Where the bodies burn
India’s ruling party said it had defeated Covid, said Aman Sethi in The New York Times. Now, just two months later, deaths are piling up faster than Covid victims can be put to rest.
THE FIRST 36 corpses were placed in the designated concrete cremation pits and set ablaze by 10 in the morning. After that, all the extra bodies went to the muddy parking lot, for a mass ceremony later. Last week, ambulances doubling up as hearses lined up along the narrow street outside the Ghazipur crematory, on the city’s eastern border. There were no cremation pits in the parking lot, so hospital attendants in protective equipment carried out the dead and placed them near the scorch marks left behind by the previous day’s pyres. Ram Karan Mishra, the presiding priest of the parking lot, walked among the corpses unmasked and unafraid. “If I fall sick and die, I will go to heaven,” he said, before paraphrasing a popular reading of Hindu scripture: “Death is the only truth.”
It is an aphorism that India’s government would do well to remember. Two months ago, India’s ruling party claimed that India had “defeated Covid under the able, sensible, committed, and visionary leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.” In January, Modi told the World Economic Forum in Davos that India “has saved humanity from a big disaster by containing corona effectively.”
Today, as a deadly second wave of the coronavirus ravages the country—with some 300,000 new infections daily and more than 21,400 dead over the past week— Modi and his party are downplaying the severity of the crisis, grossly underestimating the numbers of the sick and the dead. Tushar Mehta, one of the government’s lead lawyers, recently claimed that “nobody in the country was left without oxygen.” Yet crippling shortages, of oxygen and hospital beds, have resulted in many deaths— including of a former ambassador who passed away in his car while waiting for care for hours outside a fancy private clinic. The chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state and one of its poorest, has asked officials to seize the property of people he accuses of “spreading rumors” about shortages on social media. The Indian government has ordered Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to take down dozens of posts criticizing its handling of the pandemic. But the graphic images of mass cremations have cut through this wall of noise, misinformation, and propaganda, capturing what epidemiologists call “excess mortality” in gruesome detail.
Everyone I know has lost someone to the virus. Many have lost several members of their family. But while you’re in lockdown, the dead don’t feel dead as much as disappeared. So when my father called me on Tuesday to say that his uncle had died of Covid-19, that the uncle’s whole family was ill with the disease, and that a cousin of my father’s was in an intensive-care unit, I sensed the onset of a familiar numbness. “I might go out for a drive,” I mumbled vaguely to my wife over dinner that night. But as I got into my car the next morning and drove out to several crematories, I realized I just wanted to feel something.
HE PARKING LOT at Ghazipur is so small and the bodies are so closely packed that the pyres can be lit only all at once. So the corpses are placed on individual pyres through the day and then ignited in one big blaze in the evening. Mishra, the priest, told me last week that for the past 10 days the crematory’s staff had been burning between 40 and 50 bodies every day in a space no larger
Tthan two tennis courts.
The heat from the flames had scorched the leaves of the mango trees facing the pyres to a deep sooty black, while the tops of the canopies still shone a bright summer green. A cremation site is a mostly male space. Many Hindus still believe that only a son has the right to light his parent’s funeral pyre. At Ghazipur, small groups of young men briefly put their grief on hold to divide themselves into teams and tend to various tasks.
One group runs off to stand in the queue to register the corpse of their loved one. Another dashes to the shed to get their allotted share of wood before all the good pieces run out. A third rushes with the body to reserve a spot on which to build a pyre. Everything in this pandemic— medicines, oxygen, ventilators, hospital beds—has been marked by scarcity born of the government’s total failure to plan for and procure essential supplies. The crematory is no different.
Last week, Malvika Parakh, one of the few women at Ghazipur, stood alone amid this frenzy, the body of her father, Dr. Dattaraj Bhalchandra Parakh, at her feet. He was a plant pathologist at India’s National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources and was 65 years old when he died of Covid-19. He needed an ICU bed with a ventilator, but Ms. Parakh could organize only a hospital bed with an oxygen cylinder.
“His oxygen stats didn’t come up,” she said. He had died at 7:30 that morning.
Ms. Parakh’s mother died a decade ago; most of her other relatives had Covid-19. A family member who had escorted her father’s body from the hospital morgue to the crematory had suddenly felt sick there. So here she was alone, a 32-year-old clinical psychologist standing by her father’s corpse in a parking lot turned crematory, trying to make sense of it all.
“It’s like one of those movies in which the world has been attacked, and there are bodies everywhere,” she said, as she looked at the rows and rows and rows and rows
of pyres in various stages of completion. “You wait for the superhero to come and save everyone. Only in this case, there is no superhero.”
ARLIER THAT WEEK Bikki, a young mortuary assistant at a private hospital in the city, had told me about a new type of funeral: the “WhatsApp funeral.” (He wouldn’t give his full name because he isn’t supposed to talk to journalists.) When Covid-19 patients in the
ICU breathe their last breath, Bikki wheels the bodies down to the morgue.
