The defining image of India's lockdown, even as it is rolled back, will remain the lakhs of migrant workers who trudged home hundreds of miles away. Their misery punctured the bubble in which we live, prompting us to ask: What must it feel to be them? To get an idea, turn to John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.

Published in 1939, after the Great Depression had scarred the United States, Steinbeck's novel narrates the story of the Joads, an Oklahoma sharecropping family, which was evicted from their farm because of crop failure. The dispossession had the family of 11 and a lapsed preacher board a sedan, purchased from a junkyard and turned into a truck, and drive to California, where it was said farmhands were required.