The ongoing nationwide lockdown prevented an eighty-year-old woman in a village in Hazaribagh from meeting her son, a labourer in Calcutta, before she died on Friday morning.

Even minutes before her death, Shakuntala Devi kept staring at the door of her home in village Jordag, some 45km from Hazaribagh town and nearly 400km from Calcutta, waiting for son Subhas Mali to come, said Subhash’s cousin Amit.

Subhas, 48, who spoke to The Telegraph on Saturday over his cell phone, said he was at a quarantine centre at a high school in Burdwan district of Bengal. “I could not complete the last rites of my mother,” said the construction labourer. “I am here at the Burdwan quarantine centre in a place called Gobindpur since March 29, and have to stay here for 14 days from then,” he said.

He added that he pleaded with authorities to somehow allow him to go home “to perform her last rites”.

“I kept begging the sahibs (the team of doctors and health workers),” Subhash said. “Initially, they told me that the mukhiya of my village Jordag had to write on his letterhead saying my mother had died. I arranged it, and my mukhiya Parmeshwar Kumar Das was ready to cooperate and send the letter online, possibly through WhatsApp, but the officials here changed their mind and asked me for the death certificate of my mother. How can I arrange a death certificate from here? My neighbour Ramdhani Mali performed the last rites.”

He said that his mother stayed in the village with his wife and seven-year-old son.

“Whole of March, my mother kept saying beta jaldi aao (son, come back), and said she would not live for long,” he said. “But I stayed back in Calcutta, thinking I will go home with some money. None of us had anticipated this corona (the coronavirus pandemic).”

He said that there were 30 other labourers from Jharkhand in Calcutta where he worked. “Somehow, we arranged a bus and started for home on March 29 morning,” he said, but could not say how they managed to get a bus in Calcutta during lockdown. “Police stopped us at Jamalpur, before we could reach Burdwan town, and sent us to the quarantine centre.”

Health check

At the village of Jharkhand’s second Covid-19 patient, a team of doctors and representatives of WHO sanitised up to a 3km radius from the patient’s home. A team of sahiyas or grassroots health workers will visit every home of the village with a population of 400 for a health check-up. The patient has also given details of people he interacted with.