I lost my father to Covid and certainly with him a piece of the sky overhead went missing too. But, before I could mourn his loss, the misery and desperation unfolding all around my social space dried up my tears and what followed has been a stoic numbness since then. The moment I think of my overwhelming grief, I am nudged by the conscience to see beyond, and what passes by my eyes is pain, helplessness, death, and suffering of so many that my personal sorrow is belittled. Believe me, I have not been able to grieve my father’s death because I have also been a virtual witness to hundreds of SOS calls for oxygen cylinders, ICU beds, lonely funerals, and mourning relatives.
More than the grief, a sense of relief has set in. At least his quiet death on a hospital bed with life support in place must have ensured some satisfaction to my father’s parting soul that he was cared for until his last breath. My father just narrowly escaped the deprivation with two Delhi hospitals failing to provide an ICU bed. Time was running out fast. I remember my quivering hands making it almost impossible to type a message, and the trembling voice calls I made to my siblings, feeling helpless and distanced, sitting thousands of miles away, and parted by half a day (EST time zone). Had it not been to a dear friend suggesting me to tweet my need, to another friend connecting to her doctor batch mates at Aligarh to find an ICU bed, I do not know what could have happened. The friend’s retweeting and tagging generated some quick responses from good Samaritans, and I cannot thank them enough to feel for my need. Eventually, it was a kind doctor from my alma mater (AMU) who just not assured an ICU bed but even arranged the ambulance for my ailing father.
From morning to evening there was no solace but in prayers, and ahead was an ultimate struggle to keep him breathing. It felt like an accomplishment to get an ambulance and an assurance of an ICU bed at a hospital over a hundred miles from Delhi, the capital city where generally people come from suburbs to get medical care. It failed me, and so many like me, in the days that followed. As my father boarded the ambulance, God will only know what his thoughts were. He never disappointed his children and we were hoping his will to support our decision helps him pull through the exhaustive ordeal. He was the closest witness to the struggle of the day.
A week after his trudge from hospital to hospital with just his son by his side, my father breathed his last. Fortunately, the oxygen supply didn’t shut before he decided to bid us adieu. I call this dignity in death, because for that one week my father was treated with kindness and care by the hospital staff, and he didn’t see his family running for oxygen cylinder, or Remdesivir or any other medical supplies through hoarders and black marketers. What more can you ask from a death orchestrated by the ruthless second wave of a pandemic and ravaged by an equally indifferent Sarkar? Just imagine the trauma of losing a loved one out of a dearth of a hospital bed or an essential life support. The scar on the psyche of the living may not ever heal.
Six days to his hospitalization and signs of shortage in oxygen supply at the hospital were starting to appear. I remember clearly, it was the day after a hospital in Delhi reported 22 deaths for the lack of oxygen. The next day, the doctors at my father’s hospital were trying to restore the oxygen supply before they ran out of it. They informed us of the impending crisis just in case the patient was needed to be shifted to another facility. Visualizing my dear father gasping for breath was a tormenting thought that ended the tiring day, and I went to bed unable to imagine what was in store for the days to come. My father had a habit of not bothering anyone for his needs, and perhaps out of that sheer habit he decided it is time he slept, not to be woken up ever. It was well past midnight that my phone rang and on the other side was my sister, sobbing inconsolably and repeatedly saying “Papa has left us forever”. Isn’t forever too long? He promised he would never go without meeting me, and I simply believed him, like a child. But perhaps he got to choose a death that was not one of deprivation and that is my only solace.
A personal tragedy soon became a collective norm. Whichever part of India I see, the country is witnessing tragedies of unprecedented proportions. People are dying in hospitals out of a dearth of medical oxygen, hospitals are sending SOS messages on social media to help them out of the shortage crisis, the central and the state governments are locking horns in top judicial court to regulate oxygen supply as per need, state governments are threatening whistle blowers who complain of shortage of medical oxygen in hospitals, officials are fudging death figures to play down accountability questions, black marketers are thriving, and family members are shelling their last reserves to buy comfort to their gasping loved ones. In one particular case of illegal hoarding, one person was found in possession of 638 medical oxygen cylinders in Ghaziabad, UP. I just wondered, had he not hoarded that many lives could have been saved. Desperate families are reaching out to such sources when there is no relief from the elected officials.
Were we unprepared for the second wave or did we completely let off the guard against Covid? A little rewind to the scenario last year when hordes of migrant workers were left to walk their way hundreds of miles back home would bring back memories of people using masks to protect themselves against the coronavirus. The poorest of the poor managed to shield their nose and mouth with a cloth cover. So, what happened that people by and large shunned masks by early this year and believed that the pandemic was over? Early this year, Prime Minister, Mr. Modi at the World Economic Forum declared India’s success in overcoming Covid and absolutely ignored the warnings issued by scientific advisers in early March of a more contagious second wave. If the central government had enforced the mask mandate, social distancing, and massive vaccination drive then it might have impacted the protocols of election rallies, huge religious gatherings, and eventually the vote bank politics. It is hard to understand why the Minister of External Affairs S Jaishankar recently said that elections cannot be stopped in India even if there is a raging pandemic. Maybe, vote counts more even if it is at the stake of risking a life.
While the election results are out, the misery is yet to be over in far sight. Terms like contact tracing and isolation hold no relevance in the Indian scenario because the health system is overwhelmed to take such measures. The mask mandate is still neither enforced nor emphasized by the authorities or vehemently propagated through media sources to underline its importance. The Covid tests are not handy, they cost a reasonable amount, and the reports are often delayed and sometimes even fallacious (reported cases of false negatives are on the rise), discouraging people to get tested. The relatives who are rushing their loved ones to the hospital are also often infected and, so are most members of the family. Home care is increasingly becoming difficult because right from oximeters to the prescription drugs, there is barely anything available in the market and not everyone has the pocket or the contact to look for these essentials in the black market. The entire civic and health machinery is choked by private scavengers looking for carcasses and officials that have nothing to offer beyond reassuring lies.
With cremation and burial grounds running out of capacity, another calamity building up would be handling of the dead. With queues of dead bodies waiting in the open for their last rites to be performed and the distraught loved ones waiting to finish the rituals, it feels that beside other things Covid has also snatched away the dignity of the dead.