When A Book Becomes A Mirror
'Humans of Covid': Of (needlessly) lost lives and (many) sacrifices to save lives
Long after reading ‘Humans of Covid’, there are lines / emotions that linger.
Here are my top 25 lines from the book. A tribute to the effort that went behind reporting and writing this account - giving words to what some of us at least, were thinking, in the midst of the madness around us.
This Side & That Side
The sealed borders of India's states became battlegrounds, testing the will, the resilience and the fighting capacity of millions of its citizens.
No one paused to consider that in a life and death crisis, everyone wanted to be home with their loved ones. The unsaid assumption by policymakers was that this sentiment was a privilege of only the middle class and wealthy.
The bureaucratic ban on the movement of the poor only weaponised the police force against the most vulnerable and impoverished citizens at the toughest moments of their already difficult lives.
On Instagram, celebrities baked banana bread in their version of the ordinary. Upper middle class added 'Covid Blue' to their list of rainbow cheer. Netflix was now an adverb like Google. Out on India's highways, from the north to the south, in a parallel universe, millions of India had begun the long march for both survival and solace.
India's poorest feared that hunger would kill them before the virus did. And they were not wrong.
The sentence repeated most often in the media commentary through the pandemic - that the virus is an equalising force across the divides of class, caste and gender - is also the biggest lie of our times. The cities were islands of privilege in contrast to the villages that were nudged out of public recall.
"Do you know what Coronavirus is"? "Yes, it means I do not get food. I have to go hungry".
To come (to Dharavi) was to realise the theoretical elitism of the pandemic public service advertisement. 'Stay at home' was the most common message of the lockdowns months, often enforced by dogmatic police personnel.
Them & Us
Covid was a seismic jolt that cracked open our illusions of civility and social unity and left our fissures exposed.
No one was available to bury Simon. Pradeep was trembling. It was dark, the day was ending and he could not leave Simon there. Choking on his tears, he knelt on the gravelly floor and started digging with his bare hands, completing the job the machines had begun. As he gathered mud with both hands and threw it over Simon's body to close the grave, he kept thinking the mob would come back for him.
Over two consecutive summers, as space shrank at the riverbanks and bodies stacked up like a macabre mountain of pending laundry, cremation grounds became battlefields. There was jostling for space, shouting over the exorbitant cost of wood and fear over whether it was safe to be proximate to the bodies of those who had died.
Like many ancient traditions, Varanasi's body washers were part of an age-old informal economy that had sprung up around the ghats. Today, a harassed, grieving relative was shouting at them and accusing them of charging too much money.
No one had thought to distribute proper masks to these boys who came into daily, relentless contact with COVID corpses. "... has anyone stopped to notice that the wealthiest Indians are unwilling to come near their dead, they stand a few feet away and throw flowers at the body. It's left to us to handle everything at great risk to our lives. And we are poor people".
ZERO (Covid) & ZERO (Counts)
The utopian idea of ZERO Covid was still being pursued - unscientifically cordoned off and barricaded housing societies and factories. The result: Covid patients often did not find a hospital bed and those with other grave illnesses almost never did.
Along the way... (there were) random police check posts every few kilometres, set up to enforce the city's lockdown. They perilously slowed down a stream of ambulances, leading to a traffic snarl that could have made the difference between life and death.
The pandemic death toll does not even begin to count the thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of lives that were lost across two years from illnesses other than Covid, but as a direct consequence of decisions taken during the pandemic.
No official separate count has been done of the thousands of Indians, maybe more, who died - not from the virus - but from the deficit of oxygen.
Reality & Aspirations
As schools went online, households that had only one phone and a boy and a girl invariably allowed the boy to study ahead of the girl.
In homes where there are daughters, parents are saying: whether you marry now or later, you have to do it, so might as well do it now. They want to save their money.
"I want to play football for India... I do not want to get married at fifteen".
Good, Bad & The Ugly
The intimacy of strangers powered our travels. People we didn't know sent us home-cooked food. Those I had possibly just exchanged a single tweet with and possibly even been trolled by, opened up their homes.
The formal structure of the language, the choice of words - mulled over, staggered - said everything about the slow moving manner in which the administration approached the question of vaccines.
Applications were made, doctors' certificates were submitted, letters were written, hands were folded in submission... but no mercy was granted to families who sought exemption from election duty. The teachers were literally summoned to their death. And they were made to pay for it.
(As) a mourner at a graveyard in Delhi said, "Just because we are poor, it doesn't mean we have to die like insects, does it"?
As we rebuild ourselves from the debris of COVID, we would have learnt nothing if our hearts and minds are not moved by the staggering injustice of all that we saw.