Republica Press

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REPUBLICA PRESS
Your Business & Political News Source

Grief (Emotion)

At India’s Funeral Pyres, Covid Sunders the Rites of Grief

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Mourners in protective gear, or watching from home. Long waits at the cremation grounds. The trauma of loss has become both lonely and public.

NEW DELHI — The lifeless are picked up from infected homes by exhausted volunteers, piled into ambulances by hospital workers or carried in the back of auto-rickshaws by grieving relatives.

At the cremation grounds, where the fires only briefly cool off late at night, relatives wait hours for their turn to say goodbye. The scenes are photographed, filmed, broadcast. They are beamed to relatives under lockdown across India. They are shown on news sites and newspapers around the world, putting India’s personal tragedies on display to a global audience.

Local residents record the fires from their roofs to show the world why they must wear masks even inside their homes. The smoke and smell of death is so constant, so thick, that it covers the narrow lanes for much of the day, seeping through shuttered windows.

The flames bear witness to the devastation wrought by India’s Covid-19 crisis. They show the losses in a country where the dead and infected are widely believed to be grossly undercounted. They stand as a rebuke to a government accused of mismanagement by many of its people.

oxygen.

Before the body of Darwan Singh arrived at Seemapuri — the token given to his family indicated that he was No. 41 in line — the family had done all they could to save the 56-year-old guesthouse guard.

His fever had persisted. His oxygen level had dropped to a dangerous 42 percent. For two days, the family could find him neither a hospital bed nor an oxygen cylinder. When they found one, said his nephew, Kuldeep Rawat, he received oxygen for one hour before the hospital ran out.

The family took Mr. Singh home for the night. The next day, they waited for five hours in the parking lot of another hospital. The family paid a bribe of about $70 to get his uncle a bed at a free government hospital, Mr. Rawat said. Mr. Singh died overnight.

With Seemapuri fully booked, the hospital couldn’t immediately hand over the body. On April 25, it was piled onto an ambulance with five others and taken there.

Mr. Rawat said he had to go inside the ambulance to identify his uncle, then move him inside the crematory, where they waited for five hours before his turn at the pyre. The cost: $25 for material needed for the final prayer, $34 for wood, $14 in fees for the pandit and $5 for the P.P.E. kit for family members.

Mr. Rawat said his uncle’s family — mother, wife, daughter, son — was infected. Relatives could not come to the house for mourning and offered their condolences by phone.

“And I am still in isolation,” Mr. Rawat said, fearing that he had been infected during the final rites.

For families living around the crematories, there is no escaping the constant reminder of death as they await what feels like their own inevitable infection.

In Sunlight Colony, a mix of shanty homes and apartments where some of the houses share a wall with Seemapuri, smoke is so constant that many are forced to wear masks inside. Children are given hot water to gargle before bedtime. Laundry is dried indoors.

“Our kitchen is upstairs — it’s unbearable in there,” said Waseem Qureishi, whose mother and six siblings live in a two-bedroom house still under construction next to Seemapuri. “If the wind’s direction is toward our home, it’s worse.”

Anuj Bhansal, an ambulance driver who lives near the Ghazipur crematory, also in eastern New Delhi, said he was worried about his four children, aged 7 to 12.

Mr. Bhansal said that as the cremations reached as many as 100 a day, the neighborhood’s children would run to a nearby garbage hill and watch.

“When they look at flames and smoke coming out of the cremation ground, they ask why it is not ending,” Mr. Bhansal said. “They can hardly understand what is going on.”

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‘Every Time I’m Calling, Someone Has Died’: The Anguish of India’s Diaspora

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LONDON — First, there was the scramble to find her father a bed in intensive care. Then came the price gouging for an all but impossible to find therapeutic injection. And, through it all, countless hours on the phone with doctors, family and friends dealing with logistical problems.

From nearly 5,000 miles and five time zones away, Anuja Vakil, 40, has been struggling for the last 12 days to help manage care for her father, Jatin Bhagat, who lies in critical condition in a hospital in Ahmedabad, in India’s western Gujarat State. She knows he has been lucky to get care at all.

“When I pray to God now, it is for my dad,” Ms. Vakil said. “He has to come back.”

