We Were Bereft. As Daughters. And As Citizens

THEY SAY IT gets better with time.

But it doesn’t really.

The first thing that has altered in my life is that I cannot listen to music anymore.

My father, SP Dutt, Speedy Dutt to friends and family alike, used to spend hours at his ramshackle workstation, sitting in a corner of his airless room amid a mountain of books, dusty files and meccano toys that he had designed and built, listening to music on internet radio stations.

Christmas carols, soft rock, Santana —there was a 24/7 loop of music on his ageing Apple desktop.

Every time I hear the opening chords of a song, a memory draws me back to that image of him and I feel the pain cut me like a knife.

It seems easier to not listen to any music at all.

I had begun to think of myself as peculiar till I read an account by Michelle Zauner in the New Yorker about how she would collapse in tears every time she went to shop at H-Mart, the Korean supermarket chain; the dry food cans triggered an immediate association with her mother.
Memory can be a beast.

That is my abiding personal lesson from the pandemic.

Before his death, my sister Bahar and I always valorized our mother, Prabha Dutt, whom we lost when I was just thirteen years old to a brain haemorrhage. She was a flamboyant, volatile, tempestuous counterfoil to the gentle, unassuming, kindly and eccentric man her husband was. Among the first generation of women journalists in India, she was the automatic headline story of our family. Notoriously rebellious, she was India’s first woman war correspondent, reporting from the front line of the India-Pakistan war in 1965 by herself, armed with only a notepad and pen. We grew up in her shadow, moulded by extraordinary stories of how she once jumped into a hippopotamus enclosure to chase a story, how she petitioned the court and entered the annals of Indian case law by insisting on interviewing child murderers Billa and Ranga before they were executed, and how she exposed corruption and wrongdoing through her writings in the Hindustan Times.

She was a legend, and because she died so young — she was just forty — the memory of her grew larger than life in our heads.

It was easy to take the person right in front of us — our dad — for granted.

It took losing him to Covid for me to realize how he had been the epicenter of my existence.

It took his death for me to understand how traumatized he must have been, especially as a single parent, every time I left for an assignment to a dangerous hotspot. I remember his protestations and anxieties two decades ago when I was dispatched to report on the Kargil war in 1999; I was dismissive, impatient and stubborn. And the truth is, he set me free, entirely so, even when he had to sit on his hands.

Every day I curse myself for not appreciating him as fully as I should have when he was alive.

And now it is too late.

I have lost count of the number of daughters I have met in my travels across India who are similarly haunted. By loss. By regret. By anger. By what-ifs.

And by memory.

In April 2021, during the peak of the second wave, one of Mumbai’s most popular radio jockeys, Samridhi Saxena, better known as RJ Sam, desperately reached out to me in the hope that I could help her father with an oxygen cylinder. He had tested positive for Covid in 2020 and survived. Now he was struggling with a rare neurodegenerative disease and was on assisted breathing. Oxygen was as critical to keep him alive as it was for someone whose respiratory system was hit badly by the virus. Sam was ready to beg, borrow and steal, and did everything she could. She went on to Twitter, called everyone she knew, cried in front of strangers, folded hands in humility, snapped in exasperation. ‘If someone is a non-Covid patient, doesn’t he have the right to live? Doesn’t he have the right to medical facilities?’ Sam had created an ICU at home for her father, renting specialized equipment at the cost of ₹ 100,000 a month. But she could not get a single oxygen station in Mumbai to refill his now-depleted cylinders. ‘I don’t think he will survive,’ she said, breaking down. A cylinder that normally cost ₹ 5,000 before the second wave had escalated to ₹ 9,000 in February 2021, and during the peak of the surge was as much as ₹ 45,000 in the black market.

Betrayed by the state and the system, citizens formed a community of their own for support during the worst months of the second wave. As we travelled through India, we were approached often by complete strangers who would track us down on social media or hunt down our number and cold-call us, in the desperate hope that we could do something that doctors had been unable to.

Usually, we were even more helpless than they were.

All I could do was listen, share their pain and tell their stories. From Patna, another heartbroken daughter, Manisha, called me to say her fifty-three-year-old father would die because Ford Hospital, where both he and his wife were admitted for Covid, was asking the family to move him. ‘He is critical, his oxygen is falling.’ Manisha spoke breathlessly, as if her own heart would come to a crashing halt any moment. Like so many hospitals across India, this one too was dealing with a depleting supply in its ICU. Its administration advised that Manisha should either go out and organize the oxygen or find another medical facility. ‘My father sent me a text message yesterday,’ Manisha told me, ‘since then I have heard nothing.’ She knew the worst was imminent.

