The silence is eerie. Listen careful, you might hear the street below, a siren, another siren. My friend Shalitha had a quiet wedding, we blest them virtually. None of us wore silks and perfume. Just a prayer for the best.

By 10 am, the stores are shut, the clutter gone. There is a certain boldness in our fear. A nation crouching, afraid, strangers to each other. I want to pray but the words are new. These are not prayers we prayed before. These are words within words. Yea from days as these, our roots grow. Here is no pretense

No awkward. Here we are real. Like in a Titanic sinking. We grab life boats, we run, stall, leap. The writing on the wall is not a debate anymore: there is the good, the bad, the ugly. There’s the sinner, the sin & the saint. The Giver, the Recipient. The Gift. In between is a silence that denies nothing.

There is God and the devil. And the deep blue sea. A Red sea. Some of us believe it will part when we pray. Some of us cannot believe in the next warm meal. Ay, our Roots are grown from days as these

Days as these, are in our books of war, of floods and cities buried in sands. Careful what you do, every move unwinds on the Pages of Time. We are now those walls of caves that told stories of hate and love, of the birth of civilizations, and those that fell.

These are the days we will be known by. Not just sweet sagas of survival, but too, of how we fell each other, or do not. Of rise in prices that need not have happened, of hoardings and anti- social leanings. Where are we? What happened to all our poet- ministries, our movie stars and heroes…. we are here, equally yoked in the silence between each new day,

each breath, every deed, these are what our children’s children will know us by…

these ways we reach out to one another, these ways we turn away or say nothing, or say/ do something: these are the days, the things that grow us,

and what we become/ what we are: our core, our minds, our physical soul….

these days be-tell all; whether we will step out of comfort zones to look across our walls at the other…

or look away,

we can rage at parliaments and virus, we can wrap our sensitivities in our cooking pots and shut our doors to our own shoes for fear of death and the dying,

but what new news is that? We will all die one day, it is the manner of our deaths that vary. And when in the Chapters of our History they will write of these Times, I pray..

I pray they will recognise us as humans, unafraid of each others’ dis – ease; that we knocked doors and went extra miles, that we did not wait for kings and parliaments for sweet salvation. There’s more people dying of fear than lack of a vaccine.

When they tell of this Decade’s doings, I pray they will hear and report that we at least tried to think of each other,

(cuz who knows what becomes of what we think, when we think in each other: when we pray, as individuals, as nations, as a planet)-

we will never know: till we know what we know when we expend ourselves for one another,

In these days..