Cases of the coronavirus have exploded in India in recent weeks, up to nearly 400,000 a day, surpassing all records and still rising. As they have, so, too, has the collective grief and anxiety among the huge Indian diaspora, over loved ones lost or fighting for their lives amid a health-care system pushed past the brink. In WhatsApp chats, video calls, Facebook groups and forums, a global community has worried, mourned and organized.

Some 17 million people from India were living outside their homeland in 2020, according to figures from the United Nations, and millions more have Indian heritage, making the diaspora the largest in the world. In the United States, some 4.8 million people were either born in India or reported Indian ancestry on the last census.

pooling money to buy oxygen concentrators, connecting those in need of care with doctors and using community networks to share resources.

Deliveries of aid collected by the diaspora are beginning to arrive in India, alongside government relief fromBritain, the United States, Germany and Australia among others.

Ms. Vakil has tried to focus on these positives. While it has been hard to be away from family, she says her local Indian community in London has proved to be a lifeline, and she speaks with a friend in New York whose own father is unwell. She tries to lift her father’s spirits with daily video calls, and his doctors are hopeful he can pull through.

added to Britain’s travel “red list” last week, halting nearly all direct flights and imposing an expensive and mandatory 10-day hotel quarantine for the few citizens and residents who are allowed in. And on Friday, the United States said it would start restricting travel from India beginning next week.

The restrictions, steep costs, job commitments and a fear of contracting the virus have left many unable to travel. As cases of the coronavirus continue to rise, many described painful conversations with friends and relatives at home, and a feeling of helplessness as they watched the horrors unfold half a world away.

as the government allowed cricket matches in packed stadiums, mass election rallies and a major religious festival called Kumbh Mela, where millions gathered in one city. Meanwhile, case levels began to rise exponentially.

In Britain, home to a vibrant and diverse community of people with roots in India, the pain is palpable. In a neighborhood shop in Harrow, a community in London’s northwest with a large Indian population, two staffers recounted losing a brother in the last week.

The cultural ties between the two countries run deep, with Britain’s large Indian diaspora estimated to number over 1.5 million people — the single largest ethnic minority population in the country. For many, the loss, anxiety or grief they are experiencing as family members became ill in recent weeks are compounding what was already a difficult year, and just as Britain is emerging from lockdown and hopeful about crushing the virus.

Harmeet Gill, 31, was born and raised in London, but his parents are from Indian’s northern Punjab State, and they remain extremely close with extended family there.

disproportionately hit by the pandemic. “We went through it here and we thought, ‘Well, at least India was protected.’ They were doing reasonably well.”

But it didn’t last, and on Monday his uncle died from the coronavirus. His aunt was hospitalized on Thursday. In pre-pandemic times, his family would all have traveled to India to mourn his uncle, a patriarch of a tight-knit Sikh family.

“It’s just the sheer, sort of, helplessness of it,” he said, adding that along with the shock and sorrow is a growing anger about government mismanagement. “They know it didn’t need to happen the way it has happened.”

Mr. Gill, who volunteers at a Sikh temple in the London neighborhood of Southall, has seen the impact of the outbreak in India ripple through his community, noting “the sheer scale of it means we all have become a bit numb to it now.”

The temple has been a hub of aid throughout Britain’s outbreak, delivering thousands of meals weekly, and members are now looking for ways to help back home.

Indian doctors living abroad have also been providing medical expertise and advice to dozens of friends and family members. Many wake early to go through dozens of messages asking for help, and some even provide video consultations.

Rajesh Hembrom, 43, originally from Bhagalpur in India’s Bihar State, has lived and worked as a doctor in Britain since 2003. His wife is also a frontline health care worker, and when cases surged in England early last year, his elderly father and older sisters were anxious.

“They were quite worried, and there was quite a degree of calm back home,” he said, “until it all erupted.”

But then the dynamic shifted, and as the numbers surged family and close friends began messaging, frantically seeking help. At the moment, he is advising around 30 people by phone, he said, helping to manage their care or offering any insights that he can. Some of the people he was trying to help have died.

“There are no proper help lines where they can call so they end up clutching at straws, and they know me, so obviously they contact me,” he said.

A childhood friend is being treated in a hospital in Mumbai, and family members are in touch with Dr. Hembrom daily. He fears his friend won’t make it.

“We see a lot of death in our medical work,” he said. “But never have I seen so many people so close to me that are already dead or are possibly going to die. It’s almost like a war zone in some ways, without a visible enemy.”

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