Time blunts sorrow but also gives it an edge. Anniversaries marking any sudden and unexpected bereavement can bring fresh distress upon the faint-hearted; and in extraordinary situations, even the stout-hearted. May 2021 was an extraordinary month, when strong knees buckled and lion-hearts snapped. The month presided over the high point of the second wave in India.
Those distressing images are deeply etched and repeating them would be tantamount to revelling in horrendous cliches. They are a recurring nightmare for the bereaved, but hardly a private misery. The second wave is on a par with the 2004 Indian Tsunami in calling up collective horror, now relived through standing symbols and indexed calls for help.
An extremity of St. Mary’s Corporation Christian Cemetery stands witness to those days, with a sizeable tract of land serving as the resting place for Covid victims. The month of May 2021 is almost a leitmotif appearing on a good number of gravestones.
Fr. Lourdes Marcel, assistant parish priest, Lazarus Church, which is the caretaker of the cemetery, recalls the huge sense of urgency that undergirded anything they did at the cemetery during the second wave.
“Eight ambulances would be waiting in a queue. Three JCBs would be pressed into service. We would be digging continuously. Obviously, more people had to be employed.”
Fr. Marcel discloses that during the Second Wave, there were over 160 Covid burials at the cemetery. He explains that with regular burials also coming in — “the cemetery serves around 250 churches in and around Chennai” — the Covid burials were proving more challenging than they really were.
If it was a Covid death, certain specifics had to be followed, notes Fr. Marcel.
“The grave had to be dug by a JCB. It had to be really deep — 8 to 10 feet.”
Contact with elements that inform the burial process had to be kept to the bare minimum.
“The workers would lower the coffin into the grave with ropes tied to it,” recalls Marcel, adding that if there was any room for doubt regarding the cause of a death for want of any written declaration, and the body had come wrapped in plastic, the staff would treat it as a Covid death, and arrange for an appropriate burial.
“We had to be extremely cautious; and we did not want to take any chances.”
Spirit of volunteering
It there was a battle-cry for volunteers who had sprung up like wild mushroom after a rain, it was undoubtedly this: ‘Amplify please!’ Requests were flying thick and fast, seeking whatever it took to save lives: hospital beds, oxygen concentrators, plasma, out-of-stock critical medicine and even blood, as the fear of blood banks drying up loomed large.
A fascinating aspect of these acts of humanity is how strangers grouped into effective units to make these calls for help heard wide and loud. The volunteering groups that sprung up around that time are too innumerable to count, and they were so remotely connected that it is difficult to stamp a definitive identity on them. The crisis also threw up unlikely volunteers: Some of them drawing upon coordination skills they had previously never shown a glimpse of.
For the sake of illustration, here is how a loosely-structured students’ group from Chennai — C Help — took the baton and kept the relay on. The group consisted of students from college, and even schools, and they wasted no time in coalescing into an effective volunteering unit. During the crisis, this group was featured in these pages.
One of its coordinators, Adwaith Praveen, now a third-year medical student of ESIC Medical College & PGIMSR in KK Nagar, notes that one initiative outran the crisis.
Besides the regular call for Covid-treatment essentials, C Help launched a Glide app to create a database of blood donors. To cut a long story short, the app developed by Adithya Muthukumar, at that time in Class XII at Vidya Mandir, had around 150 blood donors in its Chennai database, which was eventually — after the second wave had gone past — handed over to a blood-management group to benefit its blood-collection efforts. The exercise also spread to Bengaluru, where the youngsters again managed to rack up a database of donors, around 50.
