Vasandani is a licensed architect. She was born in India, lived most of her life in Chicago and retired to San Diego in 2018. She lives in Torrey Highlands.
Every few hours I dig for bits of news of the devastating conditions in Delhi and India. I, like many others of the Indian diaspora, am toggling between helplessness and sadness, laced with a good measure of anger and guilt.
How do I help with the tragic effects of the pandemic when I am so far away? Help not just my relatives and friends but the community? The situation in the U.S. seems to be inching towards normalcy, but it is apocalyptic in India. Should I just block my thoughts from flying again and again to Delhi and Mumbai where thousands are dying while gasping for breath? After all, I cannot do anything except worry, check WhatsApp texts frequently, call relatives and send donations.
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Should I stop reading reports of a country that has failed its people? Reports that I obsessively seek out to find the slightest, slimmest traces of hope? Reports of a city where oxygen has become so scarce that families are using their life’s savings or their women’s gold jewelry to buy outrageously priced tanks of oxygen on the black market?
I drive by a hospital in San Diego with its almost empty parking lot, and I imagine parking lots in Delhi that are being used to cremate the dead. I hear the sound of an ambulance racing to reach an emergency room in La Jolla, and think of the absolute dearth of ambulances in Indian cities. I hear of the multitude waiting outside hospitals in Delhi, waiting to be admitted and then dying on the street before they are triaged. Dying in their cars, in taxis, in rickshaws. Not even the most privileged are spared.
I sit at a peaceful park bench with a picnic and in my mind’s eye I see images of funeral pyres in parks in Delhi. I hear the happy voices of children swimming, playing in the neighbor’s backyard and mentally contrast them with sounds of children wailing at the loss of their young parents in India. Hundreds, thousands of them, lost, orphaned.
Why does my mind not stay where I am? I focus to photograph colorful orchids, a diversion from the pictures of rows of corpses in white shrouds lined up to be cremated. No traditional marigolds on them. No garlands of flowers. No priests reciting last rites or relatives showering flower petals on the bodies of the departed. A citywide shortage of wood for cremations, yet hundreds of funeral fires light up the night sky and then blanket daylight with gray smoke.
The movie I am watching has a group of students’ joyriding on their scooters, and the picture I saw in the news flashes in my mind — two young Indian men with their dead mother’s body wedged between them on a scooter. They could not get an ambulance or a hearse to carry their mother’s body home. Maybe she died before she could get oxygen or be admitted to a hospital. I do not turn off the movie nor can I erase that image.
The cliché that life goes on feels so shallow when pictures of patients struggling for breath haunt me. I have experienced extreme panic at times when I could not breathe for a few seconds. Do the relatives of the sick feel they have failed if they cannot buy oxygen or get help for those struggling to breathe? What feelings stay with them as they watch life slip away? Guilt? Or the typical Indian fatalistic acceptance that “it was their time”?
The contrast between folks carrying on with a semblance of normalcy here and what I read in the news about India is almost surreal. If only the mask protesters outside my neighborhood grocery store or folks in crowded restaurants could see the images that are etched in my mind — rows of patients in makeshift hospital wards, of weeping relatives and multiple funeral fires. I cannot be unaffected.
I am invited to tea at a friend’s house that overlooks the ocean, but I decline. It would be a relaxing afternoon, but my mind superimposes the tired voices of cousins in Mumbai making condolence calls to several friends who have lost relatives. I am not so accomplished at compartmentalizing that I can have lighthearted conversations of little relevance, while I drag this dark heaviness in my heart.
Every family member, every friend in India relates a story of sickness or loss. The elderly, dependent on home health care anxiously waiting for help, or for their medicines, praying they don’t go gasping for breath. They are not just statistics in the news, but people. People I care about. When my thoughts turn to them and the thousands of others struggling to stay alive I have to ask, “What did I do to deserve this privilege of being safe? More importantly, what does life expect of me to pay for this privilege?”
"Opinion" - Google News
May 13, 2021 at 07:32AM
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Opinion: The pandemic contrast between the U.S. and my family and friends in India is surreal - The San Diego Union-Tribune
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