How the Pandemic is Shaking the Conscience of an Entire Nation
India is going through a collective trauma.
For most of the Indians, the first wave of Covid-19 was an anecdotal tragedy affecting only a few. The brunt was largely borne by the poor who chose dousing hunger over safety from the virus, yet many millions fell into dire poverty. The poor migrant labor had no other option but to vacate the locked-down cities and walk thousands of kilometers to their villages with the entire families on the feet and households on the heads.
The suddenness of a far more pervasive second wave led to a swift transition of emotions from comfort to denial to shock to insecurity to melancholy to acceptance to reconciliation, which is still underway.
What I am going to share now is not a one-off experience but what an average Indian has faced in the past two months.
Almost every day, we received the news of the people all around falling prey to the virus, triggering a feeling of anticipation for things getting even worse.
We waited for up to 4–5 days to get tested and receive the reports, with our situation deteriorating by the day and still not getting hospitalized because we had no covid positive reports.
We made endless efforts to look for a hospital bed for someone, receiving only no response or regret in return.
We waited for days outside the hospitals with our loved ones struggling to breathe so that we could grab the very first bed vacated after someone’s recovery or death.
We made multiple rounds of cities trying to find oxygen cylinders because the hospitals had none, while our loved ones were gasping for air.
We stood in long queues outside medical stores to buy the medicines that most of us couldn’t correctly spell or pronounce, hoping our loved ones would keep fighting for a little more on their own.
We died at home after failing to get a hospital bed or just oxygen in time.
We shared beds and oxygen masks with more than 4–5 people so that everyone could breathe for a little more while.
We, the health workers, saw the entire system coming to a collapse, yet we kept holding it together with whatever little we had.
We, the doctors, looked after hundreds of patients a day without getting the time to have a meal. Each failed recovery made us ask ourselves if we could have done more. When in need of a hospital bed for ourselves or our loved ones, many of us couldn’t even find one.
We, the politicians, came to feel the helplessness how a common man usually does when our VIP calls to the authorities went unanswered and haplessly watched the people dying or surviving on their own.
We spent days with the dead bodies of our loved ones, waiting for their turn for cremation.
We saw our corpses lying in a queue at cremation grounds, while people worked day and night there to clear the backlog.
We were even unable to arrange for our funerals and had our bodies dumped into the rivers that we worshipped and vowed to preserve.
We, the poor, were hit by the double blow of hunger and the virus, yet kept our faith in humanity and didn’t retaliate with violence. For us, covid was never the biggest threat as we struggled for meals daily.
We, the opportunists, made money by selling fake medicines, injections, oxygen, and even carrying out elaborate frauds by visiting homes and collecting swabs.
We, the volunteers, risked our lives and families by filling whatever gaps we could but stayed steadfast.
We, the professionals, didn’t desert our duties and eventually caught the virus, later succumbing to it.
We, the emigrants, cursed ourselves for leaving our old parents fending for themselves back at home.
We passed each day when our loved ones survived with a sense of guilt in feeling relieved because someone we knew had lost someone.
We still constantly live with the fear of ourselves or someone we care for succumbing sooner or later.
In the middle of all this, we sometimes wonder if anything positive is ever going to come out of it. The range of emotions experienced by us in the past two months supersedes anything we have experienced in our lifetimes. For most of us, ‘humanity’ used to be only a bookish virtue, but it has been put to test like never before in the living memory of most of us.
While it will take more time for us to come to terms with the reality, deep down we realize that being more empathetic, kind, and generous is the best way we can pay homage to the loved ones we just lost. If not anything else, let our conscience be the takeaway from here.
