# Crisis The doctor's voice came steady and measured, like a metronome counting down the hours of a life. Rajen sat in the narrow chair, his fingers gripping the armrest so hard his knuckles had turned white as bone. Outside the clinic window, the city moved in its usual chaos—autorickshaws honking, vendors calling out their wares, pigeons pecking at scattered grain—as if the world had not just tilted on its axis. "Three months. Maybe four if we're fortunate." The doctor's eyes were kind, which somehow made it worse. Kindness from a stranger felt like pity, and pity was a territory Rajen had no intention of entering. He nodded, though he had heard nothing after the first sentence. The rest was just noise, morphine derivatives and palliative care, words that belonged to other people's tragedies, not his own. When he left the clinic, the sunlight seemed too bright, almost accusatory. He walked without direction, letting his feet choose the path. The crowded sidewalks felt like they were closing in on him, each person moving with such purpose, such certainty about their tomorrow. He envied them fiercely, these ordinary people with their ordinary problems—late for work, worried about rent, nursing small grudges. What he would give for such simplicity. By evening, he found himself standing outside his apartment building, unable to climb the stairs. He sat on the front step instead, watching the light drain from the sky. A neighbor passed him, said something kind. He didn't hear it. Inside, his wife Sheila was preparing dinner. He could smell the mustard oil, the onions, the familiar alchemy of their shared life. She turned when he entered, and something in his face told her everything. Her hands stilled. The wooden spoon hung suspended in mid-air. "Rajen," she said. Not a question. A name spoken like a prayer. He could not bring himself to say the words aloud. Instead, he crossed the room and held her, feeling her heart pound against his chest like a trapped bird. They stood like that for a long time, neither moving, neither speaking, while the dal came to a boil on the stove and slowly began to burn. That night, they lay in the dark without touching, though they had slept entwined for twenty-three years. He could feel her wakefulness beside him, a vibration in the air between their bodies. Once, he heard her weeping softly, the kind of weeping that tried to hide from itself. Morning came whether they wanted it to or not. Over breakfast—which neither of them ate—Sheila's phone began to ring. News travels fast in their world, carried on the wings of worry and obligation. Their son called from Delhi, his voice strained with distance and disbelief. Their daughter called from Mumbai, asking practical questions to which there were no practical answers. Friends called. Relatives called. Each conversation was the same, yet different—the same horror recalibrated through different mouths. "We should tell them," Sheila said quietly. "I know," Rajen replied. But what was there to tell? That he was dying? That death was democratizing them all in real time? That the thing he had always known intellectually—that he was mortal, that this body was temporary—was now a sentence with an execution date? Days collapsed into weeks. The apartment filled with flowers that bloomed and rotted in their vases. Visitors came bearing casseroles and sympathy, their eyes carefully avoiding his as if dying were contagious. He began to understand the isolation of his condition—not from distance, but from the vast gulf between the living and the dying, between those with time and those without. Sheila became someone new. Not unkind, but efficient. She began researching treatments—alternative medicines, ayurvedic physicians, a temple in the foothills that was said to perform miracles. He let her go, these quests for grace, knowing she needed to believe in them as much as he needed her to try. Hope was her way of loving him now, and he would not take that from her. One afternoon, in a moment of clarity that seemed to come less frequently as the days wore on, Rajen sat at the window with a pad of paper. He began to write letters. Not goodbye letters—he could not bring himself to write those—but fragments. To his children, about the things he had never said. To his wife, about the ordinary mornings he had taken for granted. To the man he had been before the diagnosis, the man who had argued about politics and worried about his job and complained about the traffic. The words came slowly, painfully. How do you compress a life into sentences? How do you fit love and regret and all the small accumulated moments into something someone else can hold? One evening, as the sun was setting in shades of amber and rose, Rajen looked at his wife's face and saw, for perhaps the first time, how much this was costing her. Not the illness—everyone's illness costs something—but the weight of witness. She was watching him disappear, day by day, and there was nothing she could do but stand there and bear it. "I'm sorry," he said. She looked at him, confusion crossing her features. "For what?" "For leaving you." She came and sat beside him then, taking his hand. "You're not leaving me," she said. "You're here. Right now, in this moment, you are here with me." He squeezed her fingers, feeling the truth of it. Not the metaphysical truth, not the comforting notion that somehow he would remain in her memory or her heart. But the simple, immediate fact: that morning they would have tea together, and he could still hold the cup, still taste the bitterness and the sweetness. That night, she would sleep beside him, and though they would not touch, they would breathe the same air. That for a few more weeks or months, they would continue this dance of the ordinary and extraordinary, of crisis and breakfast, of the dying and the living. The news from the doctor had been clear: three months, maybe four. But Rajen was learning something the doctor could not have told him: that in the space between the diagnosis and the end, there was a kind of living that only the dying could understand. A clarity that came from knowing the count was on, from understanding that every moment was both precious and arbitrary, that meaning did not come in grand gestures but in the precise weight of a hand held, in the taste of salt in a favorite food, in the particular quality of light at dusk. Crisis, he was learning, was not the diagnosis. Crisis was the reckoning with time that should have come long ago, the forced confrontation with what mattered when all the noise fell away. He looked out at the city—still moving, still honking, still utterly indifferent to his suffering—and felt, strangely, not bitter but grateful. The gift and the curse of his condition was that it had stopped him from sleepwalking through his own life. It was a terrible gift. But it was a gift nonetheless.

