Toddler son keeps waiting by the door for her return
The 26-year-old Archana Shinde died of Covid-19 related complications on April 1.
Three-year-old Atharva is used to not seeing his mother during the day, but things become hard in the evening as the toddler waits for the doorbell to ring, and his mother Archana Shinde, who worked as a police constable in the local arms division of the Mumbai police, to walk in.
The 26-year-old died of Covid-19 related complications on April 1.
Shinde’s husband, Hemant, who is posted in a Maoist-affected district of Chhattisgarh as a jawan with the Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB), said that evenings get progressively worse as Atharva realises that his mother has not returned. By dinnertime, he is inconsolable.
“Atharva is very young and does not understand that his mother is not coming back anymore. He still feels that she will return in the evening, and he waits by the door expecting her to ring the bell. At dinnertime, he goes looking for Archana around the house and cries when he does not find her,” said 28-year-old Hemant who will return to Bijapur once his leave gets over in June-end.
“All this happened so suddenly. I feel bad for my son. No one can replace the love and affection that Archana gave our child. Not even I,” he said.
Shinde, Hemant and Atharva lived in a single bedroom home with Hemant’s parents and older brother’s family in Kamothe, Navi Mumbai, a suburb to the north of Mumbai. It was a matter of great pride that between the two of them one served the country, the other the city. Even during the lockdown and in the midst of the raging pandemic, the couple continued to work.
During the day, as Shinde travelled 35 km to the Armed Police Headquarters in Naigaon, Atharva was looked after by his grandparents.
Mid-February, Shinde’s health suddenly deteriorated.
She was admitted to a hospital in Navi Mumbai for a heart ailment. Hemant took leave and returned to Mumbai, but Shinde’s recovery was slow. She returned home almost a month later, but soon started showing symptoms of Covid-19 infection.
“Soon after she returned home Archana tested positive for the virus. But things were so bad during the second wave of Covid-19 that the same hospital that she was discharged from did not have a bed for her. We rushed her to the MGM hospital in Kamothe [in Navi Mumbai], but after six days she breathed her last,” Hemant said.
Shinde was the 100th police personnel from Mumbai force to succumb to the virus. A total of 120 personnel from the city police have died of Covid-19 so far.
In all, Shinde spent close to 45 days under some form of medical care.
The emergency depleted all of the young couple’s savings that was set aside for buying a home; now Hemant has a debt of around ₹13 lakh, borrowed from friends and relatives, to pay off. “My older brother is a cab driver and looks after our family. I don’t know how I will be able to repay these loans. We don’t even have any ancestral money. My father is a farmer and had a very small patch of land for farming.”
All his hopes are pinned on government aid after former home minister Anil Deshmukh announced last year that the kin of police personnel who contracted the virus and died would be compensated.
“In nearly 10 years of service, I have been involved in close encounters in Jammu and Kashmir and in Bijapur. But the dark future ahead for me and my son truly scares me,” Hemant said.