Bones behind the Morgue

I've been in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh for the last week and a half doing research on a book. You are going to have to wait a little before I give you the plot summary, but suffice it to say that I'm hanging out in a lot of morgues and Buddhist temples. I've also been hijacked by the New York Times and National Geographic (television) to work on a couple stories so I haven't had a lot of time to post. Until now.

I have a single tantalizing find that I came across while snooping around behind the postmortem lab at the Gaya Medical College. Around the area there are hundreds of scraps of clothing that the doctors removed from their patients during autopsies and I wondered if perhaps there were other relics of their patients lying about. Directly to the rear of the lab I came across an open-pit well that had been partially sealed, but had a hole cut into the top for people to throw things in. I took a peek inside and saw the remains of at least one human body and articles of clothing from several people. I have no doubt that if I rooted around I would have found dozens of corpses. This immediately brought to my mind the Ratlam fetal bones incident a month ago where the remains of up to 80 infants were discovered behind a hospital mortuary.

I am not sure what the laws are pertaining to disposal of human remains in India, but I am fairly sure that the only people who are discarded like scraps of clothing behind a hospital would be powerless villagers and low-caste people who have no one to advocate for their rights. I told a dalit activist I know in Varanasii about it and he said he was going to look into the incident.

What this also leads me to believe is that discarded human remains are probably a lot more common than one would think behind hospitals in India. I'll bet you dollars to donuts that if you poked around your local government hospital long enough you would have a good chance of seeing similar things.

Photos: The first image is the front door of the postmortem lab at the Gaya Medical College in Gaya, Bihar. The second image is a bit difficult to decipher but if you click on it and blow it up you can clearly see what I believe to be a femur and part of a human pelvis that I found in behind the lab in an open well.