In the Covid pandemic, the deaths we don’t count

The death game has begun; ‘Covid orphans’ is the new term that will enter our vocabulary in a few days, rues Preethi Nagaraj

Having worked in a hospital as part of my job quite some time ago, I was exposed to deaths that I shouldn’t have been witness to. No, I am not a clinician or a medical practitioner who has been ‘taught’ to see death rather differently. It’s not the numbness that’s left behind when the person leaves. It’s the void. The absence. The never-ending emptiness of someone just not being there, and everything else being in place. The look on the face of a dying person, or gasp of last breaths; the helplessness of family and friends haunt a lifetime. God forbid you’d ever have to see an innocent child sink into the folds of death. You will never forgive yourself for having been a helpless testimony to that moment. You’d be lucky if you didn’t turn into a nervous wreck. All that is nothing compared to the time we are living in now. Because too much pain can just numb everything.

Since last year, death has been doing this very wild dance everywhere and it is getting worse with passing time. We the ‘elite middle class’ saw the labourers walk home in the scorching sun when the lockdown was announced. We felt sad, some of us even helped. But we all continued to share pictures of crispy gobi manchurians we made at home, and shared newly mastered baking techniques.

According to an estimate, about 1 cr labourers walked home in March 2020, facing about 81,000 accidents and 29,000 fatalities. A lot of them were sprayed with pesticides when they reached their destination as if they were the harbingers of a bad virus. Did they survive? We would never know.

As of the first week of May 2021, India accounts for one case of Covid-19 for every 3 cases reported in the world. After a brief lull, we have seen a tsunami of Covid-19 unleash itself in the form of a second wave. February saw a steady increase in infections getting reported, and April has been the worst month so far, with May competing to be super worse.

Crematoriums and burial grounds have never been this busy. This is one of those deeply disturbing and poignant moments in the history of humankind. It shakes you up to see the images of rows of pyres burning, bodies wrapped in protective cover being lowered into the burial pits day after day. The pandemic is back in a vengeful wave. As if, it’s a sin to be alive when everything around us is collapsing — survivor’s guilt.

I particularly think of the younger generation which should have been doing some silly and some serious things that could define their future. All of them are sitting at home, wearing masks, twiddling their thumbs... their teenage is lost to boredom, technology, anxiety and fear.

Our political leaders did their elections, secured their ballots and thus, their high offices remain intact even as families were getting shattered with deaths. After all, nothing is indispensable in politics, including politicians themselves.

The chickens seem to have come home to roost. We were a teeny bit outraged when the Union Government told the Opposition that it did not have statistics pertaining to labourers who walked home. This year, we are told that the factual number of deaths may never even be known.

So, to put this in a nutshell, in the face of a pandemic we are not even numbers. We just don’t count. The death game has begun. ‘Covid orphans’ is the new term that will enter our vocabulary in a few days. Lest we forget. History won’t be kind to us.

(The author is a journalist deeply seeped into the theatre of (&) politics.)