Bengaluru: For 4 days, father waits for test report of dead son

BENGALURU: For four days now, the body of a seven-year-old boy, who fell to his death from the second floor of his Hebbal residence, is lying in a freezer awaiting an autopsy, while his distraught father has been running from office to office in a bid to obtain permission to give his son a dignified farewell. All the while, the father is paying through his nose for the freezer.
Abrar Ahmed was said to be playing on the staircase railing of his residence around 6.45pm on July 2 when he slipped and fell. After taking him to three hospitals, who refused to admit the boy, his painter-father, Aslam Pasha, managed to get him admitted in a private hospital in Vijayanagar around 11pm. The boy did not respond to treatment and died in the wee hours on Sunday.
Mohammed Sardar, Abrar’s uncle, said, “Hebbal police visited the hospital and said a postmortem is a must, but a Covid-19 test needs to be conducted before that. A swab sample was collected and we wanted to shift the body to a medical college, but police said the hospital doesn’t have freezers. They got the body shifted to a private firm which provides freezers. That’s where the body is now.”
A government order states bodies should be handed over to the family after they are swabbed. Pasha paid Rs 90,000 as hospital charges and now pays Rs 4,000 a day for the freezer. He had agreed to the plan thinking he would get test results within a day.
“I’ve had no work for the past three months and our family is going through hard times,” Pasha said. “Neighbours lent me some money and I paid the hospital bill with that. I haven’t slept a wink since I lost my son. I don’t know whom to approach or what to do.”
Family members say they had taken Abrar to Nimhans, Dr BR Ambedkar Medical College and Hospital and Indira Gandhi Institute of Child Health, but all three refused to admit the boy citing lack of beds.