“Now, I am getting around 100 bodies every day for cremation.” “I used to get six to eight bodies each day before the pandemic,” Jitender Singh Shunty, the founder of a volunteer organization that runs the Seemapuri cremation grounds in eastern New Delhi, said last week. But the devastation has been particularly severe in New Delhi, with more than 300 deaths a day by official figures, a likely undercount. The virus has spread so fast, with India sometimes recording over 400,000 new cases a day, that no corner of the country remains unaffected. “You could have everything: money, power, influence,” he said. His mother remained in the hospital with her own infection. He and his brother were the only attendees at his father’s cremation in Mumbai last week. “I couldn’t even show my family members those last moments,” said Mittain Panani, a 46-year-old business owner. In Pics | Cremation capacity upped in Delhi amid rising Covid-19 deaths Now, fear of infection keeps most loved ones away - or, in some cases, all of them. Traditionally, relatives would gather to share their grief. Instead, this intimate ritual has become both a public display, with the world watching India’s crisis, and a lonely burden. The pandemic has stripped the final rites of their usual space and dignity. They stand as a rebuke to a government accused of mismanagement by many of its people.īeyond the images, the cremation grounds bear a painful routine of trauma that will weigh on families long after the headlines fade.
They show the losses in a country where the dead and infected are widely believed to be grossly undercounted. The flames bear witness to the devastation wrought by India’s Covid-19 crisis.
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. Local residents record the fires from their roofs to show the world why they must wear masks even inside their homes. They are shown on news sites and newspapers around the world, putting India’s personal tragedies on display to a global audience. They are beamed to relatives under lockdown across India. The scenes are photographed, filmed, broadcast. 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.Īt the cremation grounds, where the fires only briefly cool off late at night, relatives wait hours for their turn to say goodbye.
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