I woke up to a steady, dull pain. I saw that the time on my phone. 11.30 am. I had overslept after staying up too late last night, watching with relentless horror, scenes from what looked like something straight out of an apocalyptic movie unfolding in real time in India, as I lay in my bed in a student room in the north-east of Scotland.
I checked my phone. A WhatsApp group called ‘Health Updates’ had streams of concerned messages, prayers and voice notes about my aunt who is hospitalized with COVID. She is doing better. We are worried but still thanking our lucky stars that we managed to find a bed for her in a hospital. I opened my social media to see calls from friends and acquaintances asking for leads with admitting people to the hospital, remdesivir injections, plasma donations, oxygen cylinders, ventilators. I draw the curtains of my window, a bright sun rises over St Andrews—the weather reflects the mood of a nation that is coming out of a long and desolate lockdown.
Spring blooms are bursting with colour all over Britain, as people are thronging pubs, restaurants, parks. Yes, British weather sucks balls. However, I have always maintained that the dreariness of the rest of the year is made up for by the summer; I have never in my life experienced something as joyous as an English summer. I remember telling my friends, after experiencing my first summer here, that I now understood why the Romantics wrote endlessly about nature! I finally saw what the pale golden petals of a daffodil looked like, even though I, like almost every school going child in the subcontinent, had spent hours memorising Wordsworth’s praises to the humble flower. I could finally see why Blake saw ‘Heaven in a wild flower’ or why Keats wanted to write verses for daisies, bees and sweet peas. Yet, this year, neither the prospect of a return to normalcy, nor the myriad delights of the season, bring me much joy. My mind is clogged with images of choked hospitals, mass funerals and tear-stained faces back home. The cognitive dissonance is overwhelming. Perhaps this emotion is familiar to most members of the Indians living in the UK.
India has seen almost 15 million cases of COVID-19 over this past year and has recently seen a deadly surge in cases with its second wave of the disease, registering over 2,17, 353 new cases in a single day. Two months ago, international press was wondering if India had somehow beaten the pandemic. I found myself trapped in self-isolation with the rest of the UK, when the new variant hit the hit the country. Christmas plans cancelled. No trips home. No eagerly awaited reunions with loved ones for me (and many others). My solitude extended for months on end. I saw Instagram stories of friends and acquaintances meeting indoors, taking holidays to beach resorts, partying in clubs while I, living alone and starved for company, conversed with walls to feel whole again. I was initially skeptical of this new-found lack of caution and eventually, just desperately jealous of everyone’s freedom back in India. In this period, United Kingdom, after dragging their feet with the new strains circulating in the country, steadily vaccinated over half its population. The vaccination drive in India, which started in January, had only vaccinated 3% of the population since then, despite the fact that it is one of the largest vaccine suppliers to the rest of world.
Today, instead of boomerangs of friends partying in Goa or grabbing lunches in crowded malls, I see only calls for help on my feed. I see bizarre visuals of the biggest hospital in Ahmedabad, the capital of Prime Minister Modi’s home state, Gujarat, choc-a-bloc with patients to such an extent that 40 ambulances lie waiting outside the building. I refresh my Instagram, corpses are being cremated on the footpaths of major Indian cities. I check my DMs, it is a friend asking if I know of any resources she can forward to someone’s parents trying to access medical help in Lucknow or Ranchi. I see tweets of people trying to process their trauma of losing a loved one they have lost to this pandemic.
It is 4 pm. I attend the funeral of a relative on Zoom, a great aunt, my mother’s. She lost her life to the disease, despite having received the first dose of the vaccine. Grieving members of my mother’s vast family meet online, solemnly attending a funeral from behind a screen. The maulvi tells us that every death is a reminder to live a more pious life. Unlike those who have departed, we still have the time to change our ways. Allah is Forgiving. Allah is Merciful.
Someone’s mic is on—a female voice is having a full conversation on the phone that everyone can hear embarrassingly clearly, while the maulvi carries on talking about the struggles of Husayn and his family’s indomitable strength in the face of all odds during the battle of Karbala. We can overhear that she is comforting someone for what sounded like another loss on that call. The maulvi just removes his earphones and wraps up his sermon—he does not ask this person to mute herself. He is forgiving, too.
