The World after Covid-19

Attorney, human-rights activist, and author Rafia Zakaria uses the first week of Pakistan’s lockdown to ask what a transformed post-pandemic society might look like and who will bear its costs. Writing in her Dawn column “The World after Covid-19” as human contact itself comes to carry the threat of contagion, she confesses that “in the midst of darkness, it is difficult to imagine light or a future.” She enlists historian Yuval Noah Harari, whose argument that emergencies fast-forward historical processes frames her own forecast that work, offices, and the premium on physical presence will be fundamentally remade. The disappearance of physical offices, she suggests, could advantage women long penalised by commuting, motherhood, and workplace sexism, since remote work shifts the employer’s metric from presence to productivity.

Yet Zakaria’s hopefulness is immediately tempered by a pointed, gendered and class-conscious critique. The same confinement that might free women in the workplace traps them at home, where “too many Pakistani men expect wives and mothers and sisters to wait upon them,” multiplying unpaid domestic labour and, in the worst case, exposing women to greater violence when their abusers are always present. She attends too to those who live alone, for whom the new isolation may prove as heavy to bear as the disease itself, producing what she describes as depression and even suicidal thoughts. Zakaria does not romanticise the potential of remote work but instead insists that its benefits will be distributed along lines of gender and class, with the burdens of a shrunken, domesticated world falling hardest on women in patriarchal households.

The essay’s significance for this archive is its insistence that the post-pandemic world will be unevenly distributed. It supplies a Pakistani newspaper essay offering a gendered, class-conscious counterpart to Arundhati Roy’s Indian reportage from the same weeks. Zakaria ends not in despair but with a summons to imagine, for the transformed world, she writes, “is being born before our eyes.”