Covid chronicles: Patna Doms displaced, erased

“Kahar barpa tha [It was devastation, pure havoc],” recalls the curiously named Time Pass. “Bahut laash jalaya tha. Ginti ke bahar ho gaya tha [There were so many bodies it was impossible to keep a count].”

In the five years since Covid-19 struck, Bans Ghat – Patna’s oldest crematorium on the banks of the Ganga – Time Pass, 21, has returned to invisibility. He had briefly emerged from that during the pandemic. He now moves through the city unseen, displaced, and out of work.

Drifting along with no regular job or income, he now seems to be living up to his name, Time Pass.

But that was not how or why he got his label. Blame his uncle Jugnu Ram for that. At the time of his birth, Jugnu Ram had just returned from watching a Sunny Deol film. And when the women of the household teased him about idling, he passed the jibe on as the boy’s name.

“I do whatever comes my way now,” says Time Pass. “I clean toilets in the metro, sometimes drains, sometimes lift a rotting pig, sometimes cremate an unclaimed body. I collect garbage too,” he lists out such work as he gets.

Each time the city wants its dead, decaying, and abandoned bodies removed, it turns to people like Time Pass. If the stench of a carcass seeps into the air, Time Pass is called in. A body lies mangled on the railway tracks, Time Pass is summoned again. An abandoned body lies in some corner of the city, a police jeep is sent, and he waits outside the postmortem room.

The calls come not because he’s trained for the job, but because he is a Dom. The Doms are classified as Mahadalits – among the most deprived social groups in Bihar. According to the latest 2023 caste survey, they number 263,512, or just 0.20 per cent of the state’s 131 million population.

They languish at the bottom of the Hindu hierarchy. Mostly trapped in an occupation imposed on them by the dominant castes. The work of tending to the dead, or to sanitation.

“Saat baje se ghat par baith jata hai ki kaghani body aave, koi kutta aave, koi baccha aave [From 7 in the morning I sit at the cremation ground, waiting for a corpse, or a decaying dog’s carcass, or a dead child brought from some hospital for burial or cremation],” says Time Pass. He speaks to us in Magadhi (also spelt Magahi).

Each task gets him a pittance, sometimes 200, sometimes 300 rupees, at most 500. All work is done with his bare hands.

When this reporter first met him on May 9, 2021, he was at the cusp of adulthood, 5 feet 2 inches tall, a thin boy with a carefree outlook. Five years later, this April 21, we met him again. He had grown by barely an inch. He had married Kajal, two years younger than him, and now has two children, Lakshmi and Rocky.

When we meet him, Time Pass sits in one corner of the open verandah of Bans (bamboo) Ghat’s clerical section. Temperature: 40 degrees Celsius.

Beneath the freshly painted colours of the crematorium’s walls, the remnants of the coronavirus still cling faintly. You can even now read: “The final rites of Covid victims are performed free of cost.”

Above him a fan whirs, blowing mostly hot air. Nearby, a group of Doms lies half asleep on a wooden plank under the same searing heat, waiting for work. For the past fortnight, Time Pass has not found enough work to sustain himself. “Kabhi kabhi bhookhe bhi sootne pad jaata hai [Sometimes, I have to sleep hungry, too].” he says.

Five years ago, Time Pass and the other Doms were at the same spot, eating, sleeping, walking, resting among the dead. Pyres burnt day and night, and the queues grew so long that waiting time went up to 12 hours and more. The Covid dead were arriving in large numbers. Sometimes, a single ambulance carried three corpses.

All 14 Doms employed at Bans Ghat by the Patna Municipal Corporation (PMC) were school dropouts. Many had quit by Class 2 or 3. None had ever made it past middle school. They performed one of the most essential functions a society needed. But were then overwhelmed by the scale of the disaster.

The PMC hired 14 more Doms on an emergency basis. And yet, 56 human hands were not enough. Patna was reporting the highest number of Covid cases and deaths and was the worst‑hit city in the state.

“Even the electric cremation machines broke down after 24 hours of continuous use,” says Raj Kumar, 50. Which was why some 50 per cent of cremations occurred on wood pyres. Today, electric machine cremations are back to 80 per cent. Kumar is the head of registrations and posted at the Ghat since 2017.

