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Lowering the coffin of a person who died from a virus-related illness during a funeral in New Delhi in August.
Credit...Xavier Galiana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images |
NEW DELHI — Mayandi Soundara Raj, an engineer pictured astride a motorcycle, was “a perfect husband” to his wife. He died on July 10.
Arkadipta Basu, who died on Sept. 17, showered her family with “love and affection,” according to Anindya Basu, her husband.
“I couldn’t keep my promise to be with you forever,” he writes under a photograph of her in a bright red sari.
Mr. Raj and Ms. Basu are among those memorialized on a new website dedicated to people in India who have died of virus-related illnesses, who number more than 154,000.
At the height of India’s outbreak last fall, more than 1,000 people were dying every day. As in many other places, pandemic restrictions often meant that friends and family members were unable to attend funerals or be present for last rites.
“As a society, we probably couldn’t provide them the dignity in which we would have loved to bid them a farewell,” said Abhijit Chowdhury of the Covid Care Network, a nonprofit group in the eastern city of Kolkata that established the site.
The group says it hopes that the memorials will broadly represent India’s population, and invites submissions online that are verified with death certificates. “We are initiating this, but we hope this becomes a place where everybody in the country could join,” Mr. Chowdhury said.
India appears to be experiencing something of a breather in its outbreak. The country has registered more than 10 million total cases, the second-highest tally in the world, after that of the United States, according to a New York Times database. Compared with almost 100,000 cases a day last fall, India now has a seven-day average of about 12,000 new daily infections. The country of 1.3 billion people has also begun one of the world’s largest inoculation campaigns, with about 3.9 million health care workers having received their first dose of the coronavirus vaccine by Tuesday afternoon.
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