A 70-year-old retired employee of Tamil Nadu government and a resident of Nagari town, died of a week-long reported self-imposed starvation on Tuesday, after his 40-year-old son was sent to a quarantine facility in Tirupati last week.
With none to help arrange the funeral, the Nagari police gave him a decent farewell. After the last rites were performed, the son too died reportedly after being tested positive for the virus, taking the total deaths in Chittoor district to seven.
According to information, the son, a lorry driver, showed COVID-19 symptoms, and was shifted to a quarantine facility in Tirupati from Nagari on June 24 night. The father, a widower, returned home and reportedly confined himself to a rickety room. Since then, he reportedly stopped eating and was surviving on water and tea.
His daughter-in-law, grandchildren and relatives who live in the same locality, kept themselves aloof from the “self-quarantined” man.
Fear in locality
Even before his son’s test reports came, fear-stricken people living turned the locality into an undeclared red zone. A boy, who supplies milk, knocked the door of the elderly man’s house on Tuesday, but there was no response. He returned again at noon, but to no avail. Seeing the lifeless man through the window, neighbours suspected that he might have died of COVID-19 and refused to go near the house.
A student of the locality is said to have passed on the message to SP S. Senthil Kumar, who, in turn, instructed Nagari Circle-Inspector K. Maddaiahchari to do the needful. By the time the police reached the locality in the evening, the entire neighborhood was behind the doors.
“Even his family members and relatives refused to come out. A neighbour just threw a crowbar to help us break the door and bring out the body. After the job was done, there was none to claim the crowbar back,” said the Inspector.
The police arranged a hearse for the elderly man’s last journey, after a three-hour long tension filled drama. Amidst stiff opposition by some locals, who refused to allow the body into the burial ground on the outskirts, Mr. Maddaiahchari accomplished the task by late Tuesday evening. Interestingly, the elderly man was declared negative for the virus after his death.
Immediately after his funeral, the report reached his daughter-in-law that the elderly man’s son died around 8 p.m on Tuesday at Tirupati’s COVID hospital.
On Wednesday morning, the Nagari police had to intervene again to arrange a vehicle for the woman and her children to go to Tirupati from Nagari, to have a last glimpse of her husband. “As the lorry driver died of COVID-19, the body will not be brought here. We have just made arrangements for the family members to pay their last respect in Tirupati, before the body is taken to an electric crematorium there. It is absolutely a wrong perception that the body of Coronavirus patients will be left like orphans,” Mr. Maddaiahchari said.