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The mechanical, communal and spiritual process of dismantling Singapore’s Covid-19 circuit began with rain at the break of dawn, a cleanse. Never too late for a clean slate.
Our government, and all of us who understand, hope that not a creature would be stirring, while visions of sugar-plum times dance in our heads. Happy Circuit Breaking to all, and to all a good month!
It was in early January that Covid-19 murmurs began to tremor through conversations both vocal and virtual, winding through Chinese New Year celebrations and insinuating itself into tiresome whirlpools of much-too-forwarded memes and unexpert, badly written WhatsApp texts of fake and faulty variety.
Around the same time, I embarked on an adventure across the entire Sherlock Holmes canon in chronological order, re-consulting the classics, creeping off the beaten bibliography. I always have a soft spot for hard core crime and horror, but could not have imagined how much this craving intensified as Covid-19 manacles closed in with the depravity of Professor James Moriarty. And to my surprise, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s early set of parlor deductions, quirky infractions, procedural cases and funnily outrageous felons would soon drop the height of Reichenbach Falls into inhuman transgressions bleak to the point of sex slavery, mortally repellant gore, insidious malice and soulless evil. Unlinked virus community spread doubling, tripling? Why, there’s a country squire whose head has been so bashed in, his brain is splayed all over the library. A spike in imported cases with 200,000+ more overseas Singaporeans expected to flee home? Check out the delinquent baronet who hosts booze bashes featuring serial raping of captured village girls.
Holmes and Dr. John Watson would leap into hansom cabs and trains and tear off into investigations. I could not wait to dive into pajamas at the end of the day and throw open the 1,313-page The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes.
In early April, an overnight surge of almost 300 new infections, driving total number of cases into the 2,000+ threshold, is why we are now Circuit Breaking. But there are no more Sherlock Holmes cases for refuge, because I had just finished them all. In the concluding story His Last Bow, Holmes and Watson are in their 60s, well retired from dragnet days but briefly back in business for one final mission, also their most important, for they rescue classified documents key to Great Britain’s national security. The former 221B Baker Street roommates toast to successfully shackling a despicable German operative off into the night, but they also salute friendship, loyalty, sticking necks out for one another. In real life, Conan Doyle had written this concluding chapter in 1917, about a year before World War I ended.
“There’s an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it’s God’s own wind none the less and a cleaner, better stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared.” — Sherlock Holmes