There, he carefully wraps each corpse in a mortuary sheet, then in a plastic sheet, then in the distinctive white tarp that marks this death as a Covid-19 case. He secures everything with white micropore surgical tape. “When a family member comes, we quickly unwrap the head so they can peek at the face and identify the body,” Bikki said. “Often, an immediate family member is either stranded abroad or isolated with Covid, so we put on a WhatsApp video call and show them the face.”
Then Bikki and his team place the body in an ambulance and accompany it to the crematory. I met Bikki and his colleagues at the crematory at Sarai Kale Khan, also in the city’s east, before heading to Ghazipur. As we spoke, construction workers used cement and red brick to quickly build human-size platforms just outside the crematory’s walls.
“They can only do 10 bodies at a time inside the crematory,” Bikki said. “They are building space for another 50.” I counted 30 bodies in front of me. There were 20 more at the back, Bikki said. One of Bikki’s attendants said that every night for the past week he had dreamed of the faces of the dead passing before his eyes in an endless parade.
“I’m pulling back the tarp, and I’m seeing their faces,” he said. “I’ve forgotten their names, but I’m seeing their faces.”
A month ago, I was called to the apartment on the floor just below mine. My neighbor, a retired Air Force officer in his 70s, had been in bed for a week with a high fever but had tested negative for the coronavirus. Now Uncle, as I called him, had lost consciousness. We tried to revive him using a portable oxygen cylinder he had at his bedside. His elderly brother pointed his cellphone camera at the cylinder while someone on the other end of a WhatsApp call tried to tell us how to use it.
Auntie, Uncle’s wife, was in shock. “Hello?” she said, taking Uncle’s hand in hers. “Hello! Say something.”
Slowly and inexorably, and then all at once,
EUncle’s oxygen level fell to zero. The ambulance arrived soon after. He was declared dead at the hospital, and also Covid positive. His children flew in from abroad, but they couldn’t meet their mother for two weeks: She, too, had tested positive and had to isolate herself. I attended a prayer meeting in his memory over Zoom.
After a week, I tried to get a Covid test but couldn’t because the labs were overwhelmed with samples. I isolated myself for one week, then another—no symptoms. My doctor suggested I continue my selfquarantine and watch out for symptoms rather than burden the city’s already stretched testing infrastructure.
Uncle’s face appears in front of me each time I pass his door. Sometimes I’m reminded of his wife holding his hand as he was dying. “Hello,” Auntie says to him in my recollection. “Hello?”
T WAS NOW a little after 3 p.m. at Ghazipur, and most of the pyres had been built. Wood is strictly rationed, so mourners began by fashioning what looked like a makeshift stretcher: First three short, heavy logs were laid on the ground parallel to one another; then longer, narrower planks were put on top, perpendicular to the logs.
Once the body was placed on the stretcher, mourners arranged sticks upright around it in a sort of wooden tent and stuffed that with bales of dry straw. The whole process took about 20 minutes. From then until the evening, mourners would flit back and forth like birds building a nest: They would pick up stray bits of straw, a length of broken bamboo, a gnarled knot of wood that someone had discarded, and fit them into the gaps in the pyre.
A few pyres, including the one for Ms. Parakh’s father, were yet to be assembled. Ms. Parakh was on her phone with her relatives, trying to find someone who could help. A caretaker of the family’s was on his way, she said. “He’s been with us for over
I20 years,” she said. “So the loss is as much his as ours.”
Things moved faster once Ms. Parakh’s family caretaker arrived; soon, the pyre was built. It was almost 5 in the evening now, and the parking lot looked like a small, congested village of low, pointy-roofed homes. Mishra, the priest, made his way through the pyres chanting hymns for the dead. A young woman sat weeping into the elbow of her protective suit. “My parents are waiting outside,” she told me, pointing to one wooden structure among the others. “It’s my husband. My husband. That’s my husband.”
The first pyre was lit, then another, and another. Slowly the sound of chants and prayers was silenced by the crackling of flames burning through dry wood. The heat rose in gusts, then in waves, and then in a steady shimmering wall. The fires blazing, I thought of everyone my family and friends had lost over the past year, all the funerals we could not attend, all the grief this city carries.
Ms. Parakh stood before her father’s pyre, talking into what looked like a WhatsApp group call on her phone. Nearby, a middleaged man in a striped T-shirt told me, pointing at a pyramid of flames, “That’s my mother.”
“Non-Covid case. It is a pity that she had to be cremated in the middle of all of this.” He had another complaint: “Don’t mind, but the media is making it seem like bodies are being burned everywhere all the time to show the government in a bad light.” Are we not in a parking lot among 50 burning pyres? I asked him. “Yes,” he replied, “but the media should say, ‘These pyres are lit all at once, only once a day,’ so people get the correct impression.”
“Death is the only truth,” I said.
“Death is the only truth,” he said.
The blaze continued for several hours.
Small groups of mourners began to leave, their eyes glistening with tears held back through the fear, the frustration, the heartbreak, the exhaustion, the heat, the horror, and the sorrow. Ms. Parakh and her caretaker walked out, hailed down an auto-rickshaw, and went home to the house she had once shared with her father. “Remember to come by 8 tomorrow morning to collect the ashes,” Mishra told everyone. “We need to clear up in preparation for tomorrow’s cremations.”
A version of this story was originally published in The New York Times. Used with permission.