Mission of Charity
The first day of work in Kalighat home for Dying and Destitute started for me with accompanying two deceased human beings to a Muslim cemetery. Stefano, the ambulance driver and me, were their only company in the last trip across Kolkata, while we never even saw their faces. The only thing we knew about them beside their religion was the insignificant weight of their apathetic bodies.
Volunteer Fabio about delivering the bodies to a crematorium: "It is a strange feeling because they have nobody close to them and even you don’t know their names usually. But for me it felt good to go with them. It is a complex feeling, part of it is the respect to the dead that you have. Also it seems good that the person finally stopped suffering. Probably, the shelter is the best place they could get to before death but still it is like a prison where you are just waiting for death".
My three weeks of work in the shelter ended with the death of two other residents. This time I knew one of them and had seen him faintly expressing gratitude for giving him one of the last relieving moments of his life. The memory of which invoked a complex of feelings: fear of the inevitable mixed with a hope for mercy, satisfaction of fulfilled moral duty, a worm of pride for the tiny self-sacrifice, and for the significance of a gesture to a human being already imprinted onto eternity.
The first day of work in Kalighat home for Dying and Destitute started for me with accompanying two deceased human beings to a Muslim cemetery. Stefano, the ambulance driver and me, were their only company in the last trip across Kolkata, while we never even saw their faces. The only thing we knew about them beside their religion was the insignificant weight of their apathetic bodies.