PALAKKAD: No job is menial, says A Nasser, a resident of Vennakara in Palakkad district. His has been, if anything, a huge service. For more than two decades, Nasser has been attending to the dead. Always a call away from the police, he handles five to six bodies a day on an average. Now 61, his only means of income remains the money the deceased person’s families give after an autopsy.
“I give due respect to the bodies that I am asked to attend to,” he says. And he is never hesitant, immaterial of the situation.
“Whether a body lies strewn over railway tracks or is decaying in the Malampuzha reservoir, or a well or a pond, I bring it to the district hospital mortuary.”
The most difficult task, Nasser says, is retrieving decayed bodies from wells and dams. As the fat in the body would have begun to ooze out, the body would be slippery, he says.
“We have to pack the body well before taking it out. While it’s easy to get down into the well, carrying a body up is a cumbersome process.”
Talking of a curious incident, he recalls transporting a body along a narrow canal road in Kuzhalmannam. Three women were accompanying the body. As the ambulance could go no further, the women said they would go and call some others to take the body.
“It was a rainy night and I got out of the ambulance and sat on the canal bund, facing the house where the body had to be taken. Suddenly, I felt a tap on my shoulder from behind. I froze for a moment. But the person had come to help after seeing the headlights of the ambulance,” he recounts.
Nasser started off as an ambulance driver with a private hospital in 1983, when the district had only three ambulances. When the hospital ran into trouble, the owner gave him the ambulance for free to eke out a living. “I ferried patients and often I also attended to those admitted to hospitals. After the vehicle began rusting, I sold it and took on the task of bringing bodies to the mortuary. I also started cremating unclaimed bodies,” he recalls.
The municipality gives him Rs 2,400 for the burial of an unclaimed body. Sometimes, his elder son, Faizal, helps him dig the grave at the public cemetery in Yakkara. “Many of the malnourished people die during the rainy season,” Nasser points out. K M Mohammed Basheer, the sub-inspector with the Shoranur police station, says he has known Nasser from 1998.
“He helps us retrieve unidentified bodies from forests and hills. Once, we had to bring back the body of a person who died by suicide in the forests of Kongad. He descended with the body so fast that the police personnel were left struggling to keep pace,”the officer recounts.
He says Nasser retrieved bodies that came floating in the Bharathapuzha during the monsoon when he was with the Pattambi station. Nasser lives with wife, Bhanu, and sons, Faizal and Afzal, in a rented house in Pulakkad. He learnt how to handle bodies while assisting one Mani, a resident of Manali in the district, who is now bedridden.