 
We are in the middle of a crisis. If Covid-19 hadn't come along, I might never have discovered that what we call a 'crisis' isn't quite the same crisis for everyone—that the virus has revealed entirely new dimensions to the whole business of crisis itself.


How so? Come, let me show you.


We have two sets of tenants. They move in circles far more elevated than ours. Sometimes, watching them, it crosses my mind that we're the ones renting their place. But anyway, after the coronavirus arrived, they found themselves in all manner of crises. From the very day Bangladesh reported its first confirmed case, I've heard them talking about being in some crisis or other. The lockdown hadn't even properly begun yet. One afternoon, just before noon, one of the aunties—that's what I'll call her—came and said to me, 'Bhavi, what will become of us! We're falling into such crisis. It will be hard to manage.' That very same day, she went to the market and came back with two saris for herself and two dresses for her daughter. And some cosmetics too. After all, a crisis is coming, isn't it?—so one has to prepare a little!


But that's not where it ends. The real crisis hasn't even arrived yet!


Just last month, on the 29th or 30th—right in the middle of lockdown—her husband went to the market. He came back with nearly 7,500 taka worth of dried fruit just for their young son. On top of that, he bought seventeen chickens. Fifty kilos of rice, twenty kilos of lentils, and mountains of other groceries, all in quantities far more than necessary. The next day, the auntie came by. She arrived and said, 'You know, Bhavi, I'm so stressed. What will happen! How will the business go? What will we eat? We're in such crisis.' Then began the hemming and hawing. I could see perfectly well what she was after in such a 'crisis moment'—what she might dare to ask for.


Then she started in: with lengthy, exaggerated accounts of what she'd been seeing on Facebook and television. This landlord won't take rent, that landlord won't take rent, some have even reduced theirs, while others are still collecting rent even in this crisis moment. Resting her cheek in her palm, she turned to my mother and said, 'Oh God! What a tyrant, Bhavi, tell me!'—(She spends all day watching Hindi serials, by the way. She doesn't even know what Bengali channels exist, yet here she is telling us what she's seen? She's just fishing through Facebook for material. Everything she says, she delivers with the most overwrought theatricality.) She went on and on while I sat there quietly taking it all in, waiting for her to get to the real point. She kept saying, Bhavi, what if Safat—that's her son's name—doesn't eat properly and wastes away! I'm so worried. What will become of my boy! You understand, don't you, Bhavi, the crisis is on…and with just that she started looking left and right, beating around the bush.


Then she finally came out with it! 'I mean, Bhavi, since the crisis is happening, couldn't we perhaps skip this month's rent? We'll definitely pay double next month.' My mother said nothing when she heard this. She just fell silent, and then the auntie left. We pay their electricity bill, and they pay us back later. They haven't paid the last two months' bill yet. Now they're asking to skip the rent! Their place is constantly full of guests, gifts, eating and drinking—if anything, it's increased now! After all, a crisis is on, they'd say…


Now let me tell you about the other set of tenants.


They've been in crisis, more or less, ever since the virus reached India. Crisis, crisis, crisis—it's constantly on their lips, every moment of the day.

# About Them

Let me tell you about them.

They have burgers or chicken fries for breakfast, and throughout the day they eat so much that three families’ worth of food disappears into their stomachs. They waste enormous amounts. All three members of the household are built like small elephants. The lightest among them—their son in class nine—weighs a hundred and two kilos. Sometimes I think, thank heavens the zoo people haven’t caught wind of them yet; if they did, surely something else would have happened. But what does it matter? It’s their money they’re spending, what business is it of mine?

Before the lockdown came and after it, they too competed with the other tenants to buy everything in sight. Just the other day they went to market and bought five kilos of shrimp at eighteen hundred rupees a kilo. Apparently their son is wasting away, demanding food constantly. Well, parents are parents, after all! When a child wants something, you can’t refuse. If they don’t feel like cooking, they order through FoodPanda because the nearby restaurants are closed. Everything from Hyderabadi biryani onwards! They too said they couldn’t pay the house rent. They have bills pending too. There’s only one reason…you know…the *crisis*.

Now let me tell you about another crisis. An uncle living next door is in quite a predicament. He’s continuing to build his three-storey house right through this lockdown. His logic is that if he doesn’t keep the work going, the labourers will starve to death! Oh, what a compassionate man—someone who withholds workers’ wages, who deducts the maid’s salary every month on various pretexts, who buys things on credit from the grocer’s shop—not because he lacks money, but because he chooses to! It’s his nature. He didn’t pay last month’s wages and has told the maid not to come for a few days. He too says he’s in a crisis. Doesn’t have much cash on hand, and now with this calamity on top of everything! How am I supposed to manage?

