I lived in an apartment with students from across Chattogram and Khulna, and their classes moved online very quickly. We were all scrambling to get our work done in the small, crowded apartment. It was hard to keep a schedule. The few windows we did have, which fed light only to the outward-facing bedrooms. Without a way to see the daylight, our schedules soon got out of sync. We were waking up at noon and playing Ludo and cards until five in the morning. But we were also working, sitting down for wholesome family dinners, and all-in-all having a pretty good time. One day, my friend looked at me out of the corner of his eye and quipped, “This has really given us an idea of who has the emotional distance to survive the apocalypse.” And it was true.
But the second issue with writing about the coronavirus is how quickly circumstances change. With an administration as unpredictable and unstable as Sheikh Hasina’s, and with more and more flights being cancelled each day, staying out of the country felt like a bigger gamble every day. When a banner appeared on the top of The Daily Star website that read “Sheikh Hasina tells citizens – Please stay at home, don’t go outside if not necessary,” I knew that something was shifting. When I read the headline, I slipped my phone into my pocket and didn’t say anything, deciding I’d deal with it the next morning. But my roommates were going through similar things with their hometowns. That night I went to sleep with everyone planning to stay in the apartment. The next day I woke up and half the apartment was poised to go home. Three days later, there was nobody left.
I boarded a bus-ticket within few hours of deciding to leave and traveled through eerily dark bus-stop in Dhaka and Mymensingh. I missed my bus in Dhaka-Mohakhali and ended up being re-routed through Tangail-Madhupur. There, I ended up sleeping in the bus for hours because of huge traffic. The next morning, I noticed that the bus was bustling with people. It was almost surreal to see a place that the crisis had not reached yet, and it was incredibly nerve-wracking. I’d been through this before, and I know what happens if people don’t take the pandemic seriously.
The unfortunate byproduct of staying in Dhaka for as long as I did is that I inadvertently put myself in a position to experience the arc of the virus twice. Everything in Dhaka seems to be occurring about a week before the equivalent events in the Mymensingh. Thus, I’ve inevitably been comparing how each town has handled the crisis. In Dhaka, I was so grateful that even as everything shut down around us, the grocery stores remained fully stocked. There were six of us in a small apartment, so daily grocery store visits were pretty inevitable, but it was never a problem.
In general, people seemed to follow the quarantine order at the beginning, but the whole country felt strangely calm. On the other hand, there’s a sort of rabid individualism in the Mymensingh, that has worked for us for a long time, but it makes politicians bicker at the expense of lives and it makes people hoard supplies and panic. Empty grocery stores are not an inevitable result of the virus; they’re something we did to ourselves.
TO BE CONTINUED….
Foysal Hasan Tanvir
Student, Department of Law
UN Children Advisor at CHRD
Picture: bohuslaningen
November 24, 2020
Brave Dimension Global 