English · Chapter 20
Study notes aligned to the official NEB syllabus.
Vishnu Singh Rai is a Nepali writer and a professor of English education at Tribhuvan University, and this poem belongs to the poems unit of the Grade 11 Compulsory English course. It was written out of the coronavirus pandemic, at a time when much of the world was shut indoors and the virus was spoken of everywhere as an enemy. The striking decision of the poem is to hand the microphone over to that enemy. Rather than describing human fear and suffering from the outside, the poet lets the virus speak in the first person, answer the charges brought against it, and turn those charges back on the human world that makes them.
The poem opens with the virus addressing humankind directly and refusing the name it has been given. People call it a killer and a villain, and it begins by rejecting that description, not by denying that it brings death but by asking who taught the world to destroy on such a scale.
From that refusal the speaker moves into a list of what human beings themselves have done. They have cut down the forests, fouled the rivers, dirtied the air, and killed animals. They have invented weapons and used them, fighting wars against one another and calling the results victory. Set beside that record, the virus argues, its own damage is small and the guilt it is charged with is borrowed. What has come upon humanity, it says, has grown out of human greed and human arrogance, out of the habit of treating the earth and every other living thing as material to be used.
The poem then turns to the strange result of the pandemic. With people shut inside their houses, the world outside has begun to recover. The air is clearer, the water is cleaner, and other creatures move about more freely than they have for a long time. The virus offers this quietly, as evidence rather than as a boast: the planet improves in the very weeks when human activity stops, which tells the reader plainly which species has been doing the harm. The lockdown that humanity experiences as imprisonment is release for everything else that is alive.
Out of that observation comes the speaker's advice. It tells human beings to change the way they live and, above all, to learn humility. Humanity has thought of itself as the master and the owner of the earth, and the virus, invisible and carrying no weapons of its own, has shown how thin that mastery really is. The lesson it presses is moral rather than medical: take a smaller place, respect what shares the world with you, and stop imagining that everything exists for your use.
The poem closes on a note that is almost consoling. The virus tells humankind that it too will pass, that it is not permanent and will go the way of everything else. The ending is double edged. It reassures readers that the crisis will end, and at the same time it removes the last excuse, because once the virus has gone the ruined forests, the dirty rivers, the poisoned air and the killed animals will be left standing as human work alone, with nothing else to blame.