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 ...
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.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.
"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." 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.
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. 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 recognised by the Delhi government in 2012.
His first stop is usually Jadeed Qabristan, the main Muslim burial ground for Delhi's old walled city. He refers to Mohammad Shameem, the head gravedigger there, as"Shameem bhai," or brother, a sign of friendship in India. His ambulance is supposed to carry a maximum of two bodies, but on this day, there were six. He carried a handwritten list of their names on a little scrap of paper.
The first was that of Satinder Kumar Singh, a 50-year-old bank employee. He was admitted to the hospital on June 9 and died two hours later, said his 16-year-old son, Amrit.
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