Opinion Life after Covid: How an orphaned family struck by tragedies has survived the odds

With her mother splayed on her, still breathing, her friend drove them 170 km to Pehowa in Haryana, where a clinic admitted her with high severity of lung damage. She died in a few hours. But later events showed that since it was not a Covid-designated facility, the doctor threatened Kavita with criminal action if she asked for her mother’s death certificate.

By the time Kavita returned home from her mother’s cremation, her father, who was a priest at a small local temple, was struggling to breathe. One of her father’s “yajmans” (parishioners) hired a taxi in which Kavita accompanied her wheezing father to a Covid hospital in Chandigarh, 300 km away, convinced that he would live. He died four days later.

“On the way back from Chandigarh, with my father’s body beside me, I was returning home as mother and father to my five sisters and four-year-old brother.”

In that devastating week, the story of this family of seven Covid orphans, broadcast on CNN at midnight, caused many viewers to choke, this writer among them. The CNN reporter Vedika Sud and I quickly got together to pledge personal support to this stricken family of children. We knew that our “tiding-over finance” was a makeshift measure and that we had to pivot the government’s attention to this and other similar cases. Meanwhile, the children were adrift; they needed milk, rations, medicines, shoes, a perception of financial security as a right, not charity.

But governments are impassive and astonishingly out-of-touch, yet formidably powerful in such situations. Illustratively, the concerned Secretary to the Government of India told me that they could place the children in a foster home set-up, but for that, they would split up the grieving children – the 4-year-old boy in a boys’ home, the under-10 girls somewhere else, the 10-15-year-olds at yet another location. Incredibly, the Secretary repeated nonchalantly, “Yes, this will split up the family, and of course, the family will be ruined. We separated a brother and sister just last week, where the mother murdered their father and is in jail, but though the siblings begged to be allowed to stay together, we didn’t permit it. These are the rules”.

With no immediate relief in sight, and with a real danger that, as a horrific by-product of my ill-considered meeting with the Secretary, Covid-affected siblings all across the country might be separated for life, we rushed to the intrepid lawyer, Prabhsahay Kaur who helmed a petition for financial assistance for children who had lost parents to Covid.

Other similar petitions were clubbed together, and the Delhi High Court ordered a stipend of Rs 2,500 per child per month up to the age of 25 years to be paid by the Centre, in addition to Rs 50,000 as an ex-gratia grant for each deceased parent. We finally got a “normal” death certificate for the mother after many procedural somersaults.

Crowd-funding, ex-gratia grants, monthly stipends, free rations by public-spirited organisations such as Bachpan Bachao Andolan, their tiny self-owned house, education, were all necessary but not sufficient elements in the survival of these “sudden orphans” who now had to live alone in Delhi’s Rohini, a sprawling colony of the middle and aspirational classes.

With lightning speed, human traffickers descended on the siblings like foraging hunters, incessantly proposing “marriage” to the elder four girls to men in Haryana and Rajasthan because “brides are scarce there and you will live like queens”, while the traffickers would place the youngest two girls and their toddler brother in “good hands”. Long years in journalism alerted me to the intention of the “RWA Secretary”, and in a friction-filled and thorny conversation, I warned him that 15 journalists lay in wait to accost him if he or his ilk tried to “improve the lives of the poor girls by marrying them off” to bride-starved unknown families. I exaggerated our sense of menace by claiming 15 journalists. We were two. But equally, a couple of sharp Tez Citizens could have daunted the abusers.

Does a wrecking ball of a tragedy make humans fearful, and reckless or does an unexpected notion of personal adequacy emerge? I watched in admiration as Kavita resumed her B.Ed course through Open University, and the other grown sisters returned to their interrupted studies, sharing a single mobile phone for online classes. They registered with the Child Helpline, netted Aadhaar cards for each sibling, and bagged admissions in the local Kendriya Vidyalaya.

Kavita has settled into a work-from-home job in a tech company, and as a stop-gap measure her 20-year-old sister accepted a part-time job as an Anganwadi worker, and the two co-parent their younger siblings, including a sister with tuberculosis. Slowly, there is sufficient money for running a tight ship of a household with food, milk, clothes and school fees and recharge of the TV.

And in the middle of this healing, love bloomed. Kavita tells me that her parents had selected a young neighbour with a modest business, as her groom. He has agreed to move in with them so that she can continue to provide a bustling home to the children.

Kavita is getting married today. Her digital wedding card has, as host, the names of her mother, father, and two sets of grandparents, each with “Late” as a prefix. The wedding party is being held at a little banquet hall’s first floor, with dazzling lights, parallel mirrors, beaming neighbours and priests. The bride and six excited siblings, dressed in tinsel-starred lehngas, mehndi and new shoes mill around in a jaunty cluster, as their youthful parents look down from a photograph on the wall, dancing at the last family wedding, and you can almost hear the drumbeats from that happy evening.

But the story is not over. I attended the wedding this evening especially to telegraph the message to the community, perhaps unnecessarily, that the siblings have an impenetrable shield of neighbours, lawyers, a few kind officers and some Tez citizens who have their back for the long haul.

Kavita and the siblings’ happiness this evening has taught me, one, that despair doesn’t last. It lasts a few days, a few weeks or a few hours, but a muscle of resilience hews a path out of despair. Two, these unexpectedly orphaned children do not regard themselves as inadequate in any way, which is so reminiscent of the spunky confidence of small-town India before social media. And three, that even in the most hopeless situation, when tyranny engulfs (and I’m thinking of Shraddha Walker), we must reach out to the public arena for help, because the hierarchical system of our ancient land will finally crumble even if an orphan stands up – with a little help from Tez Citizens.

The writer is a senior journalist