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Taxi driver turns hearse driver as coronavirus cases in India spike
Reuters, New Delhi
The heat was already suffocating when Mohammad Aamir Khan woke up in his tiny, windowless room with only a sheer curtain for a door. He offered a brief prayer to a picture hanging above the bed of the Kaaba, the holiest site in Islam, and headed down the narrow stairs.
It was time to ferry the dead.
Before the novel coronavirus brought its pandemic to New Delhi, Aamir was one of tens of thousands of people making a living in the Indian capital as a taxi driver.
But that work dried up during the nearly three-month lockdown to prevent the spread of the virus. With cases rising in India even before the government lifted the lockdown last week, a friend suggested perhaps the only business now booming in the country – driving a private ambulance.
Reporting on his first day, the 38-year-old said, he hadn’t even realized he would be transporting coronavirus patients until he was handed a set of overalls.
It wasn’t long before his ambulance became a hearse. Now his days are spent transporting corpses from the hospital to cremation pyres and cemeteries, sometimes stacked on top of each other six at a time, their names written in permanent marker on their burial shrouds.
Sometimes he is alone in his ambulance and must rely on the relatives of the dead to help him lift the body from the back of the vehicle. Sometimes he has to lift them himself. “It was strange to me, to be carrying a body instead of a patient,” he said of the first time he did it. “But over time, I got used to it.”
As the job becomes more familiar, Aamir wrestles with how much protective equipment to wear. He could wear a hazmat-like suit, but that isn’t very practical in New Delhi’s ferocious heat.
“We will faint in half an hour if we wear the kit and work,” he said. He and his fellow drivers are much more comfortable wearing a thin hospital gown. But there might be a price for their comfort: “We are always worried that we might catch the infection.”
Government-run ambulances are scarce in India. Most people resort to calling private ambulances, some little more than converted vans with mobile numbers written on the side, in the hope a passerby will note it down and call if they fall sick.
Unlike in many other countries badly hit by the virus, ambulance drivers and other vital health workers in India are poorly paid, have minimum training, no health insurance and long working hours. Cases in India are surging, with nearly 323,000 infected, four times that of China’s official infections. The peak is still weeks, if not months, away, experts say, even as the government eased almost all curbs on movement on June 8.
“We are supposed to work for 12 hours a day – but 12 hours is never 12,” Aamir said. “Earlier, there used to be one or two bodies. But now the mortuary is full.”
India’s federal government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, maintains it has the virus under control. The number of deaths in the country, at 9,500, is so far limited compared to countries with a similar number of cases.
Like his father, Aamir trained as a stonemason, but found it too difficult to earn a living. He later found work as a taxi driver for a string of companies, including Ola and Uber.
Sometimes, he was able to save as much as 1,000 Indian rupees (about $13) per day after expenses – enough for him and his wife, Rubi, to enroll their 7-year-old daughter, Hamda, at a local private school. But after the lockdown began, the owner of the taxi he drove said he was no longer required because of slack demand.
Aamir has kept his ambulance work a secret from his neighbors in Mandawali, a low-income, illegally built colony in the east of the capital that was only recognized by the Delhi government in 2012.
He worries what they’ll think if they find out. Doctors, nurses and other medical staff treating patients across India say they have been attacked and spat at, with some ostracized by friends and relatives as the virus spread across the country.
“They still think I am unemployed,” said Aamir, who doesn’t even have the comfort of his wife and child during this time of global troubles. They left to visit the family’s ancestral village days before the lockdown and haven’t been able to return.
Aamir’s pay, 17,000 Indian rupees (about $220) per month, is better than being unemployed, but it doesn’t compensate for the risks, he said.
“It’s not enough for the work,” he said. “I’m fed up. But what other choice do I have?”
Reuters/file
Mohammad Aamir Khan, an ambulance driver, wears his personal protective equipment at a mortuary, before transporting bodies of people who died of the coronavirus disease, to a graveyard in New Delhi, India.