Having had a respite  from commencing with obits for a few months, these columns are, perforce, back to the distasteful task. This time around it does not pertain to the District, though. His Royal Highness, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, was summoned to the Grand Lodge Above on the 9^th of  April at Windsor Castle. A subscribing member of Navy Lodge till his last day, Bro. HRH Prince Philip had been Initiated on 5^th December, 1952. It has been said of him that he would often turn up at the meetings unannounced. The 19 joins the rest of the fraternity in expressing the deepest condolences to Her Majesty the Queen on the loss of her beloved husband of seven and a half decades.

Nearer home, and tracing back to March, the initial feeling of over-optimism, generated by the launch of the various prophylactics, – their relative efficacies mark a topic of animated discussions, — has been markedly tempered with a blanket dripping with despondency by what is being commonly referred to as the second wave, a resurgence of corona afflictions that assumed alarming proportions as the month wore on. It can be attributed to a large extent to the lowering down of the guard too soon, a creeping in of an arrantly misplaced sense of complacency. Triggered, to a not inconsiderable extent, by what may be termed COVID fatigue, — patience and caution wearing thin after months of strict restrictions. Aggravated by the opening up of the mass transit systems and brick-and-mortar businesses, all of which, of necessity, entailed bidding adieu to social distancing, especially in the densely populated cities and towns. Inevitable, considering the equally unenviable cleft-stick alternative of a free-falling economy and the consequent dwindling job prospects. Here, in Bengal, as in the other four poll-bound states, the scourge found an additional fertile ground for proliferation with the serried phalanxes at the rallies and roadshows across the spectrum of the political parties,  where distancing and respirators have been defenestrated, to borrow loosely from Mr Tharoor’s inexhaustible store of words, — the surname is sufficiently familiar for the first name to be dispensed with — with  an almost cynical disdain, that the  wily virus, by now famous, or otherwise, for its canniness, has scooped full advantage of.  

However, not one to be intimidated by adversity, the District Grand Secretary, Bro G N Singh, organised a WALK from 19 to Victoria Memorial Hall and back on the morning of Sunday, the 14th of March. Adhering to COVID-appropriate protocol. Naturally. In part, to bolster flagging morale, to an extent to foster fellowship among brethren of the various Lodges, in part to awaken the social awareness of the pernicious effects of plastic. In an attempt also to make known to the uninitiated what is generally perceived an occult, tight-lipped organisation. A step-by-brisk-step account is furnished below by Bro Vaswani —  a name appearing with such regularity in these columns, that his first name too, one feels, may be mentioned at the expense of courting superfluity. Saves time and space, if you get the drift, dear reader.

Ah, and that nugget that had almost skipped the mind: there was this almighty scare of Bro Amit Ukil complaining of a pain on the left side of his chest after having jogged a hundred odd yards  to catch up with the tail of the procession. Having, in his customary tardiness, arrived a full hour and a half behind the appointed time. While subsequent tests, clinical as well as pathological, threw up nothing that could cause worry, he has been advised to quit smoking, to scale down the drinking to a moderate four hundred litres a week – er, resolved to the milli factor, that is — and to shake those oxidized limbs, otherwise in a perpetual state of inertia; to give a spot of much-needed respite and exercise – a contradiction in terms, it would appear at first sight —  to the  cardio-vascular organs.

Then there was the Lodge of Improvement, conducted by the DBGP – District Board of General Purposes, to the uninitiated — on the 18th of March. With the virtual flailing of the arms that constitutes the discharge of the signs of the three degrees in most cases, and flounders in the most elementary of rituals like the opening and closing of the Lodge, the exercise could not have been more timely. “Long overdue”, ace ritualist, Bro Harris James, could not have been faulted had he elected to so correct, or, the martinet, Denzel Hilt, had he thundered, jolted awake in disgust from his “five feet or more in perpendicular” subterranean repose. The Assistant District Grand Master, Bro Subir Dutta, recounts it at length. The collaboration, not the withering obiter dicta of the two legends.

Read on, dear brethren.