“It’s a sort of double blow,” he said, noting that the Indian community in Britain was among the minority ethnic groups disproportionately hit by the pandemic. “We went through it here and we thought, ‘Well, at least India was protected.’ They were doing reasonably well.”
But it didn’t last, and on Monday his uncle died from the coronavirus. His aunt was hospitalized on Thursday. In pre-pandemic times, his family would all have traveled to India to mourn his uncle, a patriarch of a tight-knit Sikh family.
“It’s just the sheer, sort of, helplessness of it,” he said, adding that along with the shock and sorrow is a growing anger about government mismanagement. “They know it didn’t need to happen the way it has happened.”
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