India Covid-19: ‘My father did not have to die’

Last summer hundreds of thousands of people died when an unprepared India was hit by a catastrophic second wave of Covid-19 and its health care system buckled. Journalist Barkha Dutt, who was chronicling the pandemic, lost her father to the virus in April 2021. Here she writes on her loss, and other daughters who suffered the same fate.

It’s been a year since I have been able to hear music; a year since the death of my father to Covid at the peak of India’s insatiable second wave.

So, a few days ago, the faint strains of a familiar tune felt like a jolt to the system.

Guantanamera Guajira Guantanamera…

My hand trembled as I heard the chords of the Cuban folk song that has been variously sung to invoke romance, patriotism, protest and change.

Inside I was shaking.

Memory can be a beast.

For my sister and I, this was Papa’s Song that marked the milestones of our lives, played out on scratchy cassettes when we were kids, remastered for an eight-track system in our teens, graduating to CDs when we went to college and finally heard on loop at his desktop. Here, he was surrounded by grandchildren, dogs, meccano sets, and odd looking wires – bit parts of kettles, speakers, coffee makers – machines he was repairing for friends, sometimes opened up for the sheer joy of tinkering with them.