Biman Nath’s ‘The Whistleblower’s Wife’ stands out as a refreshing addition to the body of Indian pandemic literature because it refuses to walk the familiar path. While most writers trained their creative gaze towards interpersonal relationships and emotional claustrophobia of the lockdown, Nath turns away from emotional interiors. His work enters the underexplored territory of the politicisation of India’s healthcare system during Covid-19, presenting a narrative that feels fresh yet unsettling. He expands the pandemic fiction canvas beyond the personal to public, from the emotional to systemic.
Drawing inspiration from the real-life death case of scientist Dr Vinod Shah, the failed trial report of Remdesivir published in Science, and the Fishbein whistleblower case in AIDS clinical trials, Nath fictionalises a scenario that parallels similar concerns.
The book tries to interrogate the vulnerability of scientific research, as commercial opportunism and political pressure create fertile ground for compromised ethics and manipulated data. This blending of fact and fiction transforms the story into a social mirror that exposes systemic cracks in the pharmaceutical companies during the pandemic, where “we are all friendly, not friends” when it comes to money games.
At the core lies a moving story of a separated couple in Bengaluru. Its emotional spine is Madhuri, the divorced wife of Aditya, a virologist, who finds herself drawn back into his life only through the shock of...
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