A first-person account from a crematorium in Ghaziabad--A day with the dead

I had never seen anything like this. For the last 50 years I have been attending funerals at the crematorium on the banks of the river Hindon in Ghaziabad. But this year I avoided going there because of the pandemic. But when a close relative passed away in late November, I had to reluctantly make my way there. Nothing had prepared me for the huge rush of people.

Impatient people crowded the office and around employees, demanding to know when their turn would come. Despite COVID restrictions, no physical distance was being maintained. And the long queue of dead bodies on the pavement patiently waited for their turn on the pyre.

Being a veteran of sorts, the relatives requested me to see if I could expedite the process. I have known the resident priest Pandit Manish Sharma for several years. Luckily, he received my call and was kind enough to come out to meet us. The first question he asked was whether the deceased had died of COVID or if it was a natural death. When we confirmed it was the latter, he informed we would then have to wait. COVID death cases were being dealt with first and the turn of ‘natural deaths’ would come later

It was 11.30 am and we were sixth in the queue of people having died of natural causes. But 12 dead bodies from the COVID list, he volunteered, had already been cremated. What he said next was revealing.

“Before the lockdown, this crematorium handled 15 to 20 dead bodies a day; now the number goes up to 60 or more on some days. In fact, 20 to 25 dead bodies are daily turned away because of the rush, which are then cremated at Garhganga, 70 kilometres from here, on the banks of the river Ganga.”

“These days we work 20 hours a day,” he volunteered. Curiously, the crematorium deemed all dead bodies coming straight from hospitals as COVID cases; and all other dead bodies of people dying at home, due to COVID or not, were considered to have died of natural causes.

He naturally had no information of deaths among Muslims or Christians. Most villages adjoining cities have their own ‘burning ghats’ and no information is available of the numbers from there either. Nor is there any information from the countryside of dead bodies of infants and others which are dumped in rivers.

The employees at the crematorium claimed that at least 100 people were dying every day in Ghaziabad city alone. They estimated one-third of these deaths are being caused by COVID. Significantly, till November 30, the official death toll in Ghaziabad district due to COVID during the entire month was said to be just 93.

Another indication of the rush of dead bodies is that the electric crematorium in Ghaziabad has been set aside for incineration of only COVID patients. And since the electric crematorium is unable to cope with the rush, some COVID cases are also being cremated in the open and on traditional pyres. In a belated move, space for half a dozen new platforms and pyres are being created to cope with the rush.

What was striking was the absence of any effort to segregate people or dead bodies. People accompanying COVID patients mingled freely with others. And there was no way of identifying who could be carriers of the virus. It shouldn’t be too difficult to make separate seating arrangements. Earlier, I had never spent more than and hour or hour and a half for any cremation. But this time it took more than five hours before we could leave after cremation.

Uttar Pradesh Government provides free hearse and ambulance services. But of course they are available only on payment, bigger the amount, the better. Some private services are naturally taking advantage.

Ghaziabad cannot be an exception. But official figures, like crime data, seem to be creating a false sense of security. Government data have always been suspect and we journalists would joke that adding a zero at the end of the figure tended to give a more correct picture.

But why would the Government try to hide the death figures ? What purpose does it serve ? The Government is not responsible for the pandemic and few will blame it for the deaths. But the correct picture and information could at least scare people to take the pandemic seriously.