Inspiration and Expiration: The Banality of Respiration in India's Second Wave
To breathe is elemental. It is an "originary right," as the philosopher Achile Mbembe called it in an essay written during the pandemic last year. Yet such a fundamental fact of life was denied, or obstructed, not just by a virus but by completely avoidable human failings in India.
When the second-wave hit, it caught us exulting silently over a supposedly improbable victory against the first wave. India, a poor country with a rickety health infrastructure, had withstood the first wave better than most "advanced" countries, so went the story. Most importantly, the fatalities had been remarkably few.
I felt the contrast this second time around very keenly. I was despairing the first time around regarding the supposed mildness of the pandemic in India and the generally tepid response to it from more privileged quarters. I even put pen to paper, venting my frustration at the work-from-home legions who could never understand the enormity of what was unfolding in front of our eyes even then, however mild and modest it was described to be.
I felt the studied ignorance was all because the theater of death and destruction was not out in the open in India then. Bodies were not dropping dead on the streets, like some description of a plague from the middle ages. We had written off the pandemic a little too early, and had literally started celebrating on the corpses from the first wave.
April of this year overturned all our certitudes. Like a giant tsunami wave, the second round of Covid infections caught us by complete surprise. Or should we say, surprised us in our arrogant carelessness. Now, at more than a month's distance from the period in April, when the earth seemed to open beneath our feet, I can feel the echoes of the cataclysm that engulfed us.
News of friends, friend's friends, relatives, former neighbors, colleagues, and other acquaintances started pouring in from all directions. A former college classmate was felled by the disease. A young Sanskrit teacher whose class I had attended a month ago was gone. Former neighbors living across from us were caught in the spate. The list went on and on. My own sister and her 4-year-old son found themselves "Covid positive.”
Delhi was the epicenter. Everything seemed to be at sixes-and-sevens. People were rushing from hospital to hospital looking for an "oxygen bed.” While they were making these trips, they had the patient, a loved one, on the limited oxygen of an ambulance or from a tank they had somehow procured.
Having had experience at an upscale Indian hospital just a few months earlier when my mother went in for a heart procedure and suffered a stroke (which nearly cost her her life) I shuddered to think of this terrifying drama at hospitals across Delhi, and India. Even for us, at that pricey hospital known for its international medical tourism — I saw people from Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia all day long — ensuring basic services for my mother was a tortuous endeavor. You were basically on your own if you wanted anything done properly and on time. Every other day the hospital called to remind me how the dues were racking up.
I shuddered to think how people were getting any kind of reasonable attention at India's many public hospitals, where so many of the poorer people went to avoid the exorbitant costs of private medical treatment.
Delhi is normally a very muscular city. It is known for its rough, pushy, brash manner, attributed to some traits common in North India. Also, like most major capital cities, it thrives on access to power and privilege. It is a city of "connections.” Most of the top brass of every wing of the government resides there. Besides, there are power-brokers, middle-men, sycophants, politicians of all stripes, and wheelers-and-dealers. In recent years, the areas surrounding the city, denoted by the term National Capital Region (sort of like Greater Delhi) have seen a tremendous establishment of multinational businesses.
The city has always existed with a “VIP culture.” Things get done here through "connections'' — everyone knows someone. In normal times, if you need a hospital bed in a top hospital, just reach out to the right people and you will have one in no time. Your child needs a special, rare drug? No issues. Someone knows someone in the Health ministry, and the drug is made available to you.
It was this city, with its pretensions to almighty power and its vulgar display of privilege, which was brought to its knees. The world was flat for a tragic period when pauper and king alike were begging for oxygen, begging for an ICU bed. If those running around desperately did not survive the ordeal, then they had to stand in line at the crematoriums and burial grounds for the performance of their last rites. For a brief period, the pesky virus brought Delhi's — and the country's — high-and-mighty down to earth.
It is important to remember this because the poorer classes are given the runaround in hospitals and other medical institutions on a routine basis. For them, most drugs and treatments are simply unaffordable and unattainable. If once again (as during the first wave) largely the poor had been affected, then the second-wave would have been another "spectacle sport" for the more affluent classes. For some reason, however, the second-wave was more egalitarian in its effect on the general population.
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Often, in the middle of this mayhem, I would close my eyes and pretend everything was completely normal. But then that induced sense of normalcy would be shattered, again and again.
During the entire day, news kept popping up on my social media chats about people desperately needing some medical resource or another.
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. His wife, also Covid positive, is in the hospital.
Each SOS message for oxygen, an ICU bed, for drugs, for a doctor, was met with a flurry of rough compilations — of contacts, of pharmacies, of medical supply agencies, oxygen refilling plants, a resource-person named Sonu here, a Monu there…
India’s battle against a pandemic was being heroically but haphazardly fought by the common people over social media with similar informal and rough messages, hastily compiled spreadsheets, and other forms of notes. Most of the leads did not work. A good number were flagged as fake by someone on the chat.
And all along trickled in news of people just dying.
When I say “just dying,” I say that in all seriousness. One could maybe conjure up a ludicrous scene from Alice in Wonderland, of the Mad Hatter at his tea table with some kind of a register, ticking names off most matter-of-factly as he sipped tea. "This one, Gone, this one too, Gone. And oh yes, this one just now, Gone..."
Never has dying been so naturalized so fast, so widely. This has been a silent countrywide carnage, a mass poisoning that has killed people one by one, inevitably, inexorably.
The surety, the sickening regularity with which people have been passing away — it is completely appropriate to think of people "just going away" — bowing out, receding from the stage of life, without as much as by your leave.
It was as though some primitive deity was demanding continual sacrifices to assuage its terrible hunger. Human beings from all corners of India were being sucked into its belly, quietly and submissively, as part of some cruel pre-ordained plan.
Ventilators. Infected lungs. Difficulty breathing. Heart Attack. Those were details. For most people the end was quick and sudden. A recently-graduated doctor was admitted before midnight in the very hospital he worked at, and by 3AM he was gone. Unless you were in hospital wards, you did not see the prolonged agony of death. You just "saw" its inevitability.
So overwhelming was this macabre drama unfolding before our eyes that it became hard to process each new day. I worried about my already sick and bedridden mother who could not get vaccinated at home, I worried about my sister and my nephew. I could not afford to think of any eventualities. The selfishness of one's own survival butted repeatedly against the need for wider compassion of all suffering. The helplessness, the grief, the frustration, the anger — all emotions collided and then dissipated away with each passing breath. There was only a numbness left, there was just the hazy consciousness of the very moment we were breathing in.
And in one's mind, one shamelessly and automatically began to play a morbid counting game, as if by reflex — Who’s Next?
Umang Kumar is a writer based in the National Capital Region of Delhi, India.