The next leg of my journey took me to Varanasi. The ancient city, surrounded by Jaunpur, Mirzapur, Ghazipur, Chandauli and Bhadohi, happens to be the constituency of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.Having driven about 300 kilometres from Lucknow, we were now in the city lanes, looking for a hotel. Smaller hotels had shut shop after facing massive financial losses. Only a few remained unexpectedly functional with reduced staff. It didn’t take us long to find a decent one on Cantonment Road. Varanasi, just like Lucknow, Prayagraj and Gorakhpur, was grappling with the worst infrastructure breakdown. The deaths were too many to count. The city’s crematoriums worked day and night and its hospitals, including the prestigious Banaras Hindu University Medical College Hospital, were overstretched.Faith and Fury: Covid Dispatches from India’s Hinterlands, Jyoti Yadav, Westland Non-Fiction, 2026.District reporters, local leaders and activists had retreated into their homes. Ground reporters weren’t able to travel to gather stories. As a result, the rural belts remained veiled in silence.What was the story of the rest of India beyond the pyres burning in the cities? This question led me towards a new chapter in my assignment.IT cell trolls had launched a scathing campaign against those of us who reported from the ground, holding us responsible for ‘spreading negativity’. They branded us as ‘vultures’ (drawing parallels between the iconic 1993 Kevin Carter photograph of a collapsed child lying vulnerably close to a vulture during the famine in Sudan).With every report that went live, the IT cell flooded the comment sections of the handles of journalists like Danish Siddiqui, me and many others reporting from the frontlines.The Uttar Pradesh government had also grown increasingly antagonistic following the reports on undercounting of deaths. In Varanasi, the stakes were even higher. As the constituency of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, any news coming from the ground was subjected to intense scrutiny.The evening I reached Varanasi was marked by the haunting images of the Ganga ghats. The visuals had gone viral, sending shockwaves across social media platforms. I visited the Manikarnika and Raja Harishchandra ghats that very evening. Countless dead bodies were there. Long queues of corpses awaited their last rites. Those who had spent their entire lives at these ghats – the shopkeepers, labourers, Doms (cremators) and priests – all said they had never witnessed anything of this magnitude.The state wanted to divert the media’s gaze from the ghats. The Varanasi district administration, in a strategic move, established a makeshift tin crematorium overnight, and called it Ramana Ghat. This new ghat was located on the opposite bank of the Ganga river. The counterparts of Varanasi’s local administration in Lucknow had blocked the burning pyres from sight by installing tin sheds. Since I had already reported on the undercounting of deaths from Lucknow, I decided not to pursue the same line in another city.Instead, I returned to my hotel and sent emails and messages to the collector, CMO [chief medical officer] and other key officials, seeking appointments to have a word with them. The next morning, I started visiting their offices in person, but in vain. Disappointed, I returned to Harishchandra Ghat that evening. As I entered the narrow alleys, a group of Doms was carrying a body to its final destination. I trailed after it. The Doms had severely tanned bodies, and their eyes were red. Their gamchhas were soaked in sweat. They paid no heed to my camera.Unlike the doctors, the nurses and the bureaucrats, who had taken centre stage as frontline soldiers, the Doms remained in the shadows. They wore no gloves, masks or PPE kits. No relief packages were announced for them.They toiled silently in the crematoriums along the Ganga. They carried the dead who had been abandoned on their last journey by their families. Their contribution during the second wave went unnoticed by a large section of the media and the administration. What does this oversight tell us?That the first draft of history systemically excluded a particular community?Also read: COVID-19 Is Five Years Old. But for ‘Long Haulers’, the Problems Are as Fresh as Ever.As the group of Doms vanished into the smoke rising from the burning pyres, I spotted the person in charge of Harishchandra Ghat at a distance. He was busy making phone calls as his role involved coordination between the Nagar Nigam and the Doms at the cremation ground. We sat down nearby to talk about the situation.He started with an incident when his team of young men had cremated the corpse of an elderly lady whose family hadn’t turned up for the last rites. Then he pointed towards a group of Doms: ‘Some of them went to her home and carried her here.’This wasn’t their duty to perform as they weren’t formally employed by the Nagar Nigam. But since the Nagar Nigam across the country was struggling with human resources, they outsourced some of the work to these Doms.I later verified the incident with an official in the local administration. He had been tasked with the duty of getting the abandoned corpses cremated. ‘There are families that simply refuse to come forward for the last rites. At BHU, this is an everyday occurrence. We wait for some time and then call the Doms,’ he said. But the Doms weren’t paid a penny for the extra mile they went to provide people dignity in death. They were overworked, underpaid and exhausted.My source revealed that the elderly lady was related to a civil servant who was then serving as secretary in a central ministry.‘Actually,’ he paused, ‘the district magistrate (Kaushal Raj Sharma) received a call from New Delhi. The mother or mother-in-law of a senior IAS officer was living in the city all by herself. A cook used to look after her. The officer from New Delhi requested a team of doctors to check on her since they hadn’t heard from her for quite some time.The collector assigned this task to the CMO.’ When the team arrived at her house, they discovered that she had passed away. ‘The collector contacted the secretary and both, the CMO and the collector, patiently waited for the family to come and take charge of the last rites. But when the secretary said the last rites should proceed without his family’s presence, the Doms were called in,’ he added.When I discovered the identity of the secretary, I sent him a condolence message, ‘I am sorry for your loss. I heard about your close relative in Varanasi.’ The secretary never responded. I also refrained from pursuing the story.Hundreds of families hesitated to go to crematoriums during the second wave, fearing the viral load in hospitals or worrying for their family members who were still uninfected. However, the kind of apathy some families displayed towards their elderly members is indescribable. In a viral video recorded by a Noida based hospital’s staff member, one family denied entry to their recovered grandmother. The hospital team stood outside their home, waiting for access. Eventually, one of them had to scale the gate to open it from the inside. Jyoti Yadav is a journalist.Excerpted with permission from Faith and Fury: Covid Dispatches from India’s Hinterlands, by Jyoti Yadav, Westland Books.