Only Between Us:

Living in a ghost city?

Aditha DISSANAYAKE in New York

Tick-a-tock, tick-a-tock. I wonder if you can hear it too. The sound of rain drops falling on Rebecca's bakery window. In spite of the turbulent weather conditions, I am here, seated at my usual table having braved a shower of icy cold rain, to come write this epistle to you.

I can hear a milder tick-a-tock too, close to my chair. The sound of water falling from my wet umbrella. It is hard to believe only a few days ago I had held this same umbrella to protect myself from the fierce rays of the sun. Last Saturday when the weather was a record breaking eighty degrees, watching me as I left her bakery in the early afternoon, and seeing me opening my umbrella, Rebecca had chuckled and said, "Diss honey its not raining". I grinned and replied. "I know".

Even though no New Yorker ever thought of carrying an umbrella when the sun is out, I held onto mine because here in New York you are free to do as you wish. Business was slow at the bakery today.

I had walked into find Rebecca in a sour mood. "Diss honey, I have had only six customers since five thirty in the morning" she explained and literary tore at her hair. "I baked forty beagles and no one has bought a single one yet. What am I going to do now?" She asked me but before I could think of a solution began to walk to and fro flinging her arms around saying "suicide." "suicide."

A director from Broadway, had he seen her, would have immediately cast her in a Shakespearean tragedy. She stopped suddenly in the middle of the chanting slapped her forehead and exclaimed dramatically, "Diss honey, it is this flu! The flu is keeping people indoors".

As if on cue the door opened just then and the old gentleman who usually buys an egg sandwich and a cup of coffee from Rebecca walked in saying "Brrrrrr.Brrrrr. I could do with a hot cuppa". He too agreed with Rebecca.

The side walks are empty. There are no queues at the supermarkets. Hardly any passengers are on board the Q64 buses. The flu has driven everybody indoors. This part of New York looks like a ghost city.

A ghost city where you should best fall dead than sneeze or cough.Isaac, the old gentleman, tells Rebecca and me how a lady had sent daggers at him when he coughed while waiting for his monthly check up at the Booth Memorial Hospital the other day. "She got up and went to the other side of the room as far from me as possible.

I told her, "Look here Ma'am, I have had this cough since Vietnam."He pauses wags his index finger at us and warns "Never ever cough or sneeze where people are around these days. They'll think you have got it."

Back at home I watch Mayor Bloomberg on TV disregarding this advice and "coughing" up humour at a news conference regarding the flu at the City Hall. Counselling against too much handshaking, even as he downplayed the threat he said "I thought about yesterday, how many people's hands I shook. I haven't come down with ..." instead of finishing the sentence he interrupted himself with a joke cough, smiled and apologized. Whether they were real or faked a remarkable number of reporters and staff at the City Hall appeared to have sniffles or coughs.

"If you cough or sneeze - as somebody just did - cover your mouth," Bloomberg said when interrupted by one well-timed explosion. One person who had no time for coughs or humour was Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who is trying to protect the interests of hog farmers, and who wished the virus was called something else.

"It is not correct to refer to it as 'swine flu,' because really that's not what this is about. It is about a human-to-human transmission," he said.For the record, you can't get the flu from bacon, pork chops or food of any kind.

"By calling it swine flu, it implies transmission from pork products, and that's not helpful to those who produce pork," said Richard Besser, acting head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Who can think of a better name for the flu? The one offered by Washington officials is "H1N1," while the European Union has renamed it the "novel flu."

Novel Flu! Attention, all fiction writers. Let us unite and protest.

Meanwhile for me, it is Hachhooose. Cough. Cough. No worries, though.This is only hembirissawa. I have walked all too often in the rain the past few days.

Catch you next week, hopefully with clear skies and a clear nose.