Lockdown : The Well (Day #1)

Eleven days of national disaster declared: Day one of national lockdown . Still no running water.
It has been happening for so long nobody ever whines about it anymore . We’ve accepted this ,we treat this ‘crisis’ with casual indifference.

When you open the tap it’ll mimick a hiccup like sound …only a bit more hopeless . This sound is not of complete dryness ,no! Its mocking , like theres something clogging the supply. That sound you make when theres a bubble of vomit stuck in your throat, burning the delicate walls of your gullet.

Nobody ever opens the tap anymore. Theres a well on the outskirts of the slums, so we casually head there. Half the settlement population queued up in a cacophonous convoy of creaking wheelbarrows , with the discipline of foraging ants. We share scooping jugs, buckets; and exchange pleasantries —shoulder hugs, knuckle bumps, handshakes— why not?

The Ministers’ safety measures are not a reality here. We are already victims of a deadlier pandemic ,those ‘precautions’ doesn’t apply to us…we live just outside the invisible walls of a castle called Class, like exiled refugees .

So we raise our fists ,punching the humid air of the wet lands and chant: ‘aluta continua’ in collective condemnation of the end of struggle. And the universe complies. ©