Author: Barkha Dutt
Price: 699/-
Pages: 288
Year: 2022
Publisher: Juggernaut Books, India
Usually, I have a wisecrack to crack on every occasion. Today, I have none. Even my posts post getting Covid in the second wave in May 2021, were full of humour [Post 1 Post 2]. I was able to laugh at myself. Not today. My pain, my experiences, seem too small today.
Sometime in April 2022, I ordered and got Barkha
Dutt’s book, To Hell and Back: Humans of COVID. I was reluctant to start
reading it, even though I wanted to. I didn’t want to refresh the memories of
what I went through. But finally, I did start reading it last week [3rd
week of July, 2022].
There were a lot of things I reminisced while reading
the book. Like wondering, during the period that I was hospitalized, that how
would someone who doesn’t know someone get a bed like I had? What if the oxygen
supply ran out? What if I was taken to the hospital a couple of hours later?
And many such questions.
During that period, I knew of a junior, who had a
two-year-old kid, not reaching the hospital on time, and then not even getting
a proper funeral. I knew of an uncle who was brilliant and taught me accounts
but did not get the right treatment. My thoughts lingered on an aunt who was
never diagnosed with Covid but had all the symptoms and passed away soon after.
I remember questioning that why did I deserve to live when they could not be
saved?
Post Covid, suffering from Long Covid- chronic
insomnia, anxiety, hair loss, pain in the bones, palpitations- I constantly
battled my symptoms and tried to be normal and move on. Barkha Dutt describes
my conversation with her on the Mojo Story on page 255 of her book. She calls
me Nutan Banga. When I started reading the book, I realized that I had really
moved on.
Barkha Dutt’s book is a solemn reminder of what the
pandemic was and gives us a view that none of us could have had individually. The
experience of a migrant labourer was very different from the experiences of a
cow herder from that of a funeral service provider, to a doctor, and to a well-connected
upper-class person, like she herself is. The inequalities that she has
presented in her book, even in the way one faced death, are unimaginable to
people like us who live in urban bubbles, disconnected from the grassroots,
disconnected from our roots, and disconnected from how people outside such
bubbles live.
I went to Kundli once and enjoyed the Murthal parathas
with white butter and daal makhana. But did I know about the toxic yellow water
that the people of this village got? No. The water that caused serious skin
diseases, how would they drink that water when even buying drinking water
became difficult?
Or consider the corpses of 20 tribal migrant workers
who were so exhausted from all the walking that they went to sleep on the
railway tracks where “they thought they would not be noticed or disturbed by
the police. A goods train ran over them an hour later.” [Pg38] A chill went up
my spine.
Most of us were helpless in the case of covid deaths
to a large extent. Whether it was the availability of beds in the hospitals,
medicines, oxygen, testing, what could most of us do? How could I help the
migrants or those who lost their jobs? Sonu Sood did it. Many others did. But
let’s just say that I am a more ordinary person. At least it was a good excuse
to console myself. But I could not stop my tears for a long time when I read about
Aishwarya.
The girl from Shadnagar, 50kms from Hyderabad,
Aishwarya, committed suicide. She committed suicide because her parents could
not afford to buy her a laptop or a smart phone to continue her education. “If
I can’t study, I can’t live”, she wrote in her suicide note [pg 233-234].
Probably because of the geographical proximity, probably because she got an
admission at the Lady Shri Ram College despite the poverty and circumstances,
probably because I feel strongly for the cause of girl education, my tears
would just not stop. Could I have helped if I knew what she was going through?
Would I have helped? The fact is that I did nothing. Not for her. Not for
anyone.
I would gladly give away all my hair if I could save
Aishwarya.
The pandemic was sudden, but not improbable. Bill
Gates warned against “the next outbreak” in 2014. National Geographic warned of
how
deforestation was causing bats to have “no other option than to fly elsewhere in search of food, carrying with
them a deadly disease” in a 2019 article. But the world at large was not
prepared for the Covid19. Some events
need to be prepared for due to the severity of their impact. The governments
must build their Afsluitdijks to prepare for such events. The quantum of
impact, the number of people impacted, the physical, emotional, economic, and
societal disruption is of catastrophic scale. Life cannot go back to normal.
To understand the severity of the catastrophe that
Covid19 unleashed on humanity, each one of us should read the book. It will
make us realise that there is life beyond our bubbles. While everyone’s sorrow
and difficulties are exactly that- sorrows and difficulties- and thus, cannot
be undermined, different situations have very different impact on the different
strata of society. And in some cases, survival itself becomes a challenge.
Some books move you. Leave an indelible mark on you.
And this is one such book. I am not going to comment on the writing style, what
the government did or did not do, the organization of the chapters, etc.
Sometimes, the message is far too important, the story is so powerful and
compelling that how it is delivered doesn’t matter.
I cried many a times while reading the book, choked many
times, sometimes just happy to be alive, while at the other times questioning
why I was alive? What was I doing? And what am I going to do now? These
questions are haunting me. Something in me changed after Covid. Something in me
has changed again after reading this book.
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