Legendary Bollywood star Dev Anand, who passed away last week, was cremated in South London on Saturday. Around 300 mourners attended the funeral at a Gothic church converted into a crematorium. People jostled for space at the venue with a seating capacity of less than 100. The spill-over crowd stood silently outside the building in biting cold watching the ceremony on two video screens.
A little after the appointed hour – 11.40am – a Mercedes Hearse slithered into the sprawling cemetery in Wimbledon carrying Dev Anand’s body in a polished wooden coffin. Sahara Group’s Subroto Roy was among those who lent their shoulder to the coffin from the Hearse to the chapel.
Roy laid a wreath, as did London’s Indian Journalists’ Association and Washington Mayfair Hotel, where Anand died on December 3. Eventually, to the playing of a bagpipe – a Scottish tradition – the furnace opened and the coffin disappeared.