In Bengaluru I met twenty-one-year-old Bharini who asked me a question I had no answer to. ‘How strong am I expected to be?’ We were in her kitchen, seated on the ledge talking. I was still trying to wrap my head around her extraordinary tragedy. She lost her biological parents when she was very young and was adopted by her mother’s sister and her husband. In 2021, she lost her adoptive father to a heart attack; later in the year her mother died from Covid. Though Bharini dreamt of being an IAS officer, on the day I met her she described herself as someone who was ‘emotionally, mentally and financially broken’.

I was speechless. My own pain seemed unworthy compared to the magnitude of what she was struggling with.

But then, as Joan Didion, who also died in 2021, had first taught us, ‘A single person is missing for you and the whole world is empty.’

Journalist Stutee Ghosh and I shared the sense of dissonance that came from remaining functional while you have a parent locked away in hospital, whom you have no access to. We spoke of the callousness of a glitzy IPL cricket tournament, a cash-rich advertising property, running right through the crisis, suspended only when players started testing positive despite their ‘bio-bubble’. And we mirrored each other’s persistent, gnawing guilt—that somehow we were letting down our fathers; and guilty also that even in the worst moment of our lives we were distinctly better off than hundreds of thousands of other Indians, just by the fact that our dads were in hospital, and we outside the closed gates of one. ‘For the past nine days, I wake up with my phone and I go to sleep with my phone and when I am not calling someone for my father, I am, like everyone else, receiving or sending SOS messages for others, for an oxygen cylinder, or a bed, or medicine, or a concentrator, or warm food. I don’t even know where the IPL is being played,’ said Stutee. Her father, like mine, didn’t make it. And, over the weeks, her grief mutated, like the virus, into rage at ‘the indignity in death for so many Indians who are dying and not even being counted by the government.’

We were bereft. As daughters. And as citizens.

In April 2021,when the news first came from Delhi that my father had tested positive for Covid, I was on the road chasing the virus in Maharashtra, which at that point had the highest number of cases. I was sitting on the pavement outside the crematorium in Ghatkopar in Mumbai, fighting back tears as an elderly man in his nineties sat stoically in a wheelchair, waving a silent goodbye to his wife.

Initially, my father’s infection seemed mild, and though he was in his eighties and a long-time patient of diabetes, the doctors thought it was easily manageable at home. That evening, on my digital platforms, I wrote about needing to find the balance between being a distraught daughter and a clear-headed, committed professional. I carried on reporting, travelling through the smaller towns of Maharashtra and onwards to Gujarat, where in Surat there were so many people dying every day that two iron furnaces at one of the city’s biggest crematoriums had melted and corroded because too many corpses had been lit on them.

But when my father’s fever persisted, I cut short my reporting assignment and flew back, a process that came with its own delays, because I first needed an all-clear on a Covid test.

I went to see him in the home where I had lived with him pretty much all my life up until the age of forty. My father’s family, that once lived in a giant kothi with pillars made of white marble, dozens of rooms, fountains out in the infinite green lawns and a grand piano in its chandeliered living room, left Sialkot in pre-Partition Punjab and arrived in Delhi as penniless refugees. The capital took in half a million refugees before August 1947. My grandfather, Krishan Gopal Dutt, imprisoned during the freedom movement, died before I was born. His sons were allotted a small plot in colonies (like Jangpura Extension, where we stayed) that were created for such migrants near and around Nizamuddin station, where most of the Punjab trains had arrived. Before the 1950s, Lodi Road formed the southern tip of the capital; beyond it were ‘open fields, where jackals howled and black bucks roamed’. On this reorganized land was our home, simply called ‘J’, the central nerve for a sprawling, close-knit family of cousins, aunts, friends and friends of friends, who all treated my dad’s home as an open house for sleepovers and Sunday meals.

My father insisted he was improving.

As proof, he stood in the doorway of his bedroom and waved to me to go back to my own apartment. ‘I am much better, see, I am walking. ’ I took a photograph of that moment that I haven’t been able to look at again, since his death.

On the eighth day, his condition deteriorated and his fever spiked. The doctors said they would prefer him to be admitted to hospital. For us this was not an easy decision; for one we would be isolating him and leaving him alone. But we went by medical advice. How would we get a room, though? It was the end of April, and the wave was a tsunami.

From this moment on I became the news I had reported all these months. From begging for space in hospital to the anxiety over falling oxygen to researching the pros and cons of remdesivir, I was suddenly telling the Covid story in the
first person.

Naresh Trehan, the celebrated surgeon, generously agreed that my dad could be brought to a general room at Medanta, the hospital he helmed. I convinced my reluctant father that we had to leave home by assuring him that he had permission to keep his own nursing attendant overnight, since he was not being admitted to the ICU. I promised him that once a series of tests was done, I would bring him home in two days.

