This book on news photography in India examines how some images became the nation’s visual memory

When the Covid pandemic hit around March 2020, death itself lost its meaning because everyone was dying or was on the waiting list to hell. The wail of the ambulance, too, had lost its meaning because that sound had become the only noise in that deadly silence that had descended on the world. In Delhi, there was no space to bury the mounting dead. There was no farewell unless you treated the honking of the ambulance as a dirge or the drumbeats that herald Yama, the god of death. Bodies were being dumped all over. For a news photographer, it could be heaven or hell. How do you capture the inevitability of people dying in front of you? Hospitals were no longer a place to go to recover and live. You went there to die. The transition was uncomplainingly smooth. There were no goodbyes. You were bundled in half-alive and stretched out fully dead. The next stop was the pavement outside the overflowing crematoriums.

About a year into the pandemic, it became evident throughout north India, at least Delhi and Uttar Pradesh, that bodies were being burnt on roadsides and riverbanks. Any empty stretch of open land was turned into a place...

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