Playing soccer on Saturdays was good. This particular Saturday, a few months back, we were playing in the make-shift grounds within the campus of the Medicine Department of the Teaching Hospital. It was just another fun-filled, goal-filled, breathless and tiring soccer match! Until… Until a cart with its top about half the size of plywood rolled on by. Their were two people in what looked like operation theater dresses and wearing face masks, gloves and Wellington boots, pulling the cart. The top of the card were covered with green cloth. I knew almost instantly that there were dead bodies underneath it probably of those who were killed during the fights the night before (I read in the papers.) Indeed they were bodies! There were legs jutting out. Thick black legs! I didn’t know Nepali’s were this black! Later I was told that after sometime of death it can turn to this color, I don’t know! I stopped playing, partly because I respected the dead, and partly because I was shocked. Although this path is inside the hospital, it is a path taken by so many people entering the hospital, and here were dead bodies just being taken on carts! That was a bit difficult for me to grasp. The cart moved into the empty area on the other side of the road opposite the playground.
We started playing but my eyes remained fixed on the card and its deliverables! I thought they were being taken to some holding or for incineration! The cart stopped inside the empty area. Meanwhile, although I hadn’t noticed, there were people inside there who had dug out the earth. The view that came next was most shocking and inhumane. The green cloth was taken off. There were three stiff still bodies laid across the small cart! One fellow in the mask held the legs of one dead body, lifted it and threw it off like holding the two handles of a wheelbarrow and emptying the dead leaves into a pit! Dump, went the other two too! I can’t imagine these people had any feelings! These were human bodies, not dead twigs!
My GOD! I was so disgusted and so sad. I couldn’t play any longer. I was too disturbed.
I was a bit amazed too ‘cos I hadn’t know before that dead bodies got so stiff that the entire body could be lifted by holding on one end much like a piece of log.
I asked the fellow “medicine” friends there whether this ill-treatment was normal. They said that dead bodies weren’t treated well at all. Their explanation: “why wud they treat dead people nicely when they kill them brutally in the first place.” I learnt that these bodies had come out of forensics and were indeed victims of the fight the night before. Forensics people cannot be brutal, can they? One of the students said and another concurred that their first ‘forensic ethics’ hands-on lesion started with the teacher making an incision on the chest and when the class ended, the incisions made by the ethics teacher on the dead body read “M A N”
How disgusting is that!! It’s a disgrace to the name “teacher” and moreover to mankind!
I can still see in my mind, the dead bodies being thrown off the cart.
