Story by Vasu Subrahmanyam

DESOLATION is as enervating as isolation. Both have a way of simultaneously sapping the soul while forcing the contemplation of hard and sometimes unanswerable questions. Why is this happening now? When will it all end? How do we cope? What do we do? Will we ever return to the known from this unknown?

Hanging a question mark on things we’ve always taken for granted is the first step to self-discovery. And desolation accompanied by isolation from everyone and everything familiar enables the process.

The pictures we are now confronted with are not pretty. In a real way, they expose the emptiness within most of us – an emptiness that we selectively fill with daily distractions from the outside.

We keep busy, we meet people, we commute, we congregate, we share public spaces, we engage in singles or in groups as our personal bubbles collide or come dangerously close… unless, of course, touching is expected, is allowed or is sought.

But now in this surreal season of social distancing by 1m or 2m, as masks muffle words and meanings furthering the space between minds, the newly sensed emptiness within is amplified and echoed by the emptiness outside. 

The starkness outside has brought into painfully sharp relief, the bits we instinctively chose not to see when we averted our eyes from those unmistakably foreign, eking out livelihoods in unfamiliar, uncomfortable ways.

Now, in these vast empty spaces and walkways they stand out… sometimes in forced rows awaiting scrutiny, handouts and orders to sit, stand or move. At other times, they cower in the shadows or behind screens wanting to be invisible, wanting to be left alone, unseen and ignored as in the good old days.

But decisions, decisions and more decisions await to be made as those who serially sought the authority to make them, ponder in private, away from prying eyes, calculating costs and dividends, human costs, financial costs and political dividends while setting out those operating procedures… often standard, sometimes selective but always with both eyes on the bald, bare truth about unproductive time and how it kills livelihoods first… and only later, lives.

Striking that elusive balance between expediency and mounting expenses is not easy. And certainly not a task for the faint-hearted or the grievously ill.. And so, a choice has been made.

That lives follow livelihoods. That lifting the sluice gates to allow the free flow of transactions (and communicable vermin) is a decision in everyone’s interest. There are dissenting voices as much as there are loud sighs of relief. 

Freedom at last. To fill the streets and the shops, to meet and greet at arm’s length or two or three, to allow commerce to commence and busyness to fill empty lives. 

And yet the scourge remains – lurking in undiscovered clusters, in congested PPR blocks, in decrepit “mansions”, in sprawling, stilted communes lining highways and byways, in congregational kongsi within waterlogged sites of stacked concrete… where steel bars protrude threateningly. 

The time to question is clearly not over. There is now a second wave of unsettling ones. Troubling even. Are we doing right by all?  Or by some? Will we pay a price now if not in the weeks to come?

Do we care for those on whose backs we built our grand structures? Do we continue to allow them in as unemployment lines start to form outside pawn shops? As the Greek for “stranger” is resurrected in our minds? 

Time, if it doesn’t kill us first, will tell. – May 7, 2020.