NEW DELHI: Sunday night was tough for Chhote Lal (42), a tea vendor. His wife Anju complained of pain in the joints and high fever, so Lal took her to Hedgewar hospital. She was discharged after preliminary treatment, but neither the fever nor the pain went away.The next 24 hours were tougher for the family as Anju’s condition worsened. But Lal’s worst nightmare was yet to come.Anju was readmitted to Hedgewar hospital where she died during treatment in the evening. The body was handed over to Lal, but the doctors gave him just a copy of the prescription and an ECG strip. The hospital was unwilling do anything else for him.In that hour of crisis, the only comforting voice came from a tout who offered to transport the body in an ambulance to Lal’s house in Karkardooma village. But of course, the tout wasn’t there for charity—he demanded Rs 300. Given a Hobson’s choice, Lal had to agree.“I carried her body in my arms to the ambulance and we drove to the village for my children to have a last look at their mother. I planned to cremate her thereafter,” said Lal, the father of two girls aged 10 and 12.Back in the village, Lal’s landlord Bablu asked for the papers given to him by the hospital. Since he didn’t have any, Bablu advised him to keep the body in the ambulance itself since there was no proof of death. “I feared that police would harass me. All Lal could show was the prescription from the hospital. The hospital hadn’t even provided a shroud,” Bablu said.Rumour soon spread that Anju’s death was unnatural. So the locals refused to allow Lal to keep the body in the village and told him to go somewhere else and dispose it.Lal went back to the Hedgewar hospital with the body, but was turned away by the security guards who refused to acknowledge that Anju had died there. Lal decided to wait till morning.But the ambulance driver started to demand more money as he had waited for three hours already. “I borrowed Rs 2,000 from Bablu and decided to take the body away to my friend’s house at a slum near the Cross River Mall. But when we reached the mall, the driver dumped the body on the footpath and asked for more money to drive to the slum,” Lal said. For a poor chaiwalla who barely managed to earn Rs 3,000 per month, it was as far as he could go.At that moment, a police constable who was passing by stopped to enquire. Upon hearing everything, the policeman paid the driver and informed the SHO of Anand Vihar police station, Vijay Shrotriya, about it. The SHO contacted Bhanwar Singh, the pradhan of the village where Lal lived, and told him to arrange for a space to keep the body for the night. “It had been five hours since the woman had died and we had to arrange for ice from meat markets in Shahdara to keep it intact,” an officer said.The body was kept at Singh’s cement godown and the police posted a guard there. On Tuesday morning, it was taken to the crematorium in a police van. “I wish she had a more honourable death,” Lal said.Dr Sushil Kumar, medical superintendent of Hedgewar hospital, said he was unaware of the incident but would enquire about it if someone approached him.