One was already aware of the touch between parents and children, and between compassionate peers and caregivers. And once we know what to touch and who to touch and not touch when already young, decades later the novel Coronavirus finds in us a slave to easy discrimination. In the neighborhood, anything to do with touch across caste and class was an elusive subject, nearly absent in its mention. In the age of Covid crisis while reading American poet Ada Limon where she urges, “I am asking you to touch me now”, I feel again and again that touch returns to eclipse all material largesse, natural bounties, and social and political one-upmanship. Months after our hands are sealed off, we will have to reinvent touch as well as the surfaces we touch, some of it metaphorical.

Source: Dhaka Tribune June 11, 2020 06:00 UTC