What happens to unclaimed dead bodies in the National Capital? What happens when homeless people die?
“I have spent six years taking care of this place. It’s not about my job or this place. It’s about what this place does for the people,” says Laxman Giri, the full-time watchman of the garage at Shaheed Bhagat Singh Seva Dal – an NGO that cremates or buries unclaimed dead bodies in Delhi NCR. Giri is the guard at the garage, which houses 11 NGO ambulances and around three cold storage mortuary boxes.
“In a place like Delhi, where people spend crores on marriages, there are some people who don’t have the right to die in peace, with a proper cremation or a burial, says Jitendra Singh Shunty, who founded the NGO in 1996.
Shunty said he founded the Shaheed Bhagat Singh Seva Dal after he caught a man stealing burnt wood from a cremation ground.
“It hit me hard when I asked him the reason. He told me he doesn’t have money for a shroud for his son’s dead body. And he was a daily-wage worker from outside Delhi,” the former member of the Legislative Assembly said.
Since the NGO’s inception, the workers have cremated/buried some 15,000 dead bodies till date, he said.
As I journeyed to the NGO office at Pratap Khand, I was nervous. I had never seen a dead body and I did not know what to expect.
Outside the office, I saw an ambulance that was preparing to leave. Inside, I saw Shunty on a call, talking to some doctor about a body.
It was chaos. The NGO had just received information about two unclaimed and two claimed bodies. As promised, Shunty let me accompany the driver of one of the ambulances so I could document the process of how the NGO claimed the unclaimed.
The process begins mostly with an emergency call from a police station, or sometimes from someone who has spotted an unclaimed dead body. “People here know about us. So if they find a dead body or something, they call us before calling the police,” Shunty said.
The driver turns out to be Shunty himself. "I, alone, have drove and carried around 8,000 bodies in my ambulance,” he says.
At the GTB hospital in Shahadra, the ambulance picks up a body from the mortuary. The body had been claimed by an old woman, who had come to Delhi – accompanied by two of her neighbours from Badaun district, Uttar Pradesh – to claim the body of her son.
The logs of wood were already in place at the Seemapuri cremation ground.
It was around 5:30pm when the pyre was ready. The mother sat outside the cremation ground, as women are not allowed into cremation grounds.
The ants began to leave their colonies as the flames rose.
After a few minutes, everyone left, except for the mother.
She stayed behind to file the details of her deceased son with the crematorium authorities.
After the filing process, the relatives can mourn in the ‘prayer section’ of the cremation ground for a day.
The smoke hit my face while I photographed the remains of the pyre. It burned my eyes and I coughed. But I only noticed the eerie silence at the ground after it was all over.
This was the first time I had seen death up close. I don’t know what happens after we leave this world. And I won’t ever find out. Our intellect is limited to this world; and while that information is discomforting, it is an important realisation.
The shroud marks the end of one’s existence. And if the unclaimed can be provided with some dignity by providing them with a shroud, then I think the world still has what it takes to be a better place, after all.
(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)