BENGALURU: T Shakuntala has lost count of the dead bodies she has buried in her backyard. Living in a corner of the 25-acre Hindu Burial Ground in Shantinagar, she does not have any fear of her surroundings. It might seem like a morbid enclosure to outsiders, but it will always be home to this 60-year-old old grave digger. She has been living her ever since she can remember.
“It doesn’t bother me, I’ve always lived here. Visitors hurry out by 6 pm. They get terrified when it starts to get dark in the evening,” she jokes, adding that the supernatural people associate with a burial ground is only because of the movies.
Flanked by her 13 pet dogs, she says, “Anyway, these are my guards. They’re all the protection I need.”
Shakuntala’s family has been in this business for generations. Her grandfather was a gravedigger and at the same ground, followed by her father, her brother and now her husband.
But her father died when she was one. “My brother took over. He got me married and looked after my mother. He was like a father to me.”
Shakuntala did not always want to be a gravedigger. She was trained to be a policewoman. She says, “I had even got my employment card but my brother suddenly fell sick. There was no one else to take care of him. So I gave my job up and started digging graves with him. I was 19 then.”
After giving birth to four sons, gravedigging took a backseat. Her two younger sons go to school and older ones work elsewhere. Her younger sons Rajkumar and Puneeth Kumar, named after her favourite actor and his son, help her husband with grave digging.
The neighbours or the general public have never treated them differently for dealing with death on a daily basis. “They respect what I do,” says Shakuntala. Occupational hazards are few and easy to deal with. “Families of the departed are quiet when they come. It’s the neighbours or distant relatives who sometimes get drunk and fight complaining that we’re not putting the mud properly... or whatever comes to their mind. It is a minor trouble.”
Shakuntala says there has never been fear but the grief of death is something she finds hard to get over. “I try to distance myself and stand far away from the relatives, over there,” she says while pointing to a wall close to the idol of Goddess Kali.
She continues, “But I can still hear them when they come in. Especially those who are burying their parents, they cry saying they fed us, educated us, what will I do now?’ It gets to you...their grief...no matter how far you stand.”