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Some Pakistanis won’t say they’re wasting their family’s circle because of the pandemic because they don’t need to bury the bodies alone.
By Mohammed Hanif
Mr. Hanif is a novelist.
KARACHI, Pakistan – I’ve issued some condolences over the past few months. None of the other people I called to ask for condolences had died of Covid-19. I’ve been given some other reason.
It started with the death of an uncle two months ago. I called to offer my cousin his condolences. We hadn’t spoken for over a decade. My 80-year-old uncle and I thought it would be some kind of well-lived verbal exchange, but it soon became a detailed, pointless denial: my father, your uncle, didn’t die of Covid-19, my cousin said.
My uncle had tested negative; died of an attack on the center, I told him. I didn’t even mention the C-word.
I controlled to enter my life lived and hung up.
Since then, I have noticed a pattern: I made part of a dozen calls, the subject of my condolences five men and one woman, elderly people aged 31 to 82, and without me mentioning the subject, I said, “It’s not what to think.
There is one exception: a friend’s father died and my friend told me that his father had died of Covid-19 but that the circle of relatives sought to hide that.
My friend is a doctor who has lived and worked in the United States for 3 decades. When I called him, he told me the cases of his father’s death: his father was over 60 years old and, like many Pakistanis, many Pakistanis had chosen that either the new coronavirus was a hoax or that he would be reluctant to intelligence. Muslims.
My friend’s father socialized in his Karachi neighborhood and stood his prayers in public, entering the mosque through the back door when, for a time, other people his age were forbidden to visit. He became ill, was hospitalized, tested positive for the virus and died a few days later.
It was in early May, at a time that the funerals of the other dying people of Covid-19 were being controlled by the local government rather than their relatives, as some members of the medical network think that the dead can infect the living. My friend’s relatives had to bribe the police to retrieve the body, and in the first place they tried to hide the cause of death, the data was revealed.
“There were other people who came here to offer condolences,” my friend said, “but others came to complain, “If your father had Covid, why did you let him mingle with our elders? What if it inflamed us all? »
The circle of relatives vehemently denied that he had died of Covid-19. “We’ve lived on this street for generations. I can see why my brothers did it.
In Karachi, I called a doctor to ask why other people were hiding Covid-19’s dead. “People don’t need to see bodies and the police come to their homes at the same time,” I said.
Another doctor told me: “There is fear, shame and stigma related to Covid’s death, as if you had inflamed with this virus by doing something immoral or dirty, that touch the knob of a door.”
What if no one attends your home funeral? What if no one comes to offer their condolences? What if other people think that because you are similar to the deceased, you can simply pass the disease on to them and their children?
It’s better to just deny what happened. In any case, didn’t other people die before this virus? What is the damage of slightly changing the cause of death? Even when someone dies of Covid-19, they do not die of Covid-19; die of headaches caused by Covid-19.
And then you lie and move on. After all, 98% of inflamed people survive.
The longest verbal exchange of condolences I had with a close friend whose sister died earlier this month. She suffers from an unknown illness and is admitted to a personal hospital in Lahore.
When his condition worsened, the circle of relatives asked to take him to the Services Hospital, a giant government facility with a Covid-19 patient room. My friend insisted that his sister had tested negative for coronavirus, but when they arrived at the hospital, a doctor referred them to the Covid section.
“If we had let her into this room, they even gave us the body, ” said my friend.
Some of the myths about the virus spread through the other people who were meant to advise us through this crisis. Prime Minister Imran Khan said 90% of Covid-19 cases were like a “normal flu” and did not pass to the hospital when he had the flu.
In early May, Asad Umar, the federal minister of Planning, Development and Special Initiatives and the type in the index of guiding the coronavirus crisis, gave a presentation on the number of more deaths in Pakistan from road traffic injuries than by Covid-19. and yet, he said, “we allow cars on the roads, because their need is greater than the danger of those injuries.”
Prime Minister Zafar Mirza’s fitness adviser said earlier this month that the upcoming monsoon season would bring coronavirus. “But it’s too early to tell, ” he added. While the first rains fell a few days later, it was learned that Dr. Mirza had tested positive for the virus.
Last March, during the first weeks of the pandemic spread in Pakistan, a phone call was leaked on social media between Nadeem Afzal Chan, one of the prime minister’s advisers and spokesmen, and a political lieutenant of Mr. Chan. Mr Chan is heard telling his assistant, in fairly colorful language, about the political campaign, to move house and stay with his children.
After an invective in Punjabi that would translate here, Chan said, “Thousands more people are dying, but the government is hiding it.”
Later, Mr. Chan admitted that the verbal exchange was sincere, but said he exaggerated the facts because his lieutenant, a friend, did not take the risk seriously. “Political staff like him need to campaign, open roads, organize rallies.”
Mr. Chan mendacity to save a friend from death, and now the other people around me are lies because they don’t need their friends to abandon them while they bury their dead.
I called a doctor friend who lost two colleagues in the last month, either by Covid-19. Why do other people still be liars about it? I asked again.
“Me too, ” he says. “Of all the death certificates I issue, I write ‘pulmonary center failure’ as a cause of death. This saves them embarrassment.
And at least there will be other people when the last shovel of earth is thrown into those graves.
Mohammed Hanif (@mohammedhanif) is the novels “A Case of Mango Explosion”, “Our Lady of Alice Bhatti” and “Red Birds”. He’s a collaborative opinion writer.
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