TISHANI DOSHI: Out of Breath
DISASTERS TAKE OUR BREATH AWAY. When we are shocked by wonder or horror, our fingers shoot over our mouths as if to stop breath from falling out. When we say, Oh my god, you won the lottery, or an Oscar, or the neighborhood watch found your cat, or someone you admire is accused of something terrible, and the minute you hear it, you understand it could be true, or you see photographs of the siege of Aleppo or the drought in Madagascar or Uighur and Rohingya camps, you are stopped in your tracks. In Iceland, when the Fagradalsfjall volcano began erupting in March, people stood at the edge, gaping at the glowing lava, as if to see, was it really so? Breath has to do with believability. The more unbelievable something is, the more we reach for our mouths.
On April 20, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi addressed the nation, saying that the second wave of the coronavirus had hit us like a storm. Tsunami. Typhoon. Toofan. Numbers that take your breath away. Over 400,000 infections a day. Thousands of daily deaths. People gasping outside hospitals. Mothers carrying their dead sons in cycle rickshaws. Wives giving CPR to husbands in autos. A young man outside a crematorium asking a photographer to take a picture of him with the fume in the sky, because that fume is his mother. Hospital signs that read: “We regret we are stopping admission in hospital because oxygen supply are not coming.”
The Nazis called the chemical they used to murder millions
in their death camps Zyklon B. German for “cyclone,” Zyklon was developed as a
pesticide by Fritz Haber, who had already created the devastating chlorine gas
used in the trenches of WWI. In Benjamín Labatut’s stunning nonfiction
novel When We Cease to Understand the World, he describes how the
Germans praised Haber for “the extreme elegance of the eradication process.”
Haber was Jewish, and was later forced into exile. His creation was used to
kill members of his extended family and millions of others “who died hunkered
down, muscles cramping, skin covered with red and green spots . . . the young
ones crushing the children and the elderly as they attempted to scale the heap
of naked bodies and breathe a few more minutes, a few more seconds, because
Zyklon B tended to pool on the floor after being dropped through hatches in the
roof.”
During the nine and a half minutes Derek Chauvin held his
knee against George Floyd’s neck, Floyd said I can’t breathe more
than twenty times. He called for his mother. He called for breath. All across
the world people took to the streets to protest. We can’t breathe. We can’t
breathe.
My brother was born a blue baby with three holes in his
heart and had to have open-heart surgery when he was two. He survived. A friend
choked on a piece of meat at a conference in Amsterdam and died. Cyanosis—a
blue discoloration of the skin due to lack of oxygenation. The soldiers in
Flanders in 1916 turned blue because of mustard gas, bodies covered in
blisters, eyes blinded, throats closing up. Code word blue….
https://orionmagazine.org/article/out-of-breath/
Gujarati Poet Parul Khakkar Blames
'Naked King' for Corpses Floating in the Ganga
A
Call for National Mourning and a Proposal for a National Government. By Anil
Nauriya
Society
of the Spectacle / 'इमेज' - 'Image': A Poem on Deaths in the Age of
Covid
Nandini
Sen Mehra: And night has come upon my land
The
Hindu priest struggling to cremate India’s Covid dead – video
