BREAKING POINT

AT THE RAMNATH GHELA SMASHAN Bhumi in Surat, over a dozen people were waiting in line to receive tokens to cremate their dead. Workers from the Khan Trust Foundation, which had been contracted by the municipal corporation to manage operations at the city’s crematoria, continued to bring in bodies, followed by grieving relatives. The crematorium was originally equipped with four gas furnaces, but the heat from constant burning over the past week had melted the grills on two of them, rendering them dysfunctional. To manage the rush, thirty additional pyres had been set up in an adjacent field—around orty bodies were burnt that day.

It was 14 April. I was in Surat with my colleague Chahat Rana to report on how the city’s hospitals and crematoria were being overwhelmed by the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the New Civil Hospital, we found a queue that was around three hundred metres long.