Let me speak more about these compassionate souls. With the arrival of this new crisis, I’m seeing fine examples of charity every day…

So this uncle next door is suffering in his crisis, but his heart is quite large. He wants to help people, but because of his crisis he can’t do anything. His crisis is so severe that though he can build a three-storey house, he can’t even provide breakfast to the workers. He didn’t do that before the virus came either, and now the question doesn’t even arise! After all, it’s a crisis! Anyway, I was talking about the uncle’s heart. The uncle told his son, “Listen, in these critical times we must stand by people.” Hearing his father, the son reached out to his circle of friends. Then it was decided that one of the son’s friends—son of a local politician—would distribute relief. But he couldn’t give to more than five people. And those five people had to stand there before he left, or he wouldn’t give anything at all.

So they selected five people carefully. I saw them standing from before the afternoon prayer, hoping for a little relief. And they got it only by evening time. All their prayers from afternoon to evening were missed. They were given the relief, then photos were taken, videos were made. They were uploaded to Facebook with grand captions. We saw it all and reacted with likes. The amount spent behind the relief was around two thousand rupees.

I was talking about crisis. But when the relief came, it wasn’t handed over directly to those five people. The aunt took it inside. And kept some for themselves.

He asked me to mention—if you eat relief food, apparently you earn merit. He’s never eaten any himself. So he’s setting these portions aside in hopes of gaining that reward. Ah! What logic. Here we’ve stumbled upon a brand new logic: eating relief food earns you merit, so it’s perfectly justified to set some aside for yourself from the relief distribution.

—

I witnessed another act of charity yesterday evening. People were being called together by loudspeaker—relief was being distributed at a nearby house. Crowds gathered. Then they handed out half a kilo of flour each. Just flour, nothing more. And yet people took it, cursing under their breath as they left. About thirty or thirty-five people received that precious relief in total. The ones distributing it? Well-to-do folk, naturally.

—

These past few days I’ve noticed something: presenting oneself as a do-gooder and showing off on Facebook has really taken off. This is precisely the moment to boost one’s own profile. It’s become a sort of competition—who can display their charity the loudest. Where I am, everywhere around, it’s the same. And then there’s the criticism: we’re not giving people anything, they say. To them I’d say this: Listen, you don’t have to worry about dying, but we do. This isn’t a time for us to celebrate. We’re not trying to show off. Let whoever sees, see—that’s enough. We don’t need to announce it to the world. In this society, the ones who give the most are the ones who boast the least.

—

Lately, a certain type of person has emerged—the kind with holes in their pockets, not a single coin to their name. They borrow from here, beg from there, and somehow scrape by through the year. Now they’re collecting money from various people, pocketing at least a quarter for themselves, and distributing the rest as relief—purely for the sake of posting on Facebook, nothing else. They snap pictures and shoot videos, then write captions underneath: “It’s my duty to donate a portion of my earnings in times like these. I’ve fulfilled my duty. Have you?” Below, people comment, hit the love reaction. They reply as if they’d given the money straight from their own pocket, spouting grand dialogue. The whole charade.

—

And yes, let me tell you about that do-gooder uncle. His son’s heart is just as big—or so it seems. The boy speaks to his parents with absolutely vile language. He gets bored of girls after six months, but somehow wants two or three at a time. The whole family knows. Nothing can be done. Still, word got out that the boy has a big heart. But only God and those girls know the truth—his heart is indeed big, spacious enough to accommodate so many without effort. And the parents, despite all this, still manage to tell people that they and their son have generous hearts. What satisfaction.

—

That boy’s occupation is romancing girls and taking money from people to squander it. He goes around the neighborhood boasting about his father’s connections, his various uncles—some cops, some magistrates, some big shots and whatnot. He mostly stays home now. Since he’s unemployed and useless at the same time, he spends his time on Facebook bothering girls and pestering others. That’s about all he does. Every so often he asks people for money through Bkash.

—

Sometimes I think this corona was desperately needed. We were flying far too wildly as human beings, doing whatever we pleased. Even now we haven’t stopped—we’re flying higher than ever.

And through our work, we keep discovering new definitions for all manner of things, heaping more pressure on job seekers’ heads—because every new term means another thing to study! Ha ha ha! I’m joking at a time when joking is hardly appropriate, but there it is. My head’s not quite right, you see. And botching the actual work? Well, that’s an old habit of ours!

At a time like this, I curse the crisis-mongering, do-gooder types and all these newly defined people with their inflated sense of importance—the very ones whose excesses have now plunged innocent people into genuine crisis. It’s truly heartbreaking. This is a global catastrophe of such magnitude that there’s nothing we can do except pray to our Creator and beg forgiveness. None of us knows when we’ll be freed from this calamity. What we need now, above all, is patience and forbearance.

Among all those working hardest for the afflicted in this disaster, not one goes live on Facebook, not one clutters our feeds with pictures and videos to unsettle us, none of them perform or show off. We don’t know them. Only God knows them, and their own conscience. No one will remember them. Even if we saw them, we wouldn’t recognize them. They will never receive an award or public acknowledgment. And yet, in God’s ledger—in the eternal record of who truly counts as human—their names are inscribed. May they stay well. May they live long. For the very life of this world, we need their lives to continue.