‘Grief Burns Like Fever’: This novel is a flashback of depravity during the surreal pandemic years
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It is hard to find anything we’d all collectively agree or disagree with, but if there’s one thing that unites Indians is our vehement determination to repress and suppress all and every memory of the dreadful Covid-19 pandemic years.
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Today, those three odd years seem like a hazy dream, a delirium where nothing and no one resembled what they once were, and it is not surprising that so many of us have retained virtually no memories of the time.
Every hour of every day was the same; the world was cut off, we were cooped up inside our homes – this would not have been so bad, and could have even been tolerated as a painfully prolonged and mandatory family-bonding exercise if not for infected air and the piling up of the dead.
Little islands
These forgettable, unforgettable days make a return in publisher-translator-writer Minakshi Thakur’s new novel, Grief Burns Like Fever. The unnamed city appears like a wasteland – those who were forced to leave have left, while those left behind struggle to stay alive as the virus contorts into more ominous shapes.
The second wave of the pandemic made the first wave look like child’s play, and with the contagion at its peak and the lockdown enforced with...