Entering the Quiet Zone

How We Found Peace in a Strange War

Nobody will forget the months of March to June 2020, no matter how long or where they live. Everyone will remember until the end of their lives the place they spent the pandemic lockdown period, whatever else life throws at them. Most will carry bittersweet memories.

As normalcy or what seems like it returns, one feels like dipping one’s feet again into that cold pond to get a sense of why it felt so cool. A personal ice bucket challenge of sorts. That lockdown was weird and with its extreme anxieties and uncertainties but that is not the whole picture.

For most people, it has been once in a lifetime experience when death chased everyone home and stood by the doors watching the streets. Its adventures will make bedtime stories children will ask grannies, decades from now, to tell again and again about the time the world changed and so deeply affected the oldies that they too changed (at least before the rude awakening of Police Brutality induced riots in the US).

Who will ever forget?

How can anyone forget that?

Memories Of Another War!

In the second quarter of 1967 an ugly civil war to stop the country Nigeria from breaking up started. Yes, a war to compel those you don’t really care much about to stay with you. That war would last for 3 years and consume more than three million lives. Among its first crimes was the dropping of bombs on civilian targets in the commercial city of Aba in the Eastern part of the country that was seceding as Biafra.

Before then, one of the playground thrills for children in Aba and that part of the country was calling out loudly to airplanes flying above their space to drop gifts.

When there are no planes in the air the children would sing loudly to flying egrets (maybe because of their pure white plumage) to replace the children’s dark fingernails with fair ones. Of course, they never got what they asked for and even if they were heard, they instinctively knew those requests would never be fulfilled and so remained in the realm of their childhood dreams. They also knew that the gifts could ‘mistakenly’ be dropped for the ‘wrong set’ of children from those heights.

All that meant a lot of passion in stretching of tiny vocal cords and the dream of those gifts, whatever they were, remained a dream for generations; each picking it up until it is outgrown without fulfillment.

Then one fateful day in 1967 a rather noisy and unusually low flying airplane flew over a primary school in Aba and most pupils in the playground sang for gifts while running in the direction the plane was heading and suddenly it happened.

Against the background of a bright sky, something dropped out from the plane in the space beyond the school area, by a railway line, into an open crowded market place. The school children roared in excitement. Then they heard the loudest explosion of their young lives as the dark object hit the earth. Hell literally broke loose.

Then The Bubbles Burst

They were too young to understand it. They may have heard of their new country, Biafra; of death in Nigeria, of soldiers preparing for or fighting a war, but the explosion and subsequent stories were a confirmation that someone was out to kill them.

They were never the same again and that’s how they lost childhood innocence. With that nightmare, they lost the dream of receiving direct gifts from airplanes.

Other nightmares would follow in the next 30 or so months. The children would instantly dive for cover whenever and wherever they heard the sound of fighter planes or any planes in the air. Aircrafts carrying relief items from the Redcross and Caritas would cause the same panic and fear even though they sounded different.

The children would suffer deprivations, kwashiorkor, and scurvy. The makeshift clinics that lacked essential medicaments and the very limited personnel were for the badly wounded, not the dying.

There were no ambulances. They would find badly smelling and bloated dead human bodies on the roads. Bodies were shoveled into mass graves with no funeral rites, following those air raids and bomb blasts. Lone deaths meant shallow graves hurriedly dug by whoever, if they happened far away from families on the run with no fixed destinations or addresses.

Wars are certainly ugly and leave particularly deep unseen scars on children.

Some carry those invisible wound marks into adulthood and old age. Some get really paranoid over what others whose psyches are not so pricked would laugh off. Wars just don’t leave survivors normal, no matter where.

Geographies make a minimal difference when it comes to the damage to the souls of those who go through wars. Maybe because there are common occurrences whose effects appear the same though perceived differently by different sets of people.

Wars first strangle commercial and social activities, especially near the front lines. It is worse when a small country has so many war fronts. Life as it knows it fades away and it becomes a strange shadow of its old self. That’s how the world in the Pandemic Lockdown reminded us of Biafra. The enemy was in the air, the land, and the sea. The war fronts were many and everyone and everything could cause death.

Like in Biafra, like in other places where crises descend unexpectedly. War zones are so eerily quiet when cars and motorbikes are not on the roads. Virtually all factories shut down. Raw materials cease to be available and of course, factory hands are needed somewhere else — as soldiers. Teenage boys and grown men are conscripted into the army with no time to train them well before they are taken to the war front. So young men and boys hide away until they are caught.

