Miniaturizing Mini Corona

     Lock down was outwardly leashing while unleashing at heart. I am personally interested in the later aspect of it because, as most of its witnesses or let us say victims, there is no point of fascination in its external dimension. Where it bounded the hands of industrious beings and cunning capitalists, it confined the perspectives of creatives eyes to mere windows. Being into a room, for not hours and hours but months and months, reminds me the predicament of Kafka’s Gregor Samsa or perhaps Kafka himself. And then Kafka reminds me of the unconscious… stop yawr! I guess I should stop talking to my friend, the unconscious, now for Its time to plunge into creative inner courtyards of the writers whom this hegemonic span has galvanized to fill the vessel of Pandemic Short Fiction.

    Reading the pandemic short fiction took my-“self” directly towards the actual rooms from where, I consider, all stories come. Yes! I tried to stay aloof from recollection but could not help and even now I am trying not to express it, but my friend is ungainsayable. Hence, what I found is that the unconscious is not only my friend but of many others too. I know that this finding is silly or vague for those who condemn Psychoanalysis but still it is my (now our) legacy or as a friend of mine said recently “a room of my own”. Since the unconscious, I believe, is greatest artist who uses “metaphors and metonymies” more than any other artist, I found him (to me he is male but he or she, or one of many more, IS someone beyond today’s, or ever existed, gender division) helping all those prism-eyed writers putting a plethora of metaphors on pages. The metaphors for Corona Virus, or COVID-19 (as it is mentioned by common masses efficiently). These are actually the anxieties which they were facing while breathing hardly in each cramped space.

            Muhammad Sheeraz Dasti’s short story Kill All the Bats features a metaphor of bat which teased him again and again. It seemed him (inwardly) pouring corona virus into the roof tight water tank. Readers and other characters know that there was no bat but still if there was, it was not responsible for the outbreak of fatal as well as mortal virus. But look how our dear friend, the unconscious, helped Dasti to cope with this predicament. Dasti, assisted by the unconscious, miniaturized the whole terror of corona into a bat. He put it on his protagonist’s water tank above the house and then he adeptly veiled himself, wrapped his face again in a “blue Saraiki ajrak”, went on his roof and attacked the bat with his racket. The bat skipped his attempt, flew, and alighted on his character’s neighbouring roof, his beloved’s roof. I shall not bother with the beloved because our friend, the unconscious, does not bother for others in terms of satisfactions. The only worry now is about return of the bat which was still alive. But again, we have a friend who helps us handle such situations. It is up to us then that how we attempt to handle.

            The miniaturizing technique is quite interesting in case of corona fear that Dasti has used with the help of a metaphorical bat and then making it flee. Lock down was imprisoning superficially, however, Dasti’s technique determines that it was unshackling inwardly.