Jadid Qabistan Ahle Islam

About 850 bodies are buried in an overgrown corner of New Delhi’s oldest and largest Muslim cemetery, a parcel of the 40-acre space that has been set aside for coronavirus deaths.

Hidden behind a busy police station, Jadid Qabistan Ahle Islam is a peaceful and well-tended place, where graves are lain in tightly packed rows with epitaphs in English, Urdu and Arabic.

 

When people started dying of the virus in India, said Mohammad Shamim, the third-generation supervisor, the committee that runs the cemetery allotted just over an acre of land. Six weeks later, the allotment was full. It has since been expanded twice more, now covering about five and a half acres.

 

Mr. Shamim puffs on a bidi, an Indian hand-rolled cigarette, as he surveys the fresh mounds, bare except for bright pink flower petals and bits of broken slate scattered over them.

 

“This part of the cemetery was wilderness,” he said. “When Covid started, no one was really willing to bury the patients because they didn’t know how dangerous it was.”

 

A doctor at Delhi’s premier public research hospital, the All India Institute of Medical Science, advised the cemetery committee to bury patients in a segregated plot in 15-feet-deep pits with earth packed densely over them to keep out rats and other animals that could carry the disease out of the graves.

 

Normally at the cemetery, families bury their loved ones themselves. But during the pandemic, Mr. Shamim and other workers have taken on the added burden of lowering the bodies with rope or forklifts, with family and friends standing at a distance.

 

“It is way more dangerous than we knew,” Mr. Shamim said. “Initially we thought it was just the old and the weak who would be affected but then I’ve seen people of all ages, young people. You should see the nameplates, read their years, and you realize that everyone can be infected by this and it’s very dangerous.”

 

For months, Mr. Shamim said, he worked without personal protective equipment, merely borrowing a pair of gloves from the ambulance delivering the corpse.

 

At the height of the pandemic in April and May, Mr. Shamim was overseeing the burials of around 18 Covid-19 deaths each day. He’s broken down in tears from time to time, such as when an ambulance brought a woman and a small child, or when another ambulance brought only a child.

 

His teeth stained red from paan, a leaf that when chewed acts as a stimulant, and the royal blue tunic under his puffy winter jacket punctured with burn holes, Mr. Shamim says that he and two colleagues lived for four months in a tent they pitched on the edge of the cemetery to avoid bringing the virus home to their families.

 

Since the new year dawned, Mr. Shamim has buried just four Covid-19 patients, one on Monday, and he is optimistic that he will soon be inoculated with one of the vaccines that the Indian government has recently authorized for emergency use.

 

“We’re in a better place,” Mr. Shamim said. “We’re hoping that soon enough we’ll also be vaccinated.”

 

Because the vaccines have been made in India, the jabs should go to health care and front line workers first, he said, and then should be exported to the rest of the world.

 

As supervisor, one of Mr. Shamim’s normal duties is to wash bodies before burial, in keeping with Islamic custom. This practice has been suspended, but he still finds solace in the ways in which he’s been of service.

 

Relatives of the dead have told him that because of his good works in the cemetery, he has been protected by God from the virus.

 

“There are very few jobs where you get money as well as people’s blessings. This is one such job,” he said.

 

In the corner reserved for coronavirus cases, upright sticks are the only markers for some graves. Some have simple metal nameplates. “Mohammad Suleiman, son of Amir Hasan. Wafat: 3 June 2020,” reads one, using the Urdu word for eternal rest. Others, for people from wealthier families, have marble headstones and lush palms planted within their slate perimeters, a ritual that Islamic scholars say began with the prophet.

 

On Tuesday, a funeral procession of about 50 men wearing kufi caps but not masks carry a coffin to a freshly dug grave opposite the muddy, unpaved road that separates the coronavirus deaths from the rest of the cemetery. Kites circle overhead and the plaintive cry of peacocks breaks the silence.