Covid in India
The catastrophe is unimaginable. Anuradha Roy helps us imagine it.
I was born in India and still have some family there, so the counry has been much on my mind since the pandemic has reached crisis proportions there. One worry I had was that India’s public health system, shaky at the best of times, would be overwhelmed. Following the news gave me a sense of the unfolding disaster in statistical terms, but I had a hard time wrapping my mind around what the pandemic in India meant as felt reality.
Although it makes for somber and grim reading, I’m grateful for an essay by the novelist Anuradha Roy about covid in Ranikhet, Uttarakhand. This is a remote area which is part of the Himalayas. (The essay was recommended by the writer and editor David Rieff). I would encourage everyone to read the essay. Make sure to read to the end because it lands with a punch. It can be found here.
An excerpt:
From Delhi, reports are coming in of winds bearing wood ash – it is in the air now, because of the thousands of cremations. They are breathing the dead.
The furnaces burn without stopping, rivers are flowing with corpses. Trees in foliage-deficient cities are being felled for funeral pyres. I scroll down my contacts list and phone people to find out if they are still alive. I dread reading the news.
More Readings and Podcasts
The first two podcasts for this newsletter are both about Philip Roth and I think they form a natural narrative: the first is about Roth as a control freak and the second about the ways in which it is impossible to control your legacy from the grave (as Roth tried to do). Both are lively and fun conversations which I think go life in general, so you don’t have to care about Philip Roth in particular to enjoy. Please listen!
I also would encourage everyone to read John Ganz’s Unpopular Front substack, which takes up many of the issues that The Time of Monsters is concerned with, in particular the threat of authoritarianism. Here is a recent, very smart, piece on this issue.
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I was in Uttarakhand from March to July of 2020. It was a bubble of sorts, as there were very few cases. But yea, I know a number of healthy people who got hit by it, and hard.