An Indian abroad: ‘My mind is a graveyard of the living’

Indians in the diaspora ‘are hit by currents of grief and guilt as we watch from afar the second wave of COVID-19’.

A stray screenshot of a WhatsApp conversation shared on Twitter cracked open my heart. Until then, I had been watching the mayhem in India in a daze. “Being thousands of kms away from her during her last moments, all I wished for was her to read these messages,” read the tweet by a woman named Isha. The screenshot was a one-way conversation with her mother who had not seen most of what her daughter had written: that she missed her every moment, she thought she was a fighter, she was sure she would get better and return home, that she would buy her a nice saree and a beautiful watch. A pair of blue ticks, however, stood at the end of one line: “Love you.” In fiction, when a tragedy overtakes a character, your heart breaks with hers. After all, you have invested your emotions in the person and her life. But projection is as much at play here as empathy. Without knowing it, you cry because you are confronted with the question: What if a similar tragedy overtakes me?