Grief Burns Like Fever – Minakshi Thakur

Description

IT TAKES A MOMENT TO UPEND A LIFE.

As the second wave of the pandemic forces lockdowns across the world, an ambulance driver at a hospital in Delhi finds his days and nights taken over by the task of ferrying patients and bodies-increasingly, bodies-to makeshift crematoria across the city. Up the length and breadth of the city, he meets the grieving and the depraved. A little boy who has lost his mother to the virus, sex workers and hijras holding each other up as the disease tears through their colonies, a young man unhinged by grief over the death of his politician father, a nurse without the time to mourn her own lost love. But also, black marketeers hoarding oxygen and traffickers preying on orphans.

Everywhere, life is hard, but networks of empathy and shared kindnesses build quietly as well, making heroes of ordinary people and shoring up dignities when all seems lost.

Grief Burns Like Fever is elegiac in its evocation of the pandemic years, opening unforgettable pathways to memory and catharsis.