Anger and grief

Illustration/Uday Mohite

One of my oldest friends is a doctor in Delhi, pragmatic and optimistic to a fault, even through the pandemic. I ask how she is. "Always near tears," she says.

I read one of those Instagram homilies the other day: I sat with my anger long enough until she told me her real name was grief. It reminded me of my friend H saying, "I think when we are hurt, some of us access our anger more easily, and some our grief." I thought she was right. Grief and anger carry different vulnerabilities and strengths. Some of us conceal grief's fragilities with anger; others confront grief, but fear anger's confrontations with power.

In these times, though, we don't get to choose one or the other. Concentrics of grief ripple around us, waves of anger crash inside us. After a year of loss, difficulty and despair, we witness escalating anguish. People weeping helplessly outside hospitals, people dying on camera, dying as they tweet. Social media is a desperate scroll of desperation - oxygen cylinders, hospital beds, medicines, help us someone help us - and those trying to help just as helplessly desperate. We nurse our own losses and fears. We read with a sinking heart of people losing their best friends, parents, colleagues and even children, all of whom we have scrolled past in their happy, achingly alive photos before. I don't know if grief must be collective, to create compassion and for anger to be transformative. What can shake our society from its uncaringness if this too doesn't?

When the warnings about oxygen supplies started we were told to not waste oxygen - perhaps by the homespun method of breathing less? Benign, compared to Dr Kafeel Khan being jailed for raising the oxygen shortage issue three years ago. Now, as bodies are cremated in gardens, and people die not from the virus, but from criminally created shortages of oxygen and medical care, a man-made disaster last seen in the Bengal famine, the apex court has adjourned the matter of national emergency to next week. It's like the system is refusing to mask up, so we can see the uncaring expression on its face.

A video of a Delhi couple apprehended for driving maskless shows them fighting with the cops. "He's my husband, what will you do if I kiss him now?" the woman yells. Later, the man absolves himself of all responsibility, saying ‘meri wife didn't let me mask up'. Just like the system, are its people. In a society disconnected from meaningful notions of the collective, everyone is actually alone. Atmanirbharta is a slogan understood as each man for himself.

This is why there are no free vaccinations for all and corporations whose research was publicly funded can make profits by selling at higher prices to states than the centre, sending out yet another message of dividedness, not collectivity. India's genome sequencing efforts have languished because - no funds. We care as little about the world as we do about our own people. We are global leaders in driving the pandemic. We are global leaders in pettiness too, when right wing trolls mock the communist leader Sitaram Yechury for losing his child to a Chinese virus.

May our grief and our anger unify into something that heals us, not only from the virus, but the sickness that has consumed our souls.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com