"Let's Try and Not Be A Cry-Baby"
On the desolation, dread, and indignities of a preventable human catastrophe
There’s no absurd turn of phrase big enough, or apt enough, or senseless enough, to fully put into words what has descended on us.
I’ve tried to find it — two weeks ago, I described it as wanting to get my brain out of my skull and wash it. One week ago, it felt like my soul needed a good cleaning. Now I’m rooting around for words and wrenching exaggerations from the deepest corners of my knowledge only to come up empty.
I’m not usually one for feeling lost or desolate in public writing — my writing, if it’s not reporting or my job, can be nailed down to “it’s all fun and games” a majority of the time. Notions of earnest weakness or vulnerability are neither mentioned nor acknowledged; and if one sneaks in, it is summarily banished. Fun and games, all in all, were the only real tricks up my sleeve.
I’ve felt only weak and vulnerable for the last few weeks. There’s just fear in the place the quips used to be. I don’t know if writing will help — I’ve always liked it — but right now, it feels like rusty muscle memory, to turn an idea into words, into something that makes sense, makes meaning in an increasingly bizarre world. I am only writing now to put all this somewhere outside my head in the hope of getting through the day as something more than “functional.”
On May 3, at least 10 people died in Karnataka from oxygen deprivation. On April 24, at least 20 people died from oxygen deprivation in Delhi. On April 25, Uttar Pradesh’s chief minister said there was no oxygen shortage in his state, yet my newly mushroomed Twitter group chat of teenagers was desperately fielding calls for cylinders in Allahabad and Lucknow between their online classes and late into the night. On May 4, 11 people died in Chennai due either to oxygen shortage or oxygen pressure fluctuation. Every day, the newspaper tells us how many have died because we can no longer take the air for granted. People are dying inside their cars and homes, with no one’s hand to hold, fighting for their stolen breaths.
We have no breathing room. We are only looking around puzzled and blinking; shrouded in dismay from work, the news, the messages, while being told that the complacency of the only people with any real power to stop this is fine and excusable, actually. We were told in the nation’s highest courts not to be cry-babies by the government’s lawyer. People compare us to Italy or Spain or New York in 2020; but the difference is that we had a year and we squandered it.
Whenever someone asks, I say it is worse than it looks. Too many people are dying, their deaths unreported; many in abject grief, with no space to mourn; and the rest of us numb from the worry that a loved one might be next. I peer so hard into my mother’s face to check if her masks are on correctly when she leaves for work that I forget to say bye. I have nothing new to say to friends who ask about my day, for it’s once again just going through the motions, punctuated by the short-lived relief of trying a new recipe or going on a bike ride. My 91-year-old grandmother — a tiny, sweet, stubborn lady commanding my world and actions—only learned the word “COVID” this past week and has likely forgotten it already. This is as far as I wish it to enter her life.
Of course, if anything were to happen, I’m comforted by the knowledge that we have all the options in the world: we have the means to isolate, to find rooms, to buy medicines, to work flexibly, to pay for life-saving care. I spend my days in a self-flagellating cycle of fear and guilt and thankfulness and disbelief.
I know that if we were to suffer, we could still do it with some dignity.
What’s stunning is the scale of indignity and disgrace foisted upon people we share this country with — who are now languishing on the pavements, lugging oxygen cylinders through the streets, begging into the poisoned air that someone please come take a look at their son, their mother, their uncle, their grandpa. They did not live peacefully, and now they cannot die peacefully. A majority of the people responding are citizens — teenagers — who are seeing a tragedy of this scale unfold for the first time.
“Everything has collapsed,” my father said when we learned yesterday that the Indian Council of Medical Research was recommending fewer tests because laboratories were overstretched on account of their staff testing positive (one in every three cases in the world is now in India). But what we have learned is that much of the structure that collapsed was decrepit, anyway — what sort of system did we have if it planned and plotted for smug, premature victory and ended up permitting a massacre?
We live in a nation of powerful cowards playing God in a place that God left a while ago. We are told that nothing could have prepared us for this when we were warned in November last year to prepare for this. We are told we were the world’s pharmacy, yet we didn’t think of shielding our own until January 2021. We are told to relitigate the issue of profits and patents when, in the world’s largest democracy, we’ve managed to manufacture, for millions, a choice between poverty and death. It’s not just a virus that’s closing in on us; it’s a profound helplessness.
We get arrested if we plead online for oxygen and get pulled up on defamation and conspiracy charges if we hint at anything less than pleasure and praise. We are told not to disrespect the dead by sharing images of mass cremations, but that it’s okay their dignity was violated when they were alive and gasping. We are fed heady narratives of positivity and optimism (borne, out of all cursed things, by influencers and Linkedin apparently) and told to shut our eyes to the negativity. Optimism, when it is not warranted, is simply a luxurious add-on; a person’s right to basic amenities is bedrock. What they mean when they say to focus on positivity is “don’t inconvenience me with your nightmarish reality.”
It is very tempting to shut your eyes and go to sleep, I will give them that. I made a big fuss out of my onset of forgetfulness a few months ago, and now, honestly, I’d dearly like to forget a dizzying array of things I have read and seen in the last month.
However — the most reluctant, tired, dragged by the heels “however” I’ve uttered — my brain should remember this. Our collective conscience should not have a short shelf-life. If there is any dignity left to be shared, it is in remembering.
There are people who’d rather have us forget all this; they can live without the forgiveness. All they care for is that we toe the line, pat ourselves on the back for braving martyrdom, and promptly dust the grief off our shoulders. They have no larger ambition than power for power’s sake, and this lazy contempt for the lives placed in their hands should rankle.
“Things will settle down eventually. Of course, they will. But we don’t know who among us will survive to see that day. The rich will breathe easier. The poor will not.” - Arundathi Roy, The Guardian.
Some as-yet sane part of my brain knows this. It’s the same part that negotiates between saying “I” and “we.” “I” know that the odds are in my favor. “We,” in the national sense, do not. I think bridging the “I” and the “we,” binding it in solidarity, is the only way to get through this. It’s perhaps not “efficient” or “analytical” or any other favorite buzzwords of the gilded mob, but it is the only way.
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What I read:
“We are witnessing a crime against humanity”, Arundathi Roy in the Guardian
“Oxygen shortage, seize property of those spreading rumours” in The Hindu
“India’s vaccine shortage will last months, biggest manufacturer warns” in the Financial Times
“One cannot even die peacefully in Delhi” in BBC
“Youth sought oxygen for grandfather via tweet, UP Police file criminal case against him” in The Wire
“Top Central government officials attend session on boosting image, perception” in Hindustan Times
“Why is India, the world’s largest vaccine producer, running short of vaccines?” in Quartz