Each time Shiv Dayal pushes a body inside his electric furnace at Gulbi Ghat crematorium in Patna, the crematorium operator prays that the power supply won’t play truant.

Given the erratic power supply in the state during the summer, families often had to wait for hours, even overnight, to cremate the dead. Many were forced to sit in the hallway, their noses covered, eyes watering with the smoke that escaped through chinks in the furnace room door.

Inside the blackened furnace, partly-burnt bodies waited, too, stripped of dignity, just because the last few megawatts of power could not perform their function.

“What can we do but wait? Often families have waited it out for four to five hours,” Dayal said. “It is sad because even in death, there’s no respite.”

The average waiting time, according to the members of the Dom community, which traditionally engages in scavenging and lives at ghats, stretched into at least two-three hours on an average.

According to a Dom community member these poor families are from the hinterlands and flock to the city’s hospitals seeking medical care. In the event of a death, they have no choice but to go to the crematoriums for the last rites. When the electricity tripped during summers, it was mostly the poor who hunched against the blackish walls and waited, while flames leapt from the wooden pyres outside.

Death is no leveller here.

While the Gulbi Ghat electric crematorium in Patna sees more than 100 bodies per month, each consuming more than 260 volts per cremation, about 10 bodies end up at the ghats everyday for the more expensive, ritualistic cremation that consumes more than 400 kg of wood per person, pushing the cost over Rs 5,000, which most poor people can’t afford, crematorium operators said. The municipal corporation only charges Rs 300 at the crematoriums.

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