Rabindranath Pal, terminally ill for the past few years, breathed his last at 62 on Saturday night at his home in Howrah’s Sijberia.

Three crematoriums in the region conveyed to the Pal family that the last rites would not be conducted on their premises on suspicion associated with the coronavirus outbreak. The doms would not touch the body, the family was told.

When morning broke on Sunday without any solution in sight, the neighbours decided to take matters into their hands.

The neighbours became the pallbearers, they arranged the funeral logs, they accompanied the local councillor to the third crematorium, persuading it to accept the body, and they facilitated the conduct of the last rites.

What else are neighbours for? But what should pass off as a good-neighbourly act — to be noted and complimented in any civilised society but not to be blown out of proportion — does have a larger message for contemporary India where Muslims are stigmatised.

The Pals are the sole Hindu family in a neighbourhood where 150 Muslim families live.

Needless to say, all the neighbours who stepped forward to help the Pal family in their grief when the doms would not touch the body are Muslim.

Sijberia, around 48km from the heart of Calcutta, is a small town at Uluberia in Howrah with a mix of Hindus and Muslims. The Pals are surrounded by Muslim neighbours, and they have been celebrating Id and Durga Puja together for years.

“We have been together for years now. They are our family friends. So, there was no question of leaving them at this crisis hour,” Sheikh Khairul Hassan, one of the neighbours, said, referring to the Pals and their predicament after the death in the family.

Rabindranath’s only son, an employee of the Indian Railways, and his family had run into a wall at the burning ghats. “At two places, they clearly said not to bring the body. We tried at the third ghat but were asked to return home,” said a family member. “Even Nepalda (the dom) refused to help us,” he added.

“It was evident that there were not many people in his family who could take a decision that night,” Hassan, the neighbour, recounted, explaining how the neighbours decided to step in after the three crematoriums turned their backs on the family.

On Sunday, the neighbours, with the help of councillor Saswati Santra’s husband Soumitra, took Rabindranath’s body to Satamukhi burning ghat, the third one that had initially asked the family to go back home.

“We were shocked to see that the doms were refusing to touch the body even after I had written on my official pad,” said Saswati, the councillor of Ward 22 in Uluberia municipality.

The neighbours left only after the last rites were completed.

“Why is it so important that we are Muslims and that he was a Hindu? Our parents and then our generation grew up together. Religion never came between us,” said Sheikh Younis Ali, another neighbour.

“How does it matter whether he was a Hindu or a Muslim? The only thing that matters is, he has left us forever, leaving a vacuum,” another neighbour said.