Book excerpt: At a mere four hours’ notice, at 8.00 p.m., on March 24th 2020, the Indian Prime Minister Modi announced a lockdown to contain the spread of virus in order to jumpstart an already-crumbling healthcare system for one of the most devastating pandemics soon to envelop India. People stormed out to panic-buy ration stocks; India’s 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 greenlighting Hindu religious, superspreader 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 pandemic ravaged India’s society, economy, politics and culture, nine of finest India’s writers try and make sense of this difficult reality. The Dark Hour is a publisher’s anthology of specially commissioned long-form essays that unpack two dreadful summers of the pandemic that wreaked havoc on the many Indias within India.