migrant working classes started walking back to the villages, left hungry and desolate without homes, work and wages – a scene not very short of an apocalypse.

Over two summers, India woke up to similar headlines: a shortage of hospital beds, oxygen, medicines; a languishing economy; cases rising and falling; governments green-lighting Hindu religious, super-spreader that compounded the second wave;

misled unlocking schools, business and the social sphere, and reversed lockdowns when cases went up; underreporting of cases and deaths; lakhs dead to the virus and crores of people infected, and still counting.

While the pandemic continues to rage on, notwithstanding its ebbs and flows, its real impact on society may start to be visible only much later.
Over a year of tracking how the novel Coronavirus ravaged India’s society, economy, politics and culture, nine of the finest of India’s writers try and make sense of this difficult reality.