Book Review |Barkha Dutt’s ‘To Hell and Back’ exhumes the bodies of those whose stories were waiting to be told

On 21 April 2021, I received a WhatsApp message from one of my best friends. She sent me a video. It had to be a meme or a reel, I thought. Didn’t they have us in splits or rejuvenated us from the morbid environment around us throughout the successive waves of coronavirus and consequent lockdowns when we were ‘working from home’ and (metaphorically) dying to step out of our respective homes? When I opened the video, I was shocked to find her gasping for breath, explaining in front of a camera the gut-wrenching tale of her mother’s demise.  She is privileged, unlike many others who fought hard to save their loved ones, especially during the second lockdown when the Delta variant wreaked havoc in the country. Yet she couldn’t save her mother because leave alone finding a hospital, according to her, basic medicinal supplies were not available in the state. It begs the question: who took her mother’s life – COVID-19 or state apathy towards its people? Help was hard to get. Dutt decided to hit the road, along with her small Mojo Story team, and ended up traversing 30,000 kilometres, covering fourteen states and union territories, in 120 days to bring to us the stories that we wanted to hear but were never served. Her new book To Hell and Back: Humans of COVID (Juggernaut, 2022) is a record of such stories. It is, as she puts it, not about the numbers, but the people behind these numbers, like my friend’s mother who died outside her house waiting for a cannula so that she could be given medicines. Maybe because my family and friends struggled during the consecutive waves of COVID-19 that made reading this book an engaging experience for me. However, anyone who has been privy to what transpired ever since the first lockdown to curb the spread of coronavirus was announced by the prime minister would find an immediate connection with the stories documented in the 13 moving chapters of this book. Dutt first destroys the ‘egalitarian’ myth of the virus. When the educated middle class and upper-middle class of the country were posting reels on making Dalgona coffee, exercising tips for staying fit at home, and, most importantly, asking everyone to ‘stay at home’, they were demonstrating how far removed they were from the real India. Kundli village in the Sonipat district of Haryana and Mumbai’s Dharavi, whose entire population (850,000) has only 8,000 common toilets, are cases in point. The pandemic didn’t neutralise the discrimination just because death was sure if you were contracted with the virus. It further exposed all the grounds of discrimination: caste, class, and gender. “In the first months of the pandemic, the humanitarian crisis overshadowed the medical threat of the virus”, writes Dutt. It took the life of Mukesh Mandal, migrant labour from Bihar, in Haryana, who “spoke to no one and left no suicide note. He was only thirty years old”. But this “spectre of starvation” wasn’t recorded at all. Every bureaucratic body was equally invested in hiding the ‘real cause’ of deaths of people dying at the hands of not only COVID-19 but also the state’s ignorance and mindlessness. “India failed to save the living; now we were refusing to count our dead”, Dutt concludes. Though it appears that all this was easy to report, it behoves us to recall that no one had the courage to ply on roads, risking their lives, working without much incentive and being called ‘vultures’ for reporting what they saw. Bakha Dutt and her team at Mojo Story did. Once when they went to cover a factory in Delhi whose owner “locked his workers behind a giant steel wall” to prevent them from going home, they were “locked in with them” too and had their “cameras snatched away”. Journalism was clearly under threat, one way or the other. One of the defining reporting by Dutt was that of the silenced people among us: the elderly people. It was Dutt who broke the painful, heart-rending story of a 70-year-old woman Leelawati Kedarnath Dube, who was found crying at a railway station having been thrown out by her son and having nowhere to go. I distinctly remember watching this story but reading it sent chills down my spine all over again. Dutt cites a survey that found 73 percent  of elderly respondents believing “attitudes towards them worsened during the lockdown and the second wave”. Several spoke about “incidences of abuse within the family. An overwhelming majority spoke about feeling neglected in the years of the pandemic.” The most harrowing of accounts from the book, however, is narrated by Indira Pancholi, founding member of the Mahila Jan Adhikar Samiti. She says that loss of jobs “pushed men into long hours of confinement in tiny quarters, where there has been nothing separating them from their spouses or daughters. Pornography, masturbation, non-consensual sex with their wives while the children watched, and yes, violence. This is what girls and their mothers have reported back to women’s groups across the country.” While some of these stories were coming out, the real struggles of the ‘COVID warriors’, the frontline workers – our doctors and medical practitioners, weren’t finding attention. There were, however, stories of them being beaten up or cursed at. Anyway, besides thali-banging and lighting diyas to ‘support’ them, was anything being done? Dutt writes, “At 0.55 beds for every 1,000 Indians and just 0.66 doctors for every 1,000 people, India should hardly have been surprised at what followed.” Her father S. P. Dutt died of COVID. And like many children, she also thought if she could’ve done anything differently. Though she was asking everyone how they were coping with loss, when she was confronted with it, she lacked articulation. Grief is a story we repeat to ourselves to keep alive those whom we’ve lost. It’s an entirely inexplicable yet performative thing. There’s only one critique I have for the book and that is: where do queer people come in the ‘humans of COVID’ narrative? This was not even surprising because stories of LGBTQIA+ people dealing with or dying of toxic hetero-caste-patriarchal homes, if they had one, rarely got covered during the pandemic. And that continues to be the story. Still To Hell and Back revisits the trauma that the nation felt, its people went through and continues to deal with, in a measured way that most journalists haven’t been able to document. When the government ignored them, by writing about them, not only has Dutt given them dignity she has also demonstrated what journalism is about: people first!

Saurabh Sharma (He/They) is a Delhi-based queer writer and freelance journalist. Instagram/Twitter: @writerly_life.

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