When the nature decided to move...

(I wrote this piece on May 14,2015)

So, what do you do in a crisis situation? What do you tell yourself to understand the uncertainty of the days? How do you cope with the lingering fear of what the nights hold?

Twenty days and counting but the dark day is still fresh in the memory of the people who experienced it. Anyone who has tried to forget and move on has had their memory jolted by the daily reminder of aftershocks. I myself remember the day clearly when the nature showed how it was still the controlling force in this so-called world of humans...

It was the beginning of an average Saturday morning for me. I wanted to sleep in after a long week of working on my final year project, but the sharp sound of alarm startled me out of my sleep. I had forgotten to turn my alarm off. I heard movement outside my room. My parents had already started their day. In the next hour or so, I tried to go back to sleep but the constant movement and loud conversation did not help my cause. Finally, I kicked my blanket off of me, stood up and gingerly walked towards the bathroom. I am neither a morning person nor am I a very social one so I didn’t utter a single word to anyone until I was fresh and made tea for myself. By that time, my mum and dad were all dressed up and ready to go out. My father works overtime most Saturdays and my mother teaches tailoring to students as a part of extra classes in a school. I was having my breakfast when I remembered I had something I had to attend to. I had to finish a poster presentation and deliver it to my college by 11:00 am in a program for April 25, the DNA day. So, I gathered my notes and laptop and went to my friend’s house to work on the poster.

My friend’s house is just five minutes’ walk from where I live. I reached there and we worked on the presentation for about an hour and a half. We were not satisfied so decided not to go ahead with the poster. After all, we had only finished working on one third of our project and we were not very confident about our poster. So, I came back home feeling dejected and wondering why I was so lazy.

Back at the house, I was watching the preview of football matches of the premier league in England on my television, when my brother came back after a haircut. We started talking about his new hair and how my hair is always messed up. My brother is a follower of latest fashion and compared to him, I am a blob. I had had enough of his self praise, so I shifted the conversation to football. The topic swiftly escalated to how good Liverpool, his favorite club are compared to the team I support, Arsenal. I and my brother like to argue about simple things and our argument often turns mildly violent but in truth, we are as thick as thieves. I guess my brother did not want to go on with our little quarrel for long and said he was going to take a bath.I told him to have lunch first and he agreed.

I passed the TV remote to my brother and stood up to go to the kitchen. I was just out of our living room when I heard a lovely song playing so I went back in to watch it. Mid way through the song, I looked at the clock on the wall to see the time. It was four minutes before twelve and then suddenly it happened.....