a shot of tequila. Cheers, she said to the toaster and knocked it back. She thought back to how at first, she had been happy. She could sleep. No more noise from the nearby construction sites. No ebb and flow of a hundred different languages filtering in at all hours of the day to assault her ears. No cars racing down the wide expansive roads, no tourists crunching the gravel pavements. No necks craning to look in at her ground-floor window.

She didn’t even need to draw the curtains anymore. How liberating that had felt. At first.

But now it seemed eerie, the silence numbing. Had she been buried alive?

Perhaps she was dead but she did not know it yet. No one said hello to her anymore. No one except the birds. Any people she saw outside strode by purposefully. Masked faces sliced in two. Heads down. Dash in and dash out. No one acknowledged her. No one looked into her window. In return, she ignored them too.

Now, it felt like a trap. Even Zoom and Skype had lost their appeal as her friends and family, five hours behind, began to find excuses not to take her calls. There wasn’t much to talk about, they’d say as they struggled with the homeschooling, remote working, online shopping, stuff they called the new normal. Why couldn’t she get used to it? Why didn’t she do something useful with this big chunk of time?

Only she couldn’t. She felt like a rose bush which had been transplanted from an English garden into a desert and was being asked to bloom alongside a cactus, away from her natural habitat. Away from everything and everyone she knew. Four weeks in quarantine, and hours of Netflix and Amazon Prime later, she was beginning to feel desperate.

She turned to the toaster. ‘When do you think it will lift?’

The toaster remained silent.

‘Don’t just stare at me,’ she said, ‘I mean the lockdown. The quarantine. When do you think life will get back to normal?’

Non-committal. Silent and stoic. For some reason it reminded her of her grandmother, her wisdom contained in her silence, hidden in her restraint.

She stroked its side and said, I didn’t mean to shout at you.

She drew patterns on the toaster’s metallic side and watched the impressions of her fingers darken, then fade away on its silver surface.

‘Can I draw on you?’

It remained silent.

‘My boyfriend back home use to do that. After sex, when we lay against each other, our backs touching, he would draw patterns on my skin. He’d ask me to guess . . .’ She stopped. There was something rising within her. A mix of rage and powerlessness. A sense of disbelief.

She was a traveller. Can it really be, in this day and age? Can you really get stranded?

She turned around and dialled his number. It was switched off. What was she thinking? It was 3 a.m. there. 

It’s been a while, she said to the toaster. I never knew I’d miss small talk so much. Here she paused and laughed, for that is exactly how she felt – as if something was missing. Portraits without faces, she thought. Stories without scenes. Sentences without words. It was all so surreal. Some important detail of life that got lost. Now, the only human voices she heard were those coming out of a screen. Did broadcasts even count as a voice?

She called him again. No answer. Pour yourself another, she said to the toaster. Setting two glasses of wine on the counter she turned back to the toaster and tried to make out her blurred reflection in its reflective surface.

Well Mr. Toaster, I think it’s time we got onto first-name basis. She decided to name him, David. Its blank expression and cold demeanour reminded her of her boyfriend. He still hadn’t called back. She carried it to bed with her. Along with the bottle of wine. It slept on the floor. Besides the bottle. Every now and then she ran her hand over it. Reassuring, yet alert. The silence kept her awake. Still no call.

*

In the middle of the night, she sat up and took out the pack of cigarettes. She lit three at once and stuffed them in her mouth. In the mirror, a monster with fangs and smoke that blurred its features stared back at her. The three red tips looked like clues. But what was the puzzle?

She felt her life had never been simpler. She worked from home. She no longer had to take the subway. She didn’t need to dress up. She got up when she wanted, slept when she could no longer stay awake. So why did it all seem so complicated?

She looked at David. Silence.

Not much of a talker, are you?

Silence.

She suddenly remembered that she had left the milk out. She got up, the cigarettes still hanging from her mouth, their red tips leading the way.

There it sat, sweating on the counter. The same disgruntled look. But wait. Behind it, in the window. A pair of eyes again.

The gazelle was back. This time its eyes scarlet, as if glowing in the dark.

What was it searching for?

What do you want from me, she shouted.

The cigarettes fell from her mouth. A small fire traced its way along the carpeted floor. She looked up and saw the fire alarm was still jammed.

The next day, she made the news.

Skyscraper in Dubai catches fire. Expat and Gazelle dead.

– Sabyn Javeri

Author’s Note: “Waiting For Yesterday” tells the story of a traveller trapped during the lockdown in a foreign land waiting to go home. It looks at the plight and isolation of those unfortunate thousands stranded far away from home. Inspired by a news story, it tells the tale of an ex-pat in Dubai waiting for repatriation flights. She was described in the news report as being extremely careful and vigilant about covid-19 precautions but ironically lost her life in the fire. The format follows the sensibilities of oral storytelling and the tradition of the Urdu ‘Afsana’ where inanimate objects are often characters.