No final goodbyes: Alone in death and beyond

With Family In Self-Isolation, Body Of 62-Year-Old From Assam Lies Unclaimed In Mortuary For 10 Days

Pankhuri.Yadav@timesgroup.com

New Delhi: 23.05.2020

While alive, he suffered. After death, the body of the 62-year-old from Assam languished in a hospital mortuary for over 10 days while his family remained in quarantine. Eventually, it was not the family that identified his body and took it for the final rites, but a stranger with a Facebook photograph to help in the identification.

Ranjit (name changed) had come to Delhi from Assam for better medical attention for the cancer he had been battling for two years. While here, the Covid lockdown was announced and he was left stranded at a relative’s house in the city. A month into his stay, he developed symptoms that seemed to indicate coronavirus infection. When his conditioned worsened, he was taken to Lok Nayak Hospital on April 28. He tested positive for Covid-19 as did members of his family.

With his family and relatives in home isolation, Ranjit’s condition worsened into severe pneumonia at the hospital and he breathed his last on May 7. During their quarantine period, the members of his family reported having a tough time getting in touch with the Covid nodal officer and so did not get any updates about the state of Ranjit’s health. In fact, the family alleged that they only learnt about his death a few days after the event.

With no one at the hospital to identify the body, Ranjit’s remains lay in a mortuary freezer for over 10 days. Officials of Assam House, office of the state’s resident commissioner in Delhi, intervened and tried to persuade an uninfected member of the family to reach the hospital and identify the sexagenarian’s body and so facilitate his cremation. But ultimately, this couldn’t be done.

The officials then sought the support of Dibyojit Dutta, general secretary, Assam Association in Delhi. Seeing how nobody was willing to assist the family, Dutta volunteered to carry out the identification and visited the mortuary with Ranjit’s photo he had downloaded from Facebook. He also asked for assistance from SPUNER (Special Police Unit for North Eastern Region), a unit of Delhi Police.

Dutta identified the body of Ranjit from the many that had piled up in the hospital mortuary and made arrangement to take it to Nigambodh Ghat for the funeral rites. However, the problems hadn’t quite ended. At the crematorium, Dutta found a lengthy queue of mourners waiting with the bodies of Covid-19 victims they had brought to be cremated at the CNG facility there, as mandated under central government norms for Covid victims.

Dutta had to wait with the corpse for a long time — a body takes at least an hour to be reduced to ashes by the gas flames — before there finally was peace for the unfortunate Assamese.

The sexagenarian had come to Delhi from Assam for better medical attention for the cancer he had been battling for 2 yrs