The sun, that afternoon was blazing down, the heat of which was staved off bravely by the thick canopy of trees. When I was walking down the road after purchasing essentials, I couldn’t help notice the forlorn portly figure of the owner of a small eatery in my place. A handkerchief doubling up as a makeshift mask, there he was, sitting with the sadness, exasperation, frustration and perhaps, hope…all rolled into one, waiting for the inexplicable crisis that has descended upon the unsuspecting us holding our lives to ransom, to vanish.
As I passed him by, with the gentle breeze frolicking with my face, causing yellow marigolds to fall from the sky, brightening the already formed yellow canopy on the road, thoughts flashed by, thick and fast.
When will the worried freckles on his face vanish? When will his eatery get to open? When will he start doing business? When will he make money? His workers? Has he been able to hedge this bets (read: ‘loss’) somewhere else?
The contrast was seen in the two shops next to his: grocery peddlers, doing brisk business to panicked citizens, not sure whether to buy what to buy, but ending up buying whatever they could lay their eyes on. It was like wartime, I thought, having not seen one, thankfully. Maybe this is what wartime looks like, or worse.
Strange are these times. Really strange. No one except Hollywood scriptwriters could imagine such happenings earlier; Maybe the Gods took a leaf out of their books! An unknown, invisible enemy ‘taser’ing the entire world into submission. It is unimaginable, this situation in real life where bustling cities have become ghost cities, with people cooped up in their homes like caged animals – on another thought, are we now able to relate to the animals we hold in zoos, in captivity, against their will?
We have all been stopped dead in our tracks because of what one country did or did not do (depending on how you look at it; it’s another debate altogether for another day, when the knives will be out soon) but looking at people picking up the pieces, tiding days, weeks…maybe months, is an unpleasant sight.
When I realise and appreciate how insulated I am, courtesy the salary that gets (and will, hopefully be) credited despite the wheels of the world economy that have ground to a halt, courtesy my white collar job, my thoughts go out to these lesser mortals who have to fend for a living, survival.
While I keep doing my bit with a dole to people of this strata who I know, I know that this cannot be a permanent solution, should this linger on.
Helpless as it sounds, I can only thank the Gods for my fortune – it is creepily interesting that my earlier post on my blog a few weeks back was on gratitude -, I try my bit to help the lesser mortals with a dole here and there; the larger one is a prayer and wish that this gets over soon, so that I can see a smile on their faces, more particularly of the owner of the eatery.
May the force be with us as we fight this out; may this vanish soon!
