Delhi Dying
I stay home most of the day — I have a mother to look after who has been bedridden for six months now. It was during what might be called the tail end of the first wave last year that we had to rush my mother for a heart operation. A post-operation complication later, we ended up with my mother having survived a major mishap, and left bedridden. Gingerly we brought her back home when she had healed just a little since the fear of a covid infection in the hospital was high.
Early on during the first wave, I had written about the unreality of the tragedy as it felt to most Indians. It was always someone far away who was affected. That was the beginning of the great work-from-home experience in India, and the upper classes were loving it.
The second wave crept up upon us quite suddenly. One moment we were basking in ridiculously low daily infection numbers, almost throwing caution to the wind. And then suddenly there was news that Mumbai was closing ranks again as another mutation of the virus was on the rampage. This was late March, early April. Delhi, then, was still not in the throes of the pandemic. I remember telling a friend who was visiting Mumbai to get out of Mumbai fast. She had retorted: “Is Delhi any better?”
I had this defensive feeling that it was. Even during the first wave, after a body blow in terms of infections, Delhi had been able to manage the infection quite well, with extensive tracing, home quarantines, containment zones and large facilities for covid patients.
But how and when exactly Delhi descended into the chaos, is hard to pin-point. But on April 16 the CM of Delhi announced a “small weekend curfew” for three days. The runaway effect of the disease had begun to take its toll.
…
I stay at home almost all day. If I close my eyes for short periods of time and pretend nothing is wrong with the world…then I soon get the feeling nothing really is. The birds chirp outside. My apartment complex is quite deserted during the day, the usual walkers, yoga-practitioners, basketball players absent, but it might as well be a Sunday.
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My reveries are, however, interrupted every now and then by messages in some of my social media chats.
Patient in Janakpuri, Delhi, needs an oxygen bed. Can anyone help? SpO2: 80–85
Anyone know where I can get remdesivir? The chemists I tried are not picking up their phones.
Mr. so-and-so (who lived in my former neighborhood) passed away this afternoon. He was covid positive.
Each SOS message for oxygen, an ICU bed, for drugs, for a doctor is often met with a flurry of rough compilations of contacts of pharmacies, medical supply agencies, oxygen refilling plants, a Sonu here, a Monu there who apparently were providing oxygen refills at reasonable costs till last confirmed…
India’s battle against a pandemic is being heroically and haphazardly fought by the common people over social media with such informal and rough messages, hastily compiled spreadsheets, pdfs and other forms of notes. Most of the leads do not work. A good number are flagged as fake by someone on the chat. What a pity that one cannot even expect a well-organized government effort to streamline the allocation of resources.
An Indian Express report outlined how the Bombay Municipal Corporation has been able to make interventions in the spread of covid by creating “war rooms” in each of the wards in the city. Delhi, the administrative capital of the country, lacks such basic provisioning mechanisms. In a scenario not uncharacteristic of Delhi, its common citizens are left to fend for itself.
But this is not about Delhi anymore. City after city is now suffering from lack of resources and an absolutely paralysed administration that is not able to manage the situation. People are just dying.
When I say “just dying,” I say that in all seriousness. Never has dying been so naturalized so fast so widely, I guess. This is not a genocidal attack in one town where people are slaughtered. This is a countrywide genocide.
But a genocide evokes violent images. As I said just above, there is some kind of naturalization that has happened, some kind of numbing. That is why I think it is more appropriate to think of people just, sort of, going away, receding from the stage. But naturally and inexorably. One is getting used to seeing messages and hearing about this friend’s father, the other’s mother passing on. In your mind you just go, Who’s Next?