Gatherings even for religious activities are not allowed. Schools are shut. People hide in bunks, bunkers and bushes in the day time. Talking, except in whispers, may reveal your locations to snipers and enemy scouts. You learn to suppress loud yawns, coughs and sneezes.

Existences are pared down to breathing, food and shelter. Nobody is healthy (vitamin deficiency related diseases including those that arise from the absence of exposure to sunshine, yes! are common) and nowhere is safe.

The sounds mostly heard are the sporadic firing of machine guns and rifles and then long drawn silences. The unusual silences and threats of gunshots are sensed by animals.

The birds do not even sing. They get scared off by the loud explosions and gunshots, or just stay quiet in the trees as they fail to hear familiar sounds. Those that feed off remnants of human food or farm crops that are no longer there die or move away. The herbivores are disturbed and migrate; the carnivores migrate or die.

The food chain is broken. The ecosystem cracks. The usual noises cease.

No Echoes

The absence of noise also means no echoes. It is an unusual and bizarre state of being that requires adjustments or modifications of behaviour.

It is not all weird, though. Some good is in it too. Most times in this state of minimal outside activity, there is less dust, dirt and smog in the atmosphere. The air is cleaner and more breathable. In such a space you feel lighter and less burdened, if you manage to shift your mind from the existential threats and anxieties. Your soul expands. Its emotional muscles are tested.

Your senses too may also come more alive and you may begin to notice how you notice things. There’s usually something dreamy about the experience that reminds you of how much you have missed even what you did not know was there.

The 2020 pandemic lockdown emptied the streets and stopped some of the noise in urban and commercial cities. In some suburbs it was so calm, so quiet that backyard goats jumped the flower hedges after eating their fill and gathered in the streets.

The animals must have wondered where the noisy and relentlessly restless humans retired to and why their departure was that sudden.

Very Noisy Humans

It was a reminder then that human beings, more than all other creatures, make the most unnecessary and sometimes useless noise.

Other animals produce sounds which are parts of a whole, have some significance, carter to some need or solve some basic or useful purpose. The noise from other animals even when they sound cacophonous or pointless immediately tells a meaningful story once you understand the context.

Humans are probably lured by their higher intellect into making frivolous and jarring noises with their tools or machines thinking they matter not as long as the ‘loftier purposes’ are achieved. Chainsaws and power motorbikes are serial offenders.

So we seem more than any other species to cause noise pollution with little concern for how it hurts us, the surroundings and other beings living around. Don’t yet think of grenades and landmines.

We don’t notice or care because after a while such intruder noises become background hum or soundtracks of our nonstop live movies. That’s why those who wander far from human habitations and traces of civilization sometimes reach very Quiet Zones, get hooked and are often reluctant to rejoin human communities. When compelled to return they keep yearning for that peace touched their souls.

Such noiseless zones are often forced on us by wars and other conflicts or disasters that compel human evacuations. And that is the big irony!

When The Noise Stopped

So it was during the Pandemic Lockdown when some folks, for the first time, heard the crows of neighbourhood roosters.

Gone was the human and machine noise of the Train Stations, the Airports, the Seaports. Playgrounds, Stadiums, Cinema halls, Theatres, Auditoriums and Churches were all empty and quiet. Bars and Restaurants, Coffee shops and Eateries, Salons, and Shops all turned their chairs face down and pulled the curtains. Just like that! Aha! Ahhh!

The conflict areas of the world may have smouldered but were forced to cool off. Kim Jong of North Korea took away his finger from the operating button of the nuclear warheads.

In the hot Sahel Region of Africa, in Congo, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Gulf Region of the Middle East, there was deescalation of crisis as all lives were under threat and news reporters were not on the field to create desired visibilities for bloated egos. The US November 2020 presidential elections will for that matter consume relatively narrower news space than the country’s other presidential elections in the recent past.

It is now a sobering world ruing maniacal hangovers and worried more about the enemy that has no respect for boundaries or shoulder chips. An enemy that sneaks in on you, strikes deathly blows and can only stop when you hide from it and from other people. Under the ashes are still burning coal, though.

There are many reports of numerous acts of help and charity for humanity.

Heartwarming stories of people running errands for elderly neighbours who were virtual strangers. People going out to sing in the streets to warm the hearts of neighbours locked in their apartments.

People donating food and money, providing foster homes for pets of those hospitalized, hotels offering rooms for isolation, keepfit exercises led from rooftops for those who missed the gym routines, free online tutorials for students and many other gestures of human kindness.

Strange that it takes a war even one against a tiny virus for us to faintly experience some wholesome peace around us.

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