Mohammad Sharif did not get the chance to bury his son. But for the past 27 years he has been burying thousands of people whose bodies have no claimant.

The police told Mohammad Sharif a month later that his son had died, but that was all: they could not tell him where or how he had died.

Mohammad Sharif knows only that his son, Mohammad Rais, was among the 2,000 people killed across India in the Hindu-Muslim riots that followed the demolition of a mosque in 1992. His father does not even know where 25-year-old Rais was buried.

"The police said his body had rotted," Mohammad Sharif recalled nearly three decades later. "We did not see his body; we only got his clothes."

A few days after that, however, he witnessed something that changed his life completely.

"One day I saw police officers throwing a body into a river. I was horrified," he said. Along with the horror came an entirely new realisation. "Perhaps my son's body was also thrown into a river like that. That day I promised myself that from then on I would be the guardian of unclaimed bodies. I would arrange their last rites."

Unclaimed bodies pile up in India for many reasons. They may be people killed in road or train accidents, or who died far from home; they may be pilgrims, migrants, the homeless, or elderly people driven out by their children. Often, too, when very poor people die in hospital, no one comes forward to take responsibility for their last rites.

Source: BBC Bangla. First published in Bengali on The Agro News.