One evening, a news flash informed me that the hospital where my father was admitted had only three hours of oxygen supply left. There was nothing I could do. No hospital had beds, and every day more hospitals were running out of oxygen. I was two steps ahead of many and yet one step behind the virus.
Surely the government would step in and fix this immediately, I thought. Instead, for more than two weeks, the central and state governments traded blame in court. Meanwhile, patients kept dying due to lack of oxygen.
But there was no time to worry about this. Covid had gotten to my grandfather. His weak body was shaking, my sister told me on the phone, crying. The hospitals they could reach said no beds were available. We did what we could — arranged a saline drip, an oxygen cylinder, a nurse to inject steroids. It was not enough. The next day he was gone.
But there was no time to grieve, either. There were logistics to take care of — find people to take away the body, figure a way to do last rites.
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