Sitting outside the mortuary of Deen Dayal Upadhyay Hospital in south-west Delhi, a 60-year-old petite man with sunken cheeks wearing a jacket and a blue gamchha waited for the police to hand over the mortal remains of his son Anil on Wednesday afternoon.
“ Gareebon ki zindagi ki koi keemat nahi hai, dekho kaise chale gaye [There’s no value of a poor person’s life, look at the way they’ve died],” said Angan Singh, a rickshaw-puller in Uttarakhand’s Khatima who received the news of his son’s death on Tuesday and took an evening train to Delhi.
Anil, a daily wage labourer, allegedly died of suffocation while sleeping near a burning tandoor in a closed truck late on Monday. Along with Anil were his co-workers Amit, Devender alias Pankaj, Kamal, Awadh Lal and Deep Chand, who also lost their lives.
Wedding season
Anil, Amit and Pankaj had come together from Khatima to Delhi on October 25 — just like they had the last three years to earn a few extra bucks during the wedding season. Working at a private catering firm, the families said they would earn anything between ₹15,000 to ₹20,000 a month.
Amit’s brother Roshan, while sighing the paperwork outside the morgue, said: “My brothers were labourers back home too. They come to Delhi only during the wedding season to earn extra money. Can’t believe this time, their dead bodies will go home,” he said, adding that Amit had gotten married only four months ago.
‘Pankaj, Kamal were alive’
Recounting the incident, 27-year-old Mukesh, who spotted the bodies in the truck, said that Pankaj and Kamal were alive when he saw them in the truck but the other four were dead.
“Their bodies were stuck in the position they slept,” he recalls.
Mukesh said that the victims had helped in catering a wedding function at Mall Road in Delhi Cantonment area on Monday, which wrapped up around 1 a.m. on Tuesday.
The next function was on Wednesday, which was why they decided to load the truck with the catering equipment and go straight to the venue of the next party at Terrier’s Hostel, two kilometres away.
“All 19 of us were staying in a room given by our company in Chander Vihar. Because there was only a day’s gap, some of us decided to go straight to the next venue instead of going to the room, so we could start preparing from Tuesday evening,” he said.
Because of the chilly weather, the deceased decided to sleep in the truck near the tandoor around 4 a.m. Mukesh claimed they were allegedly told by Army officers at the venue to not unload the equipment at that time of the night.
“They thought they had doused the tandoor but some pieces of the coal were still burning. They tried to unload the truck but the officers at the premises told them to do it in the morning because they were sleeping,” he said, adding that the six of them then decided to go sleep in the truck.
Mukesh and another colleague knocked at the closed door of the truck around 9 a.m. but no one responded.
“We have been working continuously since November 21. We only get two to three hours of sleep every day. That’s why when they didn’t wake up, I though we’ll let them sleep. But we called them again after two hours and they didn’t respond,” he said.
That’s when Mukesh went inside and found Avadh Lal, Deep Chand, Anil and Amit dead while Pankaj and Kamal were still breathing.
Mukesh raised an alarm and called the Army officers who rushed the duo to DDU Hospital. But they were declared brought dead. In another car, the four deceased were also rushed to the hospital.
The post mortem of Anil, Amit, Pankaj, and Kamal was conducted on Wednesday. The police are still waiting for the families of Awadh Lal and Deep Chand to reach Delhi.
