The body of Nithin Chandran, 29, husband of Athira Geetha Sreedharan, who had filed a petition in the Supreme Court to repatriate Indians stranded abroad, was cremated on his house premises at Perambra in Kozhikode on Wednesday.
His body was brought in a chartered flight from Sharjah to Kochi on Tuesday night and later to the Malabar Institute of Medical Sciences in the city.
The news of his death was revealed to Athira only in the morning, a day after she delivered of a baby girl. She had a last look at the body of her husband at the hospital before it was taken in an ambulance for cremation at Perambra.
Maintaining physical distancing and COVID-19 protocol, relatives and local people gathered at the house paid their last tributes to Nithin, a mechanical engineer employed with a construction firm in Dubai.
The Ministry of Health Preventive Medicine Department, United Arab Emirates, had issued an official death notification document stating that Nithin died after cardiac arrest. Subsequently, the repatriation of his body was easy as his COVID-19 test had returned negative.
Nithin was also supposed to fly back with his wife but decided to stay back as he did not want to waste a seat on the emergency repatriation flights.
Athira, an IT professional, came on the first Vande Bharat Mission flight from Dubai to Kozhikode on May 7.
