A TALE OF TIME
And so it is 25th of March 2020 In Bangladesh. Independence Day is supposed to be celebrated at mid night. The month of lent has already started and Palm Sunday is 4 days ahead. Who knew that things would change so suddenly? Life is going on but no one’s living it. Machines stand still for no one’s there to operate. Civilians are quarantined all over the earth. Business are all shut down, the swings in the park sway with the breeze, dogs and cats take the streets as their empire just after the sun goes down, even the rats don’t stay in the holes because they don’t need to. There’s no one to scare them off.
The animals in the zoo here gets some visitors often, but, we humans, nope, not possible. The media and social media all pouring down with the outbreak of a life taking disease. A virus called coronavirus or covid-19 as they named it, brought the glove to a halt. It seems as if the world stopped rotating. Well in a sense it did. It did for us the victims. The victims who have always taken the world for granted and disrespected nature at its worst. Is it not our fault that we are suffering? The news tells us of the victims and the cured. Like blind believers we believe. Is it not obvious? Right now no one is in a state to think or question anything. It’s a time for survival. Many a few people who work just to have a meal have nowhere to go now, nothing to eat except wait for relief.
Superstition is seen to have risen to its peak. Many talk about eating leaves and others tell us to drink cow-urine and eat cow dung. Some new kind of a red-bull energy drink I guess. Airports are shut down at many countries bringing the airliners and the share business down to earth. Many may go beneath also. Countless families are apart from each other and the picture is no less than any apocalyptic movies we have grown up seeing. Come to think of it, locusts are swarming up at parts of the Asian nations. They say that these little devils move in swarms of millions in number which reach a distance of almost four kilometers and consume grains in one day that add up to thirty five thousand people. It is a devastating sight which is bigger than anything the world has seen for a long while. Has the world lost? Or humanity? Or is it a teaching that we should hold each other’s hands and stand up to a common enemy? That’s not possible. How else will it be ever? Mask that costs 20tk is being sold at 250tk, groups blaming the other groups for the outbreak and raising the prices for food are being risen as well.
Right now, only a mask and a pair of gloves are the only best friends we can have. Funerals and birthdays are becoming myths. The dead are being buried in a way that the virus doesn’t spread. The elderly are more likely to pass away they say, but anyone can carry this death capsule. Shaking hands or a friendly hug is going to be a crime pretty soon. A kiss to your loved one? HAI One will think twice before he attempts. Some where we read that if we love, we have to let go, if it’s worthy, love will come back. But now? If we love and care for someone, we have to stay at least 6 feet away from them for their sake and one’s own.
This is not a tale, nor is it a story. But one day it will be. That depends on who lives to tell it. The world evolves because the living beings evolve. But the way it is seen now is that human beings need to evolve their hearts, dissolve all the hatred and come together to love, suffer and live as one. Even if we don’t live out of this pandemic, I believe that after we’re gone, the spirit carries on. And let that spirit be of knowledge to the future so that they are ready the next time.
