Pulsating campus misses its life force

Sonika Sethi

Sonika Sethi

Sweet smiling village, loveliest of the lawn/Thy sports are fled, and all thy charms withdrawn/Amidst thy bowers the tyrant’s hand is seen/And desolation saddens all thy green.

The college wears a desolate look and roaming around in the empty corridors, I feel much like the village schoolmaster of the poem Deserted Village, penned by Oliver Goldsmith. The tyrant’s hand has sucked the youthful marrow out of the veins of this campus, once vibrant and throbbing with life. This tyrant is the deadly coronavirus. The classrooms, which were once inhabited by motley and boisterous youngsters, are now like a body without soul. The blackboard has not been rubbed clean for days and displays the table of tenses taught in the last class, probably a fortnight ago. The ground that accommodated a number of young and vivacious homogeneous and heterogeneous groups now lies forsaken. The science laboratories, with their state-of-the-art equipment, are waiting with bated breath the return of future scientists; computer labs, with their blinking screens and flickering cursors, are trying to stay awake for future CEOs; the culinary gadgets and gastronomic equipment in the home science lab await would-be chefs and sous-chefs to reignite the fires in the kitchen and create mouth-watering delicacies.

The canteen, the adda of the notorious and not-so-notorious groups, can hardly boast of the aroma of samosas and chowmein that wafted through its ambience. The cycle stand stands alone and far from the madding crowd. A place that harboured hundreds of vehicles, ranging from a plain Jane cycle to the most stylish bike, now bears a languorous and placid appearance.

The flora and fauna have also not been left unaffected by the tyrant’s ungraceful sweep. Stray dogs, once pampered by chirpy, giggly girls with biscuits, crackers and chips, yearn for those good old days. Some of them had even started to put on a healthy mane with all the mollycoddling. The lack of indulgence and motherly affection has not only made them look malnourished but also despondent. The trees, once the prized spot of young couples, now wear a droopy attire and wave aimlessly at the passing gust of wind that can hardly match the passion of the stolen kisses underneath them. The virus has taken its toll on the enthusiasm of these sporty lovers. When Shakespeare said, ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds, admit impediments’, he would not have imagined such times when couples would admit ‘till virus does us apart’.

The teacher in me misses the effervescent crowd pulsating with life. I miss doling out lectures, which I have been administering to their ilk from time immemorial. I miss their naughty ‘proxy’ tricks for their friends, who may be reclining somewhere under a shady tree with someone, with a pack of crisps and a soft drink, envisaging future plans quite oblivious of the lethal Covid.

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