So whose mistake was it when thousands are said to have drowned in the Bay of Bengal during last week's storm? Whose shame was it that countless bodies floated in the water before they turned into delectable dishes for the crows, vultures, and dogs? The government blamed it on the opposition. The opposition blamed it on the government. Nobody wants to accept the blame, and everybody wants to pass the shame. The fact remains that it was one big mess.

The first point of order is that nobody bothered to mourn these deaths. People die around us all the time, but should that take away our capacity to feel the loss? Did the parliament show respect to the dead by observing silence for even one minute? Did we do anything as a nation to mourn the loss of so many lives? It is perhaps the grotesque law of calculus, but the grief of one or few deaths often paralyzes the country. Even the flag is kept at half mast at times when an eminent national or international person dies. But, so many of our own countrymen perished without a trace, as if they had never lived amongst us.

Do we know how many people have died so far? Have we tried to count the numbers? Often trying to assess the loss is a way to show the moral compunctions for failing to prevent it. For god's sake, we are not talking about a flight of birds or pack of animals here, not even a school of fish or swarm of locusts. They were human beings like us, in limbs and lumps, in hopes and dreams, those who went to the sea to earn their livelihoods like we go to work, ministers go to the parliament and the opposition goes to the streets.

It is said that Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea" presents all five forms of conflict: man vs. man, man vs. society, man vs. other man, man vs. nature, and man vs. fate. If we ignore the conflicts between man and nature and between man and fate, the other three conflicts become quite obvious if we look at the way we have treated these deaths. It is an irony that we are so engrossed in our all too human activities that we even forget we are human beings.

How else could we not act when human bodies were drifting in the water, when those decomposing bodies were being devoured by birds and animals? How could we not feel the pain every time the claws, beaks, and fangs sank in the flesh, every time the vultures went for the eyes, the crows drilled into the entrails, and dogs tore away the limbs? We can argue forever as to who created this mess, whose mistake it was and who ought to take the blame and shame. We can point fingers at each other but nothing will change the fact that what we have done is less than decent.

It is hard to tell whether men and women transform into higher or lower beings once they enter politics. It is hard to tell whether their hearts and minds harden after or before they get into the game. But it lowers my head in shame that they should have behaved the way they did, that they started accusing each other instead of doing something to recover the dead bodies. These politicians who go overseas even if they sneeze, those who appreciate good health and long life, didn't even bother that those who died might have loved life with equal intensity.

It was a big mess indeed when bloated bodies washed ashore, looking stiff and enigmatic like sculptures of death, their raised hands and frozen claws portraying how they must have wanted to clutch at anything to cling to life, until the pressure of water took them to their watery graves. But we need to find out whose mistake it was not to tell those poor fishermen that the sea was going to be hungry and disturbed, that they needed to stay out of harm's way.

Then we need to deal with the shame as a government, as an opposition, and as a nation. It was people who gave their lives to create this nation, and the nation did nothing, when it could, to save these people. Not only that, this nation even did nothing to show that it was shocked and saddened by their death.

I don't know what happens on the other side of the grave. Will these fishermen ever wake up to remember what happened to them, one minute riding on the waves and next minute going under as water rushed into their nostrils, ears, and mouths to suffocate them? Will they then realize that we didn't do what we could have done, probably to save some of them, perhaps all of them?

Even if they do, good news is that they would never come back. We don't have to look them in the eye and tell why we have been so obscenely insensitive to them. They went to the sea and then they went beyond. What about us, those who have been left behind stewing in our own unfeeling juice?

We shall live to die in our allotted times, some normally, others abnormally, since death pervades both sea and land. But mourning is a way to draw the line. It is the rite of passage that gives mere mortals a chance to transcend their state. When you weep for the dead, it is actually an appreciation of your life. Perhaps we don't care who lives and who dies because we are a bunch of living deads.

If the sea has taken them, it is their good riddance. Better dead than living in this mess. In many ways, what has happened to them has also happened to us. They drowned and we sank. The difference is a sea of shame!

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.