Facing the pandemic: What keeps ‘Hope’ alive

During a temporary lull from the rain that had fallen steadily since morning, I stood on my verandah and looked up at the heavens.

It was a purely mechanical gesture, more out of habit than anything else to look at clouds. The sky was grey and overcast and the dark clouds looked threatening; but they suddenly parted and revealed the Sun in all its brilliance, illuminating the sodden world around me.

The grey and damp houses, the rain drenched trees and the plants drooping under the weight of the accumulated moisture, the bedraggled crows squawking miserably and the murky, flooded streets were what I could see.

Looking up at the sudden burst of radiance across the leaden skies, I felt a kind of grace that only Nature could confer. As I gazed at the swiftly changing palette of greys, blues, and oranges of the skies, the cool, gusty wind whipping my hair, I spotted something, which given the circumstances, came as a complete surprise.

It was a kite, just an ordinary paper kite, flying high up, beyond the reach of the tallest building.

It leapt and danced, it swooped and fluttered and I imagined a child, fed up of being cooped up at home and without informing his parents, had crept up to the terrace to do what children rarely do now. Fly a kite. Remembering a childhood song, 'Let's go fly a kite/ Up to the highest heights', I smiled.

I assumed it was a child flying the kite; but it could have been an adult too, trying to escape the oppressive present and reeling back to a childhood pastime. I personally never learnt to fly one despite many efforts at copying the adults but since open spaces were plentiful those days, my sister would hold it aloft and toss it into the air while I remember running with the kite streaming in the air behind me.

That same feeling of freedom and exhilaration came over me in a rush, as I watched that anonymous kite perform its own little private dance in the air. It seemed to me a symbol of hope, in a very threatening environment. The child or the adult flying the kite too was exhibiting the same need to hold on to hope. The Sun shining out from behind the clouds, despite being the hackneyed and overdone cliche that it is, seemed to be symbolic of hope too.

Hope is given to us in all the little and big things around us. It's in the little acts of everyday kindness, in the Koel in the neighborhood, which never gives up calling despite the ancient tree in which it lived being hacked down overnight; in the pristine white Crinum lily that flowered despite being neglected.

It exists in the voice of a grandchild whom the grandmother has not physically seen in months, in the selfless acts of humanity that the virus has also given birth to.

The pandemic is teaching us lessons which we had forgotten and there's hope and deliverance in our desire to learn from them. Faith in the universal processes and in the indomitable human spirit fuels the hope and the courage inherent in us, to carry on.

The pandemic and the cyclones have showed us that we are all in it together, that in our stricken brothers' welfare lies ours. Nothing exists in isolation, everything is interconnected. And perhaps with that learning, we can venture forth again, revived and renewed and be free like the kite.

(The writer is a blogger based in Kolkata)