Another 12 Doms – ages ranging from 16 to 40 – were brought in, bringing their total to 40. They were hired not by the municipality, but by grief-stricken families reaching out to the Dom community. The families paid amounts ranging from 1,000 to 4,000 rupees – which would then be divided among the four workers each cremation required. None of these 12 had ever done this job before. But suddenly found themselves pitchforked into performing both wood pyre and electric cremations during the scary second wave.

That was when one of the youngest and newest workers at the Bans Ghat stepped forward to do what most others would have feared doing at the height of the pandemic: cremate a Covid-19 victim’s body. The other 11 followed his lead.

His first cremation was of a young woman victim of the virus. He doesn’t remember how she looked or what her age was, only that her body was wrapped in white plastic. He recounts the family leaving her at the cremation boundary, too afraid to touch her. They stayed briefly, then departed without a goodbye. The task of carrying out the final rites fell upon him.

Time Pass and three others performed the rituals and lit the pyre. This was done without protective gear, such as a PPE kits or gloves, or a face shield, or an N-95 mask.

“That works for those in AC [air conditioning],” he scoffs. During the first wave, Doms who tried wearing protective gear in the 42-degree heat were drenched in sweat and suffocated within minutes, often leading to a fall. The kits were soon discarded, only to be repurposed during the monsoon.

Death didn’t frighten Time Pass at that young age. “Murda ke beech mein paala poshaya hai, to maya kaise lagega. [To those born and raised among the dead, how could a corpse stir an emotion?].”

And one corpse followed another, and another, and another, until June 2021. In his first 45 days, Time Pass bore witness to a truth that to this day remains buried beneath official statistics.

India’s flawed Covid-19 fatality numbers reeked of a severe, bizarre, undercounting.

India had recorded the second‑highest number of confirmed Covid‑19 cases in the world, at 45 million. Officially, we reported the third highest toll – 533,847 Covid‑19 deaths as our final pandemic tally. However, a report by the World Health Organization estimated that India suffered 4.7 million excess deaths, both directly and indirectly linked to Covid-19.

“In a normal day, 2 to 5 cremations take place here. During Covid, we were seeing 70-80 daily. And there was a three-week period where we saw 100-105 cremations every day,” Raj Kumar, the registration head, says. That account punctures the low figures that were displayed in the state’s health bulletins every evening.

Time Pass tells us that across four generations of his family, spanning a century, no one has witnessed death on the scale that he has.

“Baap‑dada jisme khatta hai, beta bhi usi mein khatega [The son will carry on the work of his father and grandfather],” Time Pass says, explaining that he had to inherit this caste‑based work as a rule. Two of his brothers, Ramjane, 25 and Shyam, 23, were and are working at other cremation grounds. He has a sister Gauri, 35, married and living in another district.

His parents Paras Dom and Shila Devi were also at the Bans Ghat. Paras as a cremation worker. While Shila collected cooled-off coals and firewood leftover from the cremations and earned three to five rupees selling those on the market. Shila would also make bamboo winnowing baskets (bans ka soot) to make ends meet. Her children including Time Pass, would trail behind her, helping sweep the cremation ground, rearing pigs, cleaning human faeces.

But the moment he stepped forward to perform his first cremation at age 16, Time Pass became an unlikely Covid warrior, providing dignity in death to those abandoned by fear and the stigma surrounding the coronavirus. His was a dangerous, heroic role. But one that finds no place in the national Covid narrative. His story survives orally within the Dom community but lies erased in the rest of society.

Months later, when the Covid wave finally subsided, Doms employed by the municipality were given an honorarium of 4,500 rupees. They were told they would be felicitated on Independence Day and even received an invitation to Patna’s Gandhi Maidan for the August 15 ceremony. Raj Kumar and three other workers, mainly clerks, attended the ceremony but returned without being honoured.

“Maybe we were not the heroes, but the villains, since Covid was mainly a spectacle of death.” Kumar now jokes about the invitation.

Time Pass never received the 4,500 rupees honorarium, nor was he ever felicitated by the state. As the world moves further from the pandemic years, his labour too slowly gets expunged from the nation’s telling of the Covid times.

