The Covid 19 pandemic started taking its drastic toll in April 2020 which resulted in the imposition of lockdowns across the globe. The Russia-Ukraine war entered a dangerous phase in April 2022 envisaging global involvement. So it is April which has become unusually unkind and that would indeed reinforce TS Eliot’s notion that “April is the cruellest month“. 

English poets have had a strange fascination with the month of April. Chaucer, the father of English poetry, began The Canterbury Tales by praising April, ”Whan that Aprille, with hise shoures soote,/The droghte of March hath perced to the roote”. Translated, the lines read: “When in April the sweet showers fall/ That pierce March’s drought to the root and all”. 

In modern times, Eliot visualised April in a totally different light. For him, brooding over the wasteland of early twentieth-century urban civilisation, April is the cruellest month because it bred lilacs out of the dead land. April, however, brought forth hope in a hopeless world. But such hope was an illusion: “what are the roots that clutch, what branches grow/Out of this stony rubbish?” It was the creation of an illusion that made April so cruel. 

It is the time when Proserpina, the Girl goddess, the queen of Hades and the daughter of Zeus and Demeter, is allowed by Pluto, her husband, to revisit the upper world, and bring fruitfulness to the earth. 

It is the time of Christ’s resurrection, the never-ending battle between life and death, between human truth and a divine one. It might symbolise a call for renewal, transfiguration, and completion of being. 

It is the time when the fallen leaves of autumn that nourished the soil under the snow blanket are metamorphosed into new roots now painting them white, seemingly barren patches of the earth with green oases of life that would eventually shelter the passerby in the torrid days of summer. The winter’s cruel purity retreats to give room to the teenage passionate winds of spring, singing through the fir trees, and shaking down the old dark needles to pave the way for new bright green ones. 

It is the time for spring to dress in her robe of green. The meadows are fresh under her joyous laughter and trees become passionate with birds. Frail patches of snowmelt under spring’s flute as she first questions winter’s sway; buds open and fields rejoice when the soil bursts its wintry feathers. Snakes too cast off their slough when spring returns, signifying the renewal of life. Faust asks: Spring through the birch-trees veins is flowing,/The very pine is feeling it;/
Should not its influence set our limbs a glowing?, and Mephistopheles answers: I do not feel it, not a bit! /My wintry blood runs very slowly;/I wish my path were filled with frost and snow. What prevents him from feeling it is the coldhearted and cynical nature of a fallen angel, torn between satanic pride and dark despair. 

That “dark despair” has now wrapped the entire globe and made the city space what Eliot called the wasteland where lilacs breed only to wither. The list of unfortunate events that took place during the month of April is long. This April marks the 102nd anniversary of the sinking of the historic Titanic. The passenger liner RMS Titanic sank after striking an iceberg on her maiden voyage across the Atlantic. The incident took the lives of more than 1,500 people. 

The Rev Martin Luther King Jr and President Abraham Lincoln were assassinated in April. Shortly after the end of the American Civil War, President Lincoln was shot dead. 

On 18 April 1906, a powerful earthquake centring on the northern California coast shook the city of San Francisco. A fire that broke out after the quake destroyed 80 per cent of the city. 

The Ludlow Massacre occur- red in April 1914 when an ongoing conflict between the Colorado Fuel and Iron Co and the Colorado National Guard turned deadly. As many as 20 people died when the guards fired on the tent colony with a machine gun. 

The Hillsborough Disaster of April 1989 remains the UK’s deadliest sporting disaster. Overcrowding at the central pen at Hills- borough stadium in Sheffield, England led to a disastrous event in which 96 people were crushed to death. The Waco siege began when members of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms attempted to raid a compound occupied by heavily armed members of the Branch Dravidian Religious Group. After the end of the standoff on 19 April 1993, the FBI used teargas to flush the Beach Dravidians out. A massive fire broke out killing 76 people. 

The Oklahoma City bombing took place in April 1995 when a truck loaded with ammonium nitrate fertilizer exploded outside the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City killing 168 people.

In April 2010, the Deepwater  Horizon oil drilling rig was destroyed by an explosion and subsequent fire while drilling for BP about forty miles off the Louisiana coast. The spill caused massive ecological damage in the Gulf of Mexico and along the Gulf Coast. 

A disastrous fire broke out at a fertilizer storage and distribution facility in the city of West Texas on 17 April 2013. A massive ammonium nitrate explosion took 15 lives and destroyed 150 buildings in the city. 

A massive fire started on the roof of the famous Notre Dame Cathedral on 15 April 2019. The roof of the Cathedral was almost burnt down. 

On 14 April 1989, demonstrations began in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square over the death of a popular pro-reform leader Hu Yaobang. The protests continued, culminating in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army violently clearing the Square crushing some protesters and firing on others. 

The number of untoward incidents that happened in April is thus multiple. It was in April that Texas and Oklahoma were hit by one of the worst sand- storms of all time, creating the area known as the “Dust Bowl”. Many people died. 

A massive hailstorm hit Gopalganj, Bangladesh when 92 people were killed. In Moradabad, 246 people lost their lives to hail in April 1888. In April 1920, tornados killed 219 people in Alabama and Mississippi. A garment manufacturing building collapsed in Bangladesh killing 256 in April 2013. 

A massive freighter SS Fort Stikine exploded on 14 April 1944 while docked in Bombay killing hundreds of people. In April 1999, NATO accidentally bombed a convoy of civilian vehicles after mistaking them for Serbian military vehicles, killing 73 Albanian refugees. On 20 April 2014,193 people died after a strong earthquake struck Lushan County in China. On 24 April 1960, an earthquake in Iran killed over 500 people. 

In the present disastrous situation in April, one may ask ~ is it the time when life is again to be perceived through cyclic patterns of existence when people will celebrate the victory of order in nature over chaos, which gives them a sense of reassurance and of peace? 

Is it a time of rebirth and creation, a search for revitalisation and an unquenched thirst for transformation?