As the second wave of coronavirus battered us in India, my partner and I found solace and pride in our stuffed animals.
In the middle of a pandemic, I often talk to a little Chewbacca. He is a stuffed toy with bright blue eyes and a hint of a stitched smile. He used to make Wookiee roars, an ability he sadly lost after an overzealous bath.
Chewie is not my childhood toy, some nostalgic throwback to a safer cocoon. Embarrassing as it is to admit, I got him as an adult, as a gift for my partner, Bishan, who is a “Star Wars” geek. Almost as a gag, we gave Chewie his own Instagram account.
I once read about how the artist Horst Wackerbarth took a red sofa and photographed it in front of famous landmarks: the Taj Mahal, the Amazon rainforest, the ice of Alaska. We started doing the same with Chewie, who is far more manageable as a traveling art piece.
We began taking Chewie on trips, posing him in front of monuments, mountains and beaches. In the process, we stumbled upon an Instagram world we had no idea about, one populated entirely by “plushies,” the term of choice for stuffed toys. It was as if we had fallen down a rabbit hole and emerged blinking like Alice into a wonderland where a penguin named Squeeshy wore bow ties, a dog named Trashhound removed plastic from beaches and a koala named Malish starred in his own James Bond-esque thrillers.
There were cancer companion plushies, professional travel blogger plushies, emotional support plushies and rescued plushies. One day we realized Chewie had more followers than either of us. Our vacations had turned into Chewie photo shoots. Soon Chewie got more mail than any of the human residents at home, from Slovakia and Long Island and Chile. On a trip to Borneo, we got Chewie a friend: Nozy, a little proboscis monkey.
But last year the pandemic ended our travels. In our city of Kolkata, India, Bishan and I moved in with our respective families in different parts of town, and our plushies were split up as well.
Ever since, Chewie’s adventures have been limited to checking out the eggplants in my garden, while Nozy has been posing with the squirrels on Bishan’s rooftop. Occasionally we set up parallel photo shoots, Chewie on my mango tree, Nozy swinging on Bishan’s neem tree, learning to somehow do things together while forced to live apart.
When Bishan and I first met 14 years ago, I was a writer and radio host in San Francisco. He was a book editor in Kolkata, my birthplace. We met online and would get together on my trips home or on a vacation somewhere. Otherwise, we were literally night and day apart, our relationship virtual. When we played Scrabble online, one of us would wake up in the morning and see what move the other had made.
A few years later, I moved back to Kolkata to be closer to family. It was the first time Bishan and I were living in the same time zone. The pandemic has been a new kind of separation, this time by a lockdown rather than oceans. We don’t play Scrabble anymore. Instead, we connect over what Chewie or Nozy posted that day.
Oddly, as our world slowed to a crawl, the plushie world has grown vibrantly alive, with hashtags like #SaturdayPotluckWithChewie, #PlushieColourQuest and #CampHoopLaHooRay2021.
It’s not a bubble of Covid denial. One plushie worries when their human has a fever while another accompanies their human on vaccination day. Someone had to be evacuated along with their human when the pandemic halted flights. There has been disease and loss, even death. Some plushies take a social media break because their humans are too sick or stressed, and the rest of the plushie world waits patiently for their return.
In fact, plushies have emerged as unlikely knights in furry armor. I read about a security guard in Mumbai who rescued a discarded stuffed panda, the size of a 7-year-old, that he placed on a red plastic chair next to him.
“Of course, I feel alone,” he said. “Man is a social animal.”
But the panda has proved to be a good companion. Some days the guard drapes a blanket over its legs and a cap over its eyes to block the sun as it takes an afternoon nap.
Last year a woman on Prince Edward Island in Canada, inspired by the children’s book “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt,” set up a teddy bear hunt during lockdown. People would prop up teddy bears in their windows and doorsteps and residents would drive by counting bears.
It took me a long time to come out as a plushie lover. I was not one of those children who spent his childhood dragging around a grubby, moth-eaten teddy bear. Bishan never even had a stuffed toy while growing up. Our adopting a plushie menagerie in adulthood is a mystery even to us.
When a magazine in India wanted to profile us as a gay couple, we sneaked Chewie into the photo shoot; he made it feel less staged. My family has taken it in good spirit. My mother asks about my “little ones.” My sister knitted Chewie a Christmas scarf. My nephew and niece follow him on Instagram. But it still was a coming out, no less tentative than coming out as gay.
The first time Chewie went into the hand baggage X-ray and the inspector pulled him out of the bag, I remember turning red and mumbling about a nonexistent child.
It takes a certain kind of courage to pose a small stuffed animal against a 7th century sandstone sculpture and not care what other tourists think.
A friend who avidly follows the adventures of Chewie says his 7-year-old is unimpressed.
“But he is not real,” she said with irrefutable logic when she was shown pictures of Chewie’s adventures.
Analysts can read many things into this attachment with plushies — child substitutes, infantilization, escapism, transference or just bored adults with too much time on their hands. All true, perhaps, but there is also unadulterated joy in understanding that one can love something so unconditionally, even something inanimate. It is a relief to realize that one does not always have to do something to earn love. A small stuffed toy just sitting next to a pillow can be enough.
Like all love, though, it is fraught. Once on a trip to the historic town of Hampi in southern India, I perched Nozy in between some temple sculptures, took a picture and wandered away. Hours later, on our way back to the car, we realized he was missing.
Bishan, aghast, yelled at me as if I had forgotten our toddler. We raced back to the temple with him muttering grimly that there was no way Nozy would be found in such a large complex filled with schoolchildren. We bought tickets afresh, rushed in breathlessly and there he was, squished between two sandstone lions, waiting patiently to be rescued.
“How irresponsible can you be?” said my sister later.
I lost my plushie-carrying rights that trip. But as I stood there teary-eyed, clutching a tiny stuffed monkey, my heart still thudding, I understood that love can grow in the most unlikely places, and that there is no love worth its name unless it feels vulnerable to loss.
In this time of Covid, fear of loss haunts us every day. The second wave in India battered us with bad news — friends and family falling sick, hospitals running out of oxygen, vaccine shortages. Every encounter with the outside world feels like a game of Russian roulette. The plushie world had felt like innocent fun when we stumbled upon it with Chewie’s first post in 2016. Now it feels like a refuge, a community holding together even as things fall apart around us.
In a world where social media is often toxic competition, the plushie world celebrates 100 followers with as much excitement as 1,000. The humans take a back seat, rarely posing with their plushie charges, referred to as “hooman,” “roommate,” “assistant” and occasionally “mummy” or “daddy,” but almost never by their names.
There are mask skeptics, Black Lives Matter activists, anxiety-ridden teenagers and a grandmother of six, but at the end of the day it’s all about Zuzu the meerkat and Azai the one-eyed dog. The human’s biographical details, politics and skin color remain vague, as if too much information might shatter this shimmering world held together by a delicate suspension of disbelief — an iridescent soap bubble floating through a golden afternoon.
But more than anything, there is something deeply reassuring in knowing that on the bleakest most hopeless day there is a plushie you can hug. In a socially distanced world where we dare not hug each other, that’s no small gift.
Sandip Roy is a radio host and writer living in Kolkata, India. He is the author of the novel “Don’t Let Him Know.”
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