Loss In The Time Of Covid: Review of ‘Grief Burns Like Fever’

Minakshi Thakur's Grief Burns Like Fever (Westland) takes the reader back to Delhi during the devastating second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, when hospitals were overflowing and ambulances carried not just patients but increasingly the dead to makeshift crematoria. At the novel’s centre is an ambulance driver moving through a city overwhelmed by illness, death and fear. He has lost his wife and his lover, Ruma, has paid for her cremation. Around him are people dealing with loss in different ways: a child who has lost his mother, a nurse with no time to mourn her own loss, sex workers and hijras supporting one another, and those who exploit the crisis through black-market oxygen and trafficking. Many remain unnamed, reflecting the terrible reality of the second lockdown when people seemed to be reduced to mere numbers amid the tsunami of infections.

Covid was, in many ways, a modern Black Death, leaving an indelible mark on people's minds. Thakur captures the anguish of a period many would rather forget. Her narrative conveys a strong sense of a city coming apart and lives being fractured, but also of people with little to offer finding small ways to help one another. Pandemics are never just stories of death; they are also about courage, loneliness and the unexpected networks of care that emerge when formal systems fail.

Reading the novel now also raises questions that would not necessarily have occurred to people at the time. Wasn't the woman in the ambulance wearing a mask? Why does the ambulance driver remove his PPE at the crematorium? These things were unclear in the early days but became common knowledge as the pandemic spread.

The ambulance driver provides an effective entry point into this apocalyptic world. Moving across Delhi, he comes into contact with people from very different backgrounds. He witnesses both suffering and opportunism while reliving his own loss. The episodic structure allows Thakur to show the wide reach of the crisis, from hospitals and crematoria to poorer communities and families confined to their homes.

Covid was painful and complex enough without adding to the complexity through shifts in viewpoint and style. The parallel story of a new mother, her visions of her foetus and her troubled marriage brings the pandemic into the domestic sphere and links with the doll factory and the orphan boy. Her experience of isolation, motherhood and mental distress adds another dimension to the novel, but the switches between first- and third-person narration when other characters like the bereaved boy or the sex worker come in, can sometimes be confusing. These changes are not always clearly marked, making it difficult to settle into one character's experience before being moved elsewhere, rather like an ambulance. At certain points, readers may find themselves as directionless as the characters groping to find their feet.

Admittedly, in circumstances such as these, people do better on some days and unravel on others. The fractured structure reflects something of that experience. Yet, the various strands don’t always come together with equal force. Some characters make a strong impression, while others are introduced, it seems, just to illustrate another aspect of the crisis.

The simplest moments are often the most effective. Details of people waiting for ambulances, transporting bodies, caring for strangers or trying to hold their families together carry all the emotional weight the imagination needs. Thakur's portrayal of ordinary people caught in an extraordinary catastrophe and trying to survive makes its own quiet statement.

Thakur’s language is often striking, reflecting the sensibility of the poet she is, with vivid descriptions of fear, exhaustion and sorrow that evoke memories of a time many would prefer to forget. At times, however, the writing is layered with more metaphors than the narrative needs. The language can then get between the reader and the story, with the accumulation of images sometimes dictating how one should feel rather than allowing the situation itself to create the emotion.

Flaws notwithstanding, the grid of death beds, ambulances and barricades that forms the backdrop of Grief Burns Like Fever makes it an important attempt to document a time when grief became almost impossible to process individually. It was a febrile time when fever itself became synonymous with fear and, often, death. The title captures that feeling well.

Grief Burns Like Fever is a sombre, sometimes uneven, but rewarding attempt to remind readers that behind every pandemic statistic was an individual life, a family and a story.

(Anjana Basu is a Kolkata-based author and adverstising consultant. Her recent works include The House the Press Built and Translating for Rituparno)