BACK TO SCHOOL Pandemic deaths haunt gravedigger

HEARTBREAKING: ‘I’VE NEVER BEEN SCARED FOR MY LIFE’

Some of the bodies of victims arrive without relatives to help with the burial.

New Delhi

Death had not fazed gravedigger Mohammed Shamim up to now, but since the grip of the coronavirus crisis has tightened in New Delhi, a shiver runs up even his spine each time he sees a hearse pull up at the cemetery he tends.

“I’ve been burying the dead for the last two decades. But until now, I’ve never been scared for my own life,” he said.

The Indian capital has become one of the country’s Covid-19 hotspots, with media reports based on graveyard records saying there are 450 dead – triple the official tally.

Shamim said he alone had dug graves for 115 bodies at the cemetery’s designated area for coronavirus dead, about 200m away from the others.

Despite the third-generation gravedigger’s experience, his family has now started complaining about his job at the Jadid Qabristan Ahle Muslim cemetery, and Shamim has moved his four daughters to his parents’ house to reduce the risk of them catching the disease.

“They are scared. Sometimes I lie to them that I don’t touch the bodies,” said Shamim.

He gets a call an hour before the hearse arrives. That is when he becomes nervous.

He prepares the relatives, asking them to put on protective suits, gloves and masks for the burial ceremony, before the family say a prayer and lower the corpse into the grave.

The mourners then throw their protective gear into the hole before a mechanical earth-mover fills it in.

Some of the bodies of coronavirus victims arrive without relatives to help with the burial, so Shamim said he has often defied orders to stay away.

“People just refuse to come help with the burial. What can you do? I have to step in,” he said, describing “heartbreaking” scenes, like when only a wife and a small child came to the funeral of one man.

At a recent burial, Shamim had to find gloves for a small group who had turned up just with plastic bags for protection. He finally found two pairs and gave one glove each to the four people who were lowering the body. – AFP

Picture: AFP A schoolgirl wearing a protective face mask waits to enter Claude Debussy college in Angers, western France, yesterday, after France eased lockdown measures to curb the spread of Covid-19.