I have a PhD deadline that I need to meet and yet here I am, writing this article with the fervent dedication my thesis rarely invites. I keep endlessly scrolling through my feed, consuming each terrifying statistic in the news, amplifying resources, messaging friends and family members who are affected by the devastation brought about this disease in big and small ways. Finally, I come across a post by the comic Prashasti Singh called Notes from Zombieland. She describes the scene at a hospital in Lucknow, where her mother is battling COVID; she writes, in chilling detail, of people running and grabbing the available oxygen cylinders to provide to their loved ones. I cannot take it anymore—it has been an exhausting day. I break down in tears, not even for myself or my family, but for the friends, the vague acquaintances, the nameless, faceless people of my country who are in so much pain.
xxx
All this, while the democratically elected emperor of India, Narendra Modi, oversees the destruction of his country—he continues to carry out political rallies (much like his opponents) for the upcoming state elections in West Bengal, one of the states worst hit by the pandemic. Some culturally informed netizens have made witty comparisons to another emperor in history, with a similar name, who burned down Rome in his nihilistic thirst for power. While this second wave is being portrayed by most of India’s sycophantic media channels as solely a result of the laxity on the part of individuals, it is, in reality, very much a state-sponsored pogrom. The government actively encouraged pilgrimage to the Kumbh Mela, a massive Hindu festival, which saw around 3.5 million devotees make a beeline to Haridwar, an ancient, holy city in the foothills of the mighty Himalayas. This approach is in glaring contrast to the events from last year, when the government and the press blamed Muslims for trying to spread the virus by committing ‘corona jihad’, in the light of a religious meeting held by Jamaat-e-Islami that was held in Delhi in early March, 2020. The government had officially described COVID-19 on 13th March, 2020 as ‘not a health emergency in India’. Modi’s Hindu nationalist vote bank would not usually appreciate this comparison and yet, even many of them cannot help but note the blatant double standards. Memes, the collective coping mechanism of the internet age, joke about Modi fans repeating there oft-repeated phrase in response to any of his previous failures, ‘If Modi has done this, it must be for a good reason.’ Vaccines are being distributed unequally across states, disadvantaging those ruled by opposing parties. BJP (Bhartiya Janta Party, Modi’s party holds power in the center) ruled states have been revealed to have been actively covering up real numbers of deaths. Modi, and his party, have a long and dark history of persecuting Muslims and other minorities; his strongman image as the vanguard of Hindutva (Hindu supremacist political ideology) going back to the pogrom that saw 2000 Muslims dead in Gujarat, the state he was the Chief Minister of for over a decade after the riots. The notoriety and subsequent popularity, combined with his business-friendly approach, catapulted him into the forefront of national politics.
Perhaps, it is too much to expect empathy from a government that directly traces its roots to genocide, but what I find strange about this new set of disastrous events that have happened under this current government, is the ambivalence of the ruling dispensation seems to hold towards the havoc which is being wreaked by the virus, even though it does not discriminate between Hindu or Muslim, rich or poor, Brahmin or Dalit lives. Business as usual for parties on their election trail— Modi is as unperturbed now, as he was about the hundreds of migrant labourers who died last year when sent to death marches out of hunger and starvation, after he announced the implementation of a nationwide lockdown in a matter of four hours. Visuals of desperately poor, visibly exhausted people walking for 18 hours straight in the unforgiving summer heat of India or thronging bus stops and railway stations to find a way back home flooded the internet. Most heartbreaking of all, was the clip of a crying baby lying next to his dead mother, who succumbed to exhaustion from the journey. After much delay, trains that were specially introduced by the government in the midst of this lockdown to ferry these labourers back home, bizarrely enough, seemed to have lost their way before reaching their final destination days later, with nearly 100 dead bodies in them. Many of these migrant labourers in Indian cities come from the poor state of Bihar; journalists and intellectuals wondered if the BJP’s poor handling of the crisis would earn them the ire of the residents of the state.
The BJP won by a comfortable majority in the state elections, held six months later, in November 2020.
