'Amma, haven't eaten for four days'

Photographer and activist Shahidul Alam hears children crying out for food from his ktichen. He's already warned of a looming famine, and decries profiteering by the powerful.Loud and angry, the child’s voice reverberates along the Dhanmondi streets. Unlike the other cries, this one quickly recedes before I can turn on my audio recorder. The incessant pneumatic horns, the screeching of brakes, the dust spewing up from potholed worn tarmac that bedraggled buses bump their way through have gone. With factories and offices closed, load sheddings have also gone down, though the transformer blowing up as the kal boishakhi storm hit, did lead to a power outage. Above the cawing of a crow that has built its nest close to our verandah, we can hear other birds sing. Sounds interspersed with calls of small time vendors, trading what they can, selling what they can. While they can. Despite the other sounds, the child’s cry keeps echoing in my mind.In March, I’d written that famine was over the horizon due to the Covid-19 lockdown, but I hadn’t expected it to rush headlong at such great speed. When our rikshaw pedalled down empty Dhanmondi streets to the few shops that were still open, I couldn’t help seeing the rising number of people sitting on the footpath. It was the first visible sign of famine. Blank faces, looking straight ahead. Expressions stoic. The unmistakable stamp of hunger etched in their eyes. These are not people used to begging. They are there because they have no choice. At the wrong end of the capitalist food chain, these are the people the state considers ‘expendable’. Stripped of their dignity, they wait for our largesse.Yes, Covid-19 hits everyone, but for those who live day-to-day, lockdown equates to hunger. A gnawing hunger that engulfs you from the inside. Once that meaning is understood, perhaps the ease with which lockdown is uttered and the responsibility for its implementation cannot be taken so lightly. ‘Home’ lockdown assumes one has a home, and food and ways to stay connected.I’ve been recording the cries. Throughout the day and well into the night, we hear them from our kitchen, people in the streets, crying out for food. ‘Amma (mother), khalamma (aunt), haven’t eaten for four days. Give me some rice.’ Voices of women, men, children. The sounds break the silence of the quiet streets. ‘Amma, khalamma, haven’t eaten for four days.’ The cries fade slowly. In the secure apartment blocks we now live in, people from ‘outside’ are a threat. People are not sure how to help. A few find ways to give food through the locked gates.Advised by Drik’s electrician Nannu and our driver Joshim and sympathetic shopkeepers, Rahnuma and I started off by distributing bags with rice, lentils, potatoes, onions, cooking oil and soap, a month’s ration to each recipient. The inequalities we live within, cannot be solved by such stop gap methods alone, and we quickly discovered how inadequate our attempts were. We deliberately left at 6:30 the next morning, hoping things would be more manageable in the early hours. Nannu had arrived even earlier and, looking at the empty streets, had thought we’d find no one. Spotting a man in a wheel chair a few hundred metres down the road, he stepped out to hand over a bag. Others quickly gathered, and we stopped on the other side of Dhanmondi bridge on Road 8, to give out a few more bags. It worked for a while but people kept coming, seemingly from nowhere and soon we were out of our depths and had to leave. We later turned to friends who knew better.Despite looming famine, some spot opportunity. True to form, a section of ruling party affiliates stole rice. Others supplied fake masks. Expensive testing kits were imported illegally. All bought by taxpayers’ money. Some even saw it as a photo op, crowding around a bag of rice, or by a farmer in a rice field.What we’ve collectively been able to do, will make little difference to those who grow our food, earn our nation’s wealth and build the citadels we live in. The stolen rice, the hijacked elections, the share market scams and the corporate profiteering, in village malls and in distant boardrooms, are the less covered stories. The perpetrators, often powerful themselves, are shielded by others in power. The ‘stimulus packages’ hardly reach the crying child. They say the virus does not discriminate. The powerful do.Shahidul Alam is a 2018 Time magazine 'Person of the Year'. Please visit www.shahidulnews.com to see additional reflections.To read all '30 reflections for our times', please follow the Facebook page '30 days 30 deeds', Instagram @salmahasanali, or subscribe to the newsletter at www.salmahasanali.com.Photos: Saanya Ali (@stinglikeali)