India’s eighth coronavirus patient was cremated in Kolkata late on Monday night after the police pushed back local people who protested that the funeral at the neighbourhood crematorium may spread the infection.
A group tried to stop the hearse from entering the crematorium around 10.30 pm and targeted the police as they pushed through.
Hostility from neighbours, fueled by rumours that the man had suppressed a foreign visit, has added to the family’s profound grief.
The man’s son had sent a letter of consent to the police for the cremation, as required by the government, as he was in the US and unable to come back because of the worldwide lockdown due to the Corona pandemic.
He has requested that if rules permit, the ashes of his father be handed over to the family when possible.
The 27-year-old son was a student at a US university and left Kolkata in July last year.
The rest of the man’s family is in quarantine since Saturday. His mother and mother-in-law — both in their 70s — and his wife, were whisked off to hospital for coronavirus testing immediately after his swabs tested positive and he was quarantined.
The man’s brother-in-law, who arrived in Kolkata on Saturday, was locked up by neighbours at his mother’s flat in an apartment building in north Kolkata. The neighbours allegedly acted out of fear that he could be a virus carrier. A family friend had to call the police and the local councillor to rescue him on Sunday.
A friend of the patient, who is helping the family through the traumatic time, said the wife and son were devastated, not just by their bereavement but also by the vilification heaped upon him due to rumours about how he contracted the virus.
The man never travelled abroad; there are all indications that a train ride may have been the cause.
But soon after he was admitted to hospital on March 16, rumours claimed the man visited his son in Italy recently but had hid it.
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