Denied permission from his landlord and neighbours to keep his wife’s dead body at home, a 38-year-old tea seller wandered in a private ambulance with it for five hours on the streets of east Delhi’s Anand Vihar on Monday night.
Anju, 35, died around 9 pm at east Delhi’s Hedgewar Hospital. Her husband, Chotelal, had admitted her around 6 pm with high fever, severe joint pain and facial swelling. Doctors at the hospital told him that she had died of chikungunya, but the hospital authorities did not provide him a doctor’s prescription nor a death certificate, mentioning the cause of death, he alleged. Nor did they arrange for an ambulance; instead, they asked him to take his wife’s body home on his own.
A private ambulance driver, Gaurav, after much negotiation, agreed to transport Anju’s body to his house for '200. But when he arrived at the rented accommodation he lived in at 11 pm, a room on the third floor, he asked the landlord, Bablu, to help take the body up, but he refused to even let him enter the building, a decision that other neighbours endorsed.
“It happened in front of my daughters, aged 6 and 4 years, respectively. They were clueless that their mother had died. I have no relatives or friends in the city to whom I can hand them over till the mourning period gets over,” said Chotelal. He was not allowed to keep the body outside the local temple either. “They asked me to take the body back to the hospital or somewhere else,” he added.
According to Bablu, Chote Lal didn’t have any documents of his wife’s death that could prove that she died of chikungunya and was admitted to east Delhi’s Hedgewar Hospital. “I gave him Rs 2,000 to take the body back to the hospital and keep it in the mortuary until morning,” he said.
After neighbours’ prote-sts, Chotetal returned to the hospital with the body but the security guards on duty denied them entry. At last, he requested the amb-ulance driver to drop him with Anju’s body near his tea stall, located opposite a mall in east Delhi, where some of his friends lived in the slums and allowed Chotetal to keep the body there for the night.
Constable Vikram was patrolling the area when he spotted the ambulance and approached its driver who narrated to him the entire story. “We provided Chotelal all necessary he-lp,” said a senior police of-ficer. The hospital administration is conducting an internal enquiry after we informed them about the matter. The constable informed the station house officer about the matter and he in turn arranged a space at the village pradhan’s home where the body was preserved for the night after covering it in a bag with ice.
On Tuesday afternoon, the man finally cremated his wife’s body.