I failed to keep my word.

On Tuesday morning, on 20 April, my father climbed down the steps of our home in crumpled blue pyjamas, taking the help of the polished wooden railing to slowly make his way down, shrugging off even then the help of the attendant. He was due for his second vaccine shot that very week.

The hospital’s ambulances were busy till the afternoon. We panicked and, in what became one of the many decisions I have come to regret, started hunting for a private vehicle.

When the ‘ambulance’ arrived it turned out to be an old Maruti van that had been repurposed for the task. It had a crew of one; the driver and no accompanying paramedics. I glanced at the back. There was no stretcher, just the hard, flat grey slab of a worn-out seat. My eye travelled to an oxygen cylinder on the floor. Does it work, I asked the driver. He assured me it did. Then he suddenly asked me if we could provide the mask for oxygen. Suspicious of the infrastructure, I told him we would not travel with him if he was not fully equipped with a kit to administer the oxygen. He produced a mask and guaranteed me that everything was in order. By now, caught between panic and fear, I decided to take the chance and not lose more time. We helped our father on to the back. I sat in the front seat with the driver.

Along the way we encountered random police checkposts every few kilometres, set up to enforce the city’s lockdown. They perilously slowed down a stream of ambulances, leading to a traffic snarl that could have made the difference between life and death. The driver had no idea of how to get to Medanta, and so I had one eye on Google Maps, another on my father at the back. ‘Is he breathing,’ I repeatedly asked his nurse. Over the noise of the traffic and the rickety vehicle we were in, my father motioned his hand at me in a wave, as if to say everything will be all right.

But by the time we reached the Medanta ICU my father’s oxygen levels after an hour of being on a cylinder had plummeted. The young doctor on the emergency shift told me that the mask fixed to the cylinder had not administered high-flow oxygen as it ought to have and my father was no longer in any condition to be admitted to a room as we had promised him. He needed to go straight to the ICU. And, naturally, there was no bed free immediately. My father was extricated from that sham of an ambulance, placed in a wheelchair, wheeled into the open lobby of the hospital and given a different oxygen cylinder. I stroked his hair and hugged him; he was barely conscious or cognizant of his surroundings. He had aged ten years in that hour. He sat hunched over, his hands limp, his face impassive.

Even in that horrific moment, when my heart was quite literally in my throat, I knew that my upper-class privilege, my relative access to monetary and other resources, made my father luckier than many Indians. After all, this is what I had spent months and months doing—telling the stories of those who were dying at the gates of hospitals, sometimes on the streets, because the healthcare system had crumbled.

Now I was on the other side; I was the protagonist instead of the chronicler. It was surreal, but also debilitating. I was so much more used to asking the questions, offering empathy, reflecting the rage. Suddenly, as the protagonist of my own sadness, I did not know how to cope. That day was the last day I would see my father alive.

Over the next two days I managed only a crackly Facetime call with him on the doctor’s mobile. Dad was hard of hearing and often used to piece together what we were saying by reading our lips. Unable to talk or hear and visibly uncomfortable with all the contraptions strapped to him, he formed a half sentence: ‘I am choking, treat me.’

The hospital’s doctors tried their best and I shall forever be grateful for that.

My father used to be an Air India executive in the glory years of the airline. Unlike his more contrarian and confrontational daughters, he was a universally liked man with perfect people skills. But at heart he was really a man of science. He walked out of a secure, salaried job when we were still in college, to dabble with entrepreneurship and the stuff he really loved—mathematics, meccano, and making things with his hands. A geeky inventor, he sometimes pulled apart electronic gadgets just so that he could experience the joy of reassembling them. In the now-locked cupboard of his room, saved between sheaths of tissue, is a newspaper clipping from his years in Modern School. It’s a six-column story on the brilliant young boy who made a rocket that actually worked. As a young adult he built a vending machine for Cadbury chocolates well before the concept had arrived in India. We preserved it in our home with the love and awe one might feel for a museum piece. Over the years we stopped noticing it because it literally became part of the furniture. But I remember it vividly: white, curved at four edges, it looked like a small refrigerator, except for a black scrawl across its middle, one that tantalizingly promised a chocolate bar would drop out from its belly, in exchange for an inserted 25paise coin.

Later he dabbled with other inventions, one of them a shoe-shine machine eponymously named ‘Speedshine’, used for some years by the posh Gymkhana Club. He was fascinated with the idea of creating a roti-maker. And there were his meccano pieces —trains, jet planes, ships that sailed on water, robots that talked. I would urge him to start a bespoke collection for commercial sales; he’d just laugh.

(This is an edited excerpt from Barkha Dutt’s To Hell and Back: Humans of Covid)

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