Udala: Like most of us, Khela Soren of Sanajunupala village under Kaptipada police limits in Mayurbhanj district must have had bad days in his life. But Monday evening was surely the worst one as he had to carry his wife’s body in a trolley after his relatives refused to help him perform his wife’s last rites.
It was when Khela was pulling the cart with his wife’s body covered with a blanket along the road through Nabara jungle, about 8 kilometres from Udala police station, that Udula police stopped him and later sent him with the body in an auto-rickshaw to his village.
The statement that Khela gave to the police left local people as well as the police more shocked.
Khela said he had admitted his wife Raimata Soren at Baripada district headquarters hospital. She breathed her last Sunday after giving birth to a baby boy.
Since he had none with him and with no option left, he was forced to leave their newly born son at the hospital at the mercy of god and took his wife’s body in a hearse to a nearby relative’s house at Urmala village. The hearse returned to the hospital from there.
Khela had thought his relatives would help him in performing his wife’s last rites. But their cold shoulder shocked Khela.
It was when his relatives denied helping him; the ground below his feet felt crumbling. He then somehow arranged a trolley, placed his wife’s body on it, where he must have not allowed her to sit on when she was alive, and then pulled it along the road to his village, sobbing and thinking about the lone child back at the hospital.
When asked what made him carry his wife’s body on a trolley, a teary-eyed Khela said he had no money to hire a vehicle.
Even as there is the government’s strict direction that in no way a dead body be treated with disrespect, the incident of Khela pulling his wife’s body on a trolley has become the topic of discussion here.
The reason behind Khela’s relatives’ refusal to help him is yet to be ascertained.
Call it fate or disdain, but it must have taught Khela a lesson about fast eroding human values.
PNN
