Coronavirus | Grief, groceries, all shared in this fight

Volunteers have stepped up to help patients, kin

On Thursday, Pritam Singh helped cremate a 24-year-old man. But that wasn’t his worst experience over the past year. He remembers having to carry the body of a man past his young son, saying they were just taking him into a hospital emergency. “The family had told us not to reveal that his father had died,” he says. Mr. Singh and his team of seven, has, over the past year, supported free of cost, about 400 families struggling to perform the last rites of kin who have died of COVID-19. “Usually, when we go to a house, there are only two or three people. At the most, neighbours will come out of their homes when we are putting the body into the ambulance, but otherwise, there is no one to help,” says the 48-year-old, who heads United Sikhs. The lack of support from those they thought they could lean on and the breakdown in government machinery is what both angers and grieves people, he says. Mr. Singh and his team have helped with Hindu and Sikh cremations and Muslim and Christian burials, but feel bad that they have to turn down many people simply because they have neither the volunteers nor the vehicles. Last year, the daily calls were four or five; this year, it is 18-20.