Of Poems, Pandemics and Death

In the poem “21 Days Later…”, included in Sanket Mhatre’s collection of lyrical poems A City Full of Sirens (Hawakal Publishers, 2023), an airport resumes services after a hiatus:

At the airport

The ban has been lifted

Doors open. The first travellers are ushered.

The click of check-ins

Trolleys scramble

without any distance

I am waiting for you.

The poem is full of images of the airport, of travel, flying, and reunion. But as it soon becomes evident, this is not a poem about travelling at all — it is a poem about the COVID-19-induced isolation. And the joy of reunion at the end of the lockdown.

The Indian government announced the first COVID-19 lockdown on the evening of March 24, 2020, as the number of active cases in the country rose to 500. The first phase of it would last for 21 days, effectively preventing the country’s 1.3 billion-strong population from stepping out of their homes and also cutting down on the rate of spread of the virus. However, the sudden announcement of the lockdown also led to a panic-stricken exodus of millions of migrant workers, many of whom worked in daily-wage jobs, from big cities and towns to their native villages, resulting in several deaths.

The title of the poem refers to the first phase of 21 days — the lockdown would be extended several times and imposed with different levels of severity, depending on the state of the pandemic. But it is also a reference to the 2002 zombie-apocalypse horror film 28 Days Later. Directed by Danny Boyle, it stars Cillian Murphy, who recently won a Golden Globe for his performance in the biopic Oppenheimer, as a survivor.

Mhatre’s poem is also about surviving the pandemic, reuniting with loved ones at the end of a long period of uncertainty and anxiety:

Several planes take off in a unified choir

“Where to?” I ask

“To each other.”

Twenty-one days dissolve in an embrace.

Here

I am still waiting for you

It’s Day One

at the airport

The last stanza of the poem is a reaffirmation of the renewal of the planet and everyone on it.

Since 2019, when the pandemic entered our lives, poets around the world have tried to respond to it — not always with great success. An anthology, Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic, edited by Alice Quinn, former poetry editor of The New Yorker, published in late 2020, was described by the New York Times as faltering “on every front”. Despite a few misses, however, poetry did prove to be therapeutic — with even mental health professionals advising their patients and clients to read more verse.

In India, too, several poets have responded to the pandemic, trying to make sense of their own survival or loss. One of the first books to respond to the pandemic in India was Singing in the Dark: A Global Anthology of Poetry Under Lockdown (2020), edited by K. Satchidanandan and Nishi Chawla. (I had also contributed a few poems to it.) Nikita Parik’s powerful collection, ‘My City is Murder of Crows (2022), addresses the cocktails of emotions sparked by surviving the deadly second wave of the pandemic. Vinita Agarwal’s The Natural Language of Grief (2022) also bears witness to the ravages of the disease. Mhatre’s book is a suitable addition to this rich and growing body of work.

The titular poem of the book refers to the sirens of ambulances taking Mhatre’s mother — Aai, in Marathi — to the hospital after she is detected with stage-three cancer:

On a rain-kissed day

sirens from ambulances wring at full volume

sending a shockwave through this somnolence

the city has been suddenly diagnosed with Stage 3C

The image of the murder is fused with the image of the city, and the breathless lines of the poem follow each other, without as much as a comma, like machine gun fire. Medical terms make too frequent appearances.

now, water levels are rising

her stomach bloats with a spell of monsoon

and there’s no omental biopsy in sight

no cytology report collected

Anyone who has ever served as a caregiver will provide testimony to the sheer anxiety of waiting for hours in cold waiting rooms of hospitals and nursing homes, for medical reports, treatment, for tests. This poem examines the contours of bereavement, which sometimes begins with a diagnosis, long before the actual event of death.

In the introduction to this book, dedicated to Mhatre’s mother, he writes: “She was diagnosed with Stage 3C Ovarian Cancer. I could feel the voice of sirens, the constant beat of cardiograms filling up my veins as my father broke the news to me. From then, the sound of sirens became second nature. Synchronised to my heartbeat.” But the sound of sirens is not only the bugle of fear and loss; it can also be a sound of hope. As Mhatre reports, his 93-year-old grandmother’s recovery from Covid-19 became a story of hope: “The sound of sirens was celebrating our survival.”

Death has served as an inspiration to poets since Gilgamesh was written some 4,000 years ago. But not every expression of death and loss — and survival — can be epic. Even in its most quotidian expressions, it can provide relief, hope, and catharsis. Mhatre’s book does succeed in doing this.

Uttaran Das Gupta is a New Delhi-based writer and journalist. He teaches journalism at O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat