Covidepistle Contest- Winning Entry

Written by Ashley Roby, Batch 18

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My sympathies and tributes to the living and dead, I seem to find no options before me that I could use to introduce myself in a manner that wouldn't boil your blood. I am constantly summoned in your prayers, used frequently in the national debates and invoked more than 100 times in a single edition of your daily newspaper. I'm corona. It would be quite presumptuous of you to continue reading this letter of mine with a spiteful frown and disregard to my side of the story. So consider this as my polite request to keep your intolerance to truth aside, for 5 minutes. Unaware of any letters addressed to mankind from viruses that crippled them, tonight I'm quite directionless about this whole affair. But I'm still resolved to inform you about the realities that I have seen. One of my top concerns is how you have come to illustrate me as a gruesome green monster. I'm unfamiliar, how it helps when the enemy is portrayed as ugly and vicious and squirmy with a thousand sprouting arms. Well, maybe it's true, unlike the other members of my extended family with geometric body shapes and slim figure overall, I'm quite round in all, blessed with equally sized limbs evenly spaced. Speaking of an extended family reminds me of my grandmother, MERS with whom I grew up. I no longer stay with her and my last day with her was 15 years ago. Though I'm fully aware of the expanse of the destruction my kin has done to the living world, my grandmother taught me to be unapologetic and bold. Unapologetic because the world leaders have been scapegoating us for their poor-planning, unfunded research fields, and their own overflowing bank accounts. we always seem to come handy when they need an escape plan. Bold because yes, we can simply stop everything and everyone within short notice(more often without any notice). But what my grandmother never told me, and even if she had I doubt if I would have believed her is the reaction a virus outbreak could elicit. Yes, I was prepared for the hate and the weeps, but what I can't still believe is the racism and the classism and the casteism that you hold on to despite the possibility of a life-threatening virus in the air you breathe. At the end of this all I would suggest the statisticians count the number of deaths against the number you left to die. I'm afraid, literate congregation, that one side of the balance will be weighed down by your sins. I'm shocked by the unfairness of the rich, closing their gates and shutting their windows, arming themselves with a mask, and looking down at the poor who worked for them till the previous day. An announcement of lockdown and a scare of spread sanitized the humans of any humanity. Three months since my first introduction to the world, I have come a long way and taken too many lives to count and witnessed many tears that were so weak to fall to the ground. And as I close this letter, I violate one of the two things that my grandmother taught me. To the countless bloodied footsteps of a thousand migrant workers who are stranded far away from their hometowns, to the millions of hungry cries that I can bear no more, to the weak sobs from the helpless health workers. -I'm deeply sorry. I shall leave before its too late. Farewell.