I had moved to the UK again for my PhD by this time. I decided I wouldn’t despair. I would instead try and actively immerse myself in my new life now. There is no justice in the world.
xxx
I rant angrily about the situation back home to anyone who would bother to hear. My new friends in the UK offer me a patient hearing, suggest ice creams to cheer me up. The ice creams, the clear skies, the shimmering blue sea do cheer me up, albeit temporarily. My phone notifications are still buzzing. I keep an eye on the ‘Health Updates’ group chat for any further details about my aunt.
The masochist that I am, I cannot resist the urge to check my phone constantly, to stay updated, to see if everyone is doing okay, to share my anger. ‘There is no justice in this world!’, I text a friend after returning home. Here I was, having a breakdown on a Sunday afternoon because I saw something sad on Instagram. Again. I tell people how sad I am, how I can do nothing but despair and friends can say nothing to console me. I cannot function, I tell my friend, who has tested positive, is immunosuppressed, stuck in self-isolation and is monitoring her vitals thrice a day. It is ironic, I realize, that I am complaining about my COVID induced anxiety to someone who has got the virus, and is significantly more at risk than others her age, as someone with an already compromised immune system. I want her to therapize me. Now.
She texted back, ‘Shut the news, Zehra. It is a gutter, but people are managing. This government doesn’t give a fuck, but people do. Frontline staff are working day and night, people are compiling resource lists to help those in need. Knowing it won’t change a thing. I know it sounds naive but that’s the only way to keep sanity. Focus on what you can do instead of thinking about what they who are supposed to be doing aren’t doing. The government will not—they don’t care. Better to accept. Take action and spread joy, the world needs that.’
Spread joy. Trite as the sentiment seems to be, maybe that’s all I have.
The implementation of restrictions, if any, has been left mostly to state governments and local authorities, who are woefully unprepared for the crisis and scrambling about managing the political considerations of the powers that be in the center with the urgent demands for support by locals constituents. Faced by an uncaring government, Indian citizens have taken to providing support in their own hands. The internet is now flooding with resource lists compiled by ordinary citizens, providing people with numbers, plasma donation lists, supply for life-saving drugs, amplified by journalists, activists, academics, influencers and regular people on the internet. Case in point, Kusha Kapila. An Instagram comedian and actress, she, like many others, is using the power of her 1.6 million followers to provide COVID relief. Her stories wherein she is connecting plasma donors to patients, are interspersed with reels of her comedy sketches, the antics of her puppy Maya and shout outs to glamorous model/influencer friends. Jarring as the dissonance is to some, it is also important work. She is saving lives; even spreading some smiles. Some would say that this is more than what the Prime Minister is currently doing.
If India comes out of this pandemic, it will be due to the efforts of individuals who went above and beyond to do far more than expected, with no thanks to the government.
It is Ramzan, the holy month of Muslims all over the world. Overwhelmed by an uncharacteristic connection to the divine, I find myself taking pulling out my prayer mat to offer namaaz—praying for my country. Allah is Forgiving. Allah is Merciful.
Update: I lost my aunt to the virus a few days after writing this article. She was a single parent, raising her college-going daughter and selflessly caring for an ageing mother-in-law. Mumaani was a warm and affectionate woman of quiet fortitude, who taught it me it was possible to smile through adversity without ever letting that pain define who you are. A teacher, a mother, a daughter, a daughter-in-law, an aunt, a sister. A human being can have so many roles, exists in such a complex web of relations—so many people for whom that individual provides some indispensible, irreplaceable function.
Of all her nieces and nephews, her love for Bollywood films rubbed off on me the most. While the rest of the family was mildly alarmed by my penchant of being clued into all the latest Bollywood gossip and hours of filmy discussions, Mumaani indulged me. She would spoil us with presents and food, impromptu trips to Aligarh’s noisy markets and cinema halls. It was only after her death that it registered in me that she wasn’t related to me by blood, there was no expectation on her to pamper us so. She just did. My school vacations were spent in our family home, ‘Aiman’, built lovingly, brick-by-brick by my grandfather. She was the person who made that building a home. As a result of her passing, that house, which saw so much, now stands mostly empty.
Bare bones 