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.
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At the cremation grounds...relatives wait hours for their turn to say goodbye. The scenes are photographed, filmed, broadcast. They are beamed to relatives under lockdown across India. They are shown on news sites and newspapers around the world, putting India’s personal tragedies on display to a global audience... The pandemic has stripped the final rites of their usual space and dignity.... Instead, this intimate ritual has become...a public display, with the world watching India’s crisis... “I couldn’t even show my family members those last moments,” said Mittain Panani, a 46-year-old businessman... It felt disgusting.”
Hindu tradition stipulates cremation as the preferred disposal method for the dead. In a belief focused on the liberation of the soul, cremation breaks attachment to the physical body. After death, the eldest son typically leads a procession of close male relatives carrying the body to the pyre.
A Hindu priest, or pandit, leads final prayers before the fire is lit. Ashes are strewn in the Ganges or another holy river, and mourners gather at home to remember and to perform prayer rituals...
“Those private moments when you want to say goodbye to your loved ones, in private, are being denied,” she said. “Death has become a spectacle.” “When someone in India dies, we gather and talk about them, their life, their habits, the good things about them. We couldn’t do even that.”
...inside the crematory...they waited for five hours before his turn at the pyre. The cost: $25 for material needed for the final prayer, $34 for wood, $14 in fees for the pandit and $5 for the P.P.E. kit for family members.
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“Flames rising from pyres, people wearing P.P.E. and everyone covered in plastic — it felt like the end of the world,” said Dimple Kharbanda, a movie producer who flew to New Delhi last week from Mumbai to arrange the final rites for her father, Dharamvir Kharbanda.
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It is a holocaust that is going on in India and the invasion of privacy a near co-equal horror with death. Only the New York Times is bringing vividly this physical and psychic catastrophe to the wider world, only the New York Times.