y darling mother died early this month. Her death was peaceful and painless – and it was not due to the coronavirus. Yet it was shaped by the pandemic, as is its aftermath. The register office, the undertakers, the crematorium: the usual institutions of death are now inundated. The administrative and social rituals that busy your mind have practically disappeared. The friends dropping by, the swell of a funeral, the hugs: all are statutorily absent. It began with a urinary tract infection, of all things: a bothersome visitor but hardly unknown to my mother. If her body could not fight it off, then ordinarily an ambulance would whisk her off to hospital for stronger drugs and a bag of fluids. Not this time. The hospitals were almost overwhelmed, I was told, and parts are rife with contagion. And already she was so weak. On my mother’s last afternoon, I sat by her bedside, on the phone to the community matron, who told me that another nursing home had that day sent a resident to A&E – just for the medics to call and say they were returning her to the home to die. As her only child, I took what I hope was the best decision. Whether it really was is still a question that wakes me up in the dark. Another question ought to be asked, this one in public. Amid the focus on pulling the NHS through this plague, how many people have had their lives cut short because they couldn’t get hospital treatment for illnesses other than coronavirus? The leading statistician David Spiegelhalter, at Cambridge University, told me he sees a “large transfer” in the number of non-Covid-19 deaths from hospitals to homes and care homes. Some have been mis-recorded, while others have died in their bed rather than under the stark lights of a strange ward. But, as he observes, “many could have had their lives extended had they gone to hospital”. The Office for National Statistics says it is now examining that gulf, but there is a high chance that those people are the collateral damage of a health system that has been starved of cash for years. When the undertakers came to take my mother’s body, three of the staff at the nursing home where she spent her last few weeks ushered me away. All were black, and on my reckoning, first-generation immigrants: from Cameroon, Ghana, and the West Indies. I would also guess that at least one earns less than the £30,000 a year the government proposed as the baseline for immigrants to get work visas. But for now they are carers to be applauded on Downing Street. A primary school teacher in Hackney for decades, Arati Chakrabortty would today be termed a “key worker”. And as I looked at the carers in their protective gear, too flimsy to deter any virus, I knew my mother would have recognised something of their world. In the 1980s her staffroom was a whistlestop tour of the British empire: Nigeria, Trinidad, Ireland, India, Pakistan. All women, quick on their feet and with their wits, and on pay far below their qualifications. Every day Mother went in wearing a sari far too lovely for the litter-strewn streets of 80s Hackney. During my school holidays she would drag me along to help: as we trundled down the road in our rickety hatchback, van drivers would cut her up and shout that she was a “paki” who should fuck off back home. She was more than they could ever know. In the 1940s, when she was little, her family fled the Japanese bombing of Burma on the last ship out of Rangoon. All except her father, who along with other Indian men was stripped of his ticket by the British and had to walk through the mountains to get to India. The trek broke his health and he died not long after, leaving my mother and her brother and sister to be raised by a young widow – in a place and time where jobs and money were men’s business. They were plunged close to poverty, then saw their family land in East Bengal disappear after partition. Even now, as our world is turned upside down, it is worth remembering that some among us have lived through far worse. Yet she had a will of iron. When the then prestigious Benares Hindu University made her sit an undergraduate exam in Sanskrit, a subject she hated, she retaliated by dipping her fountain pen in the inkwell and flicking it across the paper, leaving the blots and dots to be marked by some poor soul. When she arrived in London in the late 60s to do postgraduate study, she hunted for a bedsit among signs reading “No Irish, no Blacks, no Dogs”. But she hardly dwelled on bad memories, preferring to talk about how Sarat Chandra Chatterjee’s novels of Bengali peasant life reminded her of Thomas Hardy, and her soft spot for Maxim Gorky, his hard upbringing and good politics. This was the era of Margaret Thatcher and her “alien hordes”. The right viewed my mother then as it now sees Polish builders and Somali carers: as outsiders here to take from Britain. The left retorted, as it still does, by counting how much they give Britain. Even today, neither side sees them as people with their own memories, dreams, worlds. Who might have something to teach Britain. My mother’s love of Shakespeare and Hazlitt was not an attempt to fit in. She claimed them as she claimed all of world culture. Nothing was off-limits. That liberty was what she wanted for everybody ­– especially for the generations of children who passed through her class. She was the teacher every parent wanted for their kids, the smiling sari-clad lady who could turn round the toughest nuts. After retirement, she volunteered to teach Turkish and Kurdish migrant families who were moving into the streets where I’d been brought up – and when poor health meant she couldn’t manage the bus, she got my father to drive her. When he died, she asked me to lobby the school opposite her house for a classroom in the evenings so she could carry on. One other episode keeps coming to mind. Towards the end, my mother’s faculties were corroded by dementia. I wheeled her up to the hospital for a memory test. The questions were childishly simple ­– what is the date, who is the prime minister ­– but my mother’s responses were faltering, which exasperated her. It was not pleasant to see. Then, right at the end, the doctor asked her to write her name. For the briefest moment, a look I knew well passed over my mother’s face. Carefully she wielded the pen. The doctor looked down, then in confusion showed me the pad. She had written her name, all right ­– in Bengali, so he had no way of knowing whether she had done it right or wrong. Although silent, her message was clear: she would not fit someone else’s categories. Now she has left me, us. She will not see our toddler grow up, or meet her second granddaughter, who arrives next month. But if both girls learn not to be defined by others, to stay instead sharp and mischievous and free, then Mrs Chakrabortty will have delivered a most valuable lesson. • Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist