Trials and tribulations of a city without morgues

Departure from life takes an acute toll when grievers run looking for a mortuary that can accommodate their loved one

KARACHI:

When 50-year-old Zafar Alam succumbed to Covid-19 at wee hours in the care of a local government hospital, his distressed wife, the deceased’s lone attendant, found herself moiling in haze looking for a public morgue to store her husband’s dead body for a few hours.

“It was quite late in the night and the hospital did not have a cold storage facility. I had no option but to somehow wheel the body to one of Edhi Foundation’s morgues before it went bad,” the widow recalled.

“It was heart-rending to see my husband being placed in a charity, but we had to keep him somewhere until his last rites could be performed and he moved to his final abode,” she added, as tears welled up in her eyes.

Although poignant, the ordeal Alam’s wife was forced to experience immediately after the passing of her husband, is one that resonates with all who bereave in the raging, raucous metropolis called Karachi. Here, in the absence of a functional government mortuary, charitable organisations like Edhi Foundation and Chhipa Welfare are the only resolve available to the grievers of the deceased.

According to people working in the medico-legal and postmortem departments of the city’s three biggest public hospitals—Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre, the Civil Hospital, and Abbasi Shaheed— they experience an inflow of 25 to 30 bodies from various casualties every day.

“Once the deceased’s family arrives and learns that we have no cold storage, they usually shift the body to a charitable or private mortuary, which can cost upwards of Rs20,000 to Rs30,000,” corroborated an officer on conditions of anonymity.

However, this was not always the case. A survey conducted by The Express Tribune revealed that cold storage facilities, once offered by various government hospitals in Karachi were gradually shut down without notice, owing to burgeoning reports of negligence and administrative malpractice.

Read K-P fares with lone public mortuary

Preserving a dead body until burial requires refrigeration at a minimum of minus four to fifteen degrees Celsius. However, not one out of the city’s three major public hospitals has been able to acquire a cold storage system appropriate enough to store a dead body.

“In theory, there are morgues at some public hospitals, but they aren’t equipped with proper refrigeration systems, so a body can barely survive two hours in there before it starts going bad. Whereas, the hospitals that did have working cold storage were decommissioned due to non-deployment of backup generators and 24-hour personnel that are required to man any mortuary,” revealed an unnamed medico-legal officer deputed at a major public hospital.

The officer’s information checks out the case of Abbasi Shaheed Hospital, which was equipped with a cold storage facility in 2015— the year Karachi experienced its more torturous heatwave. However, the facility had to be closed down as soon as it was started, due to inattention and various aforementioned reasons.

There was also a cold storage centre adjacent to Jinnah Hospital morgue with a capacity of 20 bodies. The centre was also administratively subordinate to Jinnah Sindh Medical University and administered under the Medico-Legal Department at Jinnah Hospital. However, this morgue was also closed down on technical grounds.

Similarly, 15 years ago, a cold storage facility was also set up in Civil Hospital, that could accommodate the small number of eight bodies. Later, in 2019, another cold storage was set up with a capacity to hold 12 bodies on the premises of Civil Hospital and operated by its MLO section but remained administratively subordinate to Dow University.

Thus the operation of this cold storage centre involved three administrations and a growing deficit of resources, due to which the facility could not remain operational for long and was eventually shut down, leaving the city of more than 20 million people with no mortuary to store the remains of their loved ones.