Sajad Hassan sat at his professor’s hospital bedside for three nights, doing most of the talking as his friend and mentor breathed through an oxygen mask, and struggled with a suspected COVID-19 infection.
Both were confident that the 48-year-old academic would be heading home soon, until a COVID-19 test came back positive and physicians ordered him moved to the isolation ward — known by many at the university hospital as the “dark room” because so few who enter come out alive.
“I could visibly see fear in his eyes,” Hassan said.
Two days later, his professor, Jibraeil, was dead — one of nearly 50 professors and non-teaching staff at Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), one of India’s top universities, who fell victim to the virus as it ripped through the nation in April and last month.
AMU’s tragedy was repeated across India as schools experienced similar blows to their faculty, and the loss of their knowledge — and in many cases friendship and guidance — has been devastating to the academic community.
“The virus took away our brightest minds,” AMU spokesman Shafey Kidwai said.
One of the oldest universities in India, AMU has produced generations of politicians, jurists and academics.
The university has been the seat of modern education for many Muslims in the Indian subcontinent and an intellectual cradle for the community. It was primarily founded to educate the nation’s Muslims, who make up about 14 percent of its population.
Over the past two months, local newspapers and the university’s Facebook page have been filled with the obituaries of its professors — all lost to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The zoologist “touched the lives of a generation of his students.”
The physician was “an exceptional clinician, teacher and human being, who mentored many generations.”
The psychologist was a “vibrant presence” and was “known for conducting high-quality research.”
Jibraeil, an assistant professor of history who went by only one name, was a “dedicated teacher, who loved his work and cared deeply about students.”
At the height of the surge, Kidwai recalled seeing colleagues carried off in ambulances to the hospital; some returning later to be buried in the more than 100-year-old campus graveyard, which ran out of space, and fresh graves had to be dug over old ones.
“It was deeply harrowing,” he said.
There is no official count of how many professors have died during the pandemic, but many top Indian universities have reported situations similar to that at AMU.
Delhi University and its affiliated colleges lost 35 teachers.
At New Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia University, four professors and 15 staff members fell to the virus.
The pandemic has been equally devastating for government schoolteachers in some areas. More than 1,600 died in India’s most populous state of Uttar Pradesh, where many are thought to have become infected after being forced to staff polling stations, over their objections, for an election held during the surge.
The academics were just a small part of the ghastly scenes that played out across the nation in April and last month, as its health system collapsed under a sudden, severe spike in COVID-19 cases that caught the Indian government unprepared.
Some died in ambulances. Those who made it to hospitals were often left gasping for breath amid dramatic shortages of oxygen and ventilators. Crematoriums burned bodies day and night, at times in pyres outside their overwhelmed facilities.
More than 180,000 died in those two months, nearly half the 383,490 confirmed fatalities in India since the beginning of the pandemic.
As the surge has waned in the past few weeks, AMU authorities and students have begun assessing the ledger of loss.
They say that the deaths of educators have left a void and their grief has been exacerbated by pandemic-induced isolation, with memorials postponed indefinitely or held online.
“We want to celebrate the lives of those we lost, but the entire university is empty,” Kidwai said. “Without that, I feel students will feel a lingering sense of loss.”
With universities still closed, the situation has left many students grappling with uncertainty. The same day Jibraeil died, Shah Mehvish, a doctoral student at AMU, learned that her thesis supervisor, 63-year-old Sajid Ali Khan, had also died after being infected.
The 28-year-old, one of Khan’s six doctoral students, who is in her fourth year researching clinical psychology, said that she cried and felt numb when she learned of his death.
“His loss has left a void in my heart which is hard to fill,” Mehvish said.
Now, weeks later, she is contemplating the challenge in completing her research without Khan’s tutelage, which has left her “feeling anxious,” she said.
“The cooperative relationship between teacher and researcher takes a lot of time and effort,” Mehvish said. “I don’t know how long it would take to familiarize myself with a new guide.”
For Hassan, also working toward his doctorate, Jibraeil was more than just his former history professor.
The two had developed a close friendship since first meeting about five years ago when Hassan was an undergraduate student and Jibraeil was his teacher. Over the years, the professor had gone out of his way to help Hassan, lending him books, guiding him in his research into modern Indian history and even helping him out with a financial loan.
In ordinary times, the burial of a popular professor like Jibraeil would have brought hundreds to the campus graveyard, but due to a pandemic lockdown, people were forbidden from gathering, including Jibraeil’s wife, Falak Naaz, and his two young children.
Following mandatory Muslim funeral prayers attended by several dozen friends and colleagues, all were ushered out of the cemetery before the burial.
Desperate to pay his last respects, Hassan volunteered to assist in the burial, helping to lower Jibraeil’s body into his grave.
“I owed it to him,” Hassan said.
Alone at the cemetery on a hot summer evening, with only the Muslim cleric who gave the last rites and the three medics who had accompanied the body from the hospital morgue, Hassan said his final farewells.
“I’ve never seen such a silent and lonely burial,” Hassan said.
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