‘But this perpetual stage we strut and fret across all our lives allows us to make sense of catastrophes as if we were perpetual audience members, even when they cut to our core. It’s as if we needed a Greek chorus of media outlets and social networks to accompany this tragedy and comment on it and drape it with a deceptive disguise, so as to stomach it more easily.’

In this extraordinary year of self-isolation, future uncertainty, and political upheaval, solace found in the writing of others is more and more crucial to our collective understanding of the changing world around us .

As part of adda’s online collection of creative responses to COVID-19, Ananda Devi’s searing piece takes on the ubiquitous juggernaut that is the global pandemic and its destructive consequences on pre-existing inequality, industrialisation, and technology.

Written in the French and translated in to the English by Jeffrey Zuckerman, A Broken Mirror sits among other isolation meditations from writers Olive Senior, Ben Okri, and Mia Couto.

Illustration by Moira Scicluna Zahra.