He estimates he cremated over 200 Covid bodies and earned between 70,000 and 1 lakh rupees doing so. The money came from the families.

“Kaiyon mein to pillu bhi pad gaya tha [Some bodies came rotting so badly with insects crawling over them],” he says. In some cases, no loved one accompanied the dead. From these lonely corpses, he extracted anklets and toe rings.

“I sold them for 9,000 rupees later,” he admits. The money vanished as quickly as it came. He bought a second‑hand scooter for 13,000 rupees, only to resell it months later when its engine demanded repair. He also purchased a smartphone and a few new pairs of clothes. The cost of living and mobility in those cruel months was equally punishing. He sold his pig and her four piglets for 19,000 rupees to pay the medical and other bills of his father Paras, whose leg had been fractured by a speeding car. He spent on daal‑bhaat meals costing double their usual price. Some of it was spent on mahua (the country liquor brewed from the mahua flower) to numb himself and escape the nauseating stench of corpses. His mother died in 2023.

On April 30 this year, when the rains arrived in Patna, Kachchi Talab in the Gardanibagh neighbourhood went underwater. It is an urban slum, home to twenty families, including Time Pass and his father. Time Pass’s wife, Kajal, left him during Holi this year, taking their two children with her. She is living with another man who sells desi liquor. Now it is only Time Pass and his father who live together. Dom hamlets are built beside drains, filthy ponds, and garbage dumps. Flooding and eviction drives are a common feature here. Besides which, mafias might set them ablaze to seize the low‑lying government land.

“If only the state could rehabilitate us in a Dom Khana [colony],” sighs Paras Dom.

Paras built this 10x12‑feet shack for Time Pass, roofed with plastic sheets collected from several political rallies in Kachchi Talab. Before settling in this neighbourhood two years ago, Time Pass lived in Chajju Bagh, from where an administration demolition drive, displaced him. And he wasn’t finding work.

In desperation, Time Pass and his cousin Mangru Dom sought work at a construction site. “We lifted bricks all day, and once the manager came to know about our caste, we were denied both the job and the wage,” he alleges. Earlier, Time Pass had successfully found work beyond the cremations. Sometimes as a daily‑wage labourer, or setting up wedding tents, carrying lights during a baraat procession, even scrubbing utensils after marriage rituals.

“You only get this work if you conceal your Dom identity,” he explains. The larger city, home to 2.7 million people, offers some anonymity, a shelter where identity can be diluted or disguised.

“In a village or small locality, where everyone knows everyone, this kind of daily wage work is impossible for a Dom,” says Time Pass.

A native of Jamui district’s Sikandra village, registration head Raj Kumar was able to break free from pyres and ashes as his father was determined to send him to school. Kumar ended up completing a degree in biology, a rare achievement in his community.

In his grandfather’s generation, says Kumar, “Doms would place their slippers on their heads and bow down while passing a dominant caste home.”

Things shifted slightly for the next generation. “In my father’s time, it meant rising from a cot or a stool the moment an upper‑caste person was seen walking by. We weren’t allowed to sip water from a glass. We would fold our hands and drink from the palm,” says Kumar. A tiny yet significant change began taking shape in the 1990s, when Lalu Prasad Yadav came to power.

“At least we started going to school. But the Doms, Musahars, and Chamars (all Scheduled Castes) were seated apart from general category students,” he says, recalling the discrimination at the classroom level.

Time Pass has found different ways of breaking free. Not school, but social media accessed on his smartphone, was his way out.

His first act of resistance came when his Aadhaar card was being made some years ago. He changed the humiliating name – a huge problem for many Dalits. He recalls an aunt named Luchchi Devi, a colloquial word for liar. Two of his uncles were named Akela (alone) and Bimari (illness). But Time Pass asserted himself – and became Rohit Kumar.

Then came his smartphone, not a vanity indulgence but a way of being seen, he insists.

Last year, he got on to Instagram to do what everyone else of his generation seems to be doing: dance and sing. Registering on that platform was a relief for him.

“It didn’t ask me if I was a Dom.”