Skip to main content

Keeper of Corpses


Fiction

He was the Corpse Man.  Savakkaran, they called him in his and their language.  Some refined it to Mortuary Man.  Those who knew him personally and did not want to equate him with his job called him Balan.  Balan kept corpses frozen in arrays of drawers.  Until somebody came to claim them.  Or until nobody claimed and order was given to dispose off the body in the nearby electric crematorium which was operated by his wife, Latika.  Death was their family business.  He, Balagangadharan, was the keeper of corpses and Latika, his wife, was the disposer of corpses.  

Both the mortuary and the crematorium belonged to the government.  While the crematorium seldom experienced any discrimination between rich corpses and poor corpses, the mortuary often did.  Rich corpses preferred private mortuaries, those in the hospitals meant for the rich.  Government mortuaries received poor corpses.  Or corpses of criminals.  Or anonymous corpses.  Abandoned corpses. 

Who said death is a great leveller?

There are exceptions, of course.  Hitler, the man who fattened himself on the corpses of six million people, had to kill himself in an underground bunker which was no better than the concentration camps he had given to his victims.  That was perhaps the only thing Balan remembered from his history classes.  He liked the story of Hitler as narrated by his history teacher.  Hitler had forgotten to love because he was busy with conquests.  Finally when he learned to embrace his Eva, he was already in a metaphorical tomb.  Poor man!  What did he achieve in life?

That was the only history Balan knew anyway.  History matters little in actual life, thought Balan.  In actual life – in life outside books, that is – the rules are different.  They, the rules, depend on how much money you have and what position you hold. 

But this corpse was different.  Balan looked at the corpse which he was transferring to the drawer in the mortuary.  This man came here yesterday.  He came by a very expensive car.  A car that could carry ten people.  But he was alone in it.  He got down from the driver’s seat.  He was wearing branded trousers and shirt.  Balan could easily make out that he was a rich man who should have nothing to do with the Savakkaran’s mortuary.  Yet he approached Balan and asked, “Can I have a look at the mortuary?”

“Anyone of yours is in?” asked Balan.  The only people who ever came to the mortuary are either the dead ones or the owners of the corpses. 

Owners of corpses.  Balan was stuck on that phrase for a moment.  He was amused by it.

“No,” answered the man.  “I just want to see it.”

Strange, thought Balan.  He showed him the arrays of drawers containing corpses. 

“Would you mind opening one of them?”  He was very polite.

He looked at the frozen face inside the drawer that Balan had slid open.  It was then Balan noticed that there was little difference between the two faces: the frozen one inside the drawer and that of the man standing beside it wearing the best branded dress. 

Yesterday he stood watching a corpse in one of the drawers.  Today he is a corpse in one of them.

He had gone to the crematorium too.  Latika told Balan in the evening.

“He asked me how long it would take for a corpse to burn up completely?” Latika narrated his visit to her husband when they were at home.  “Depends, I said.  On what? He asked.  On how the person lived, I said.  What do you mean? He asked.  Those bodies which had consumed a lot of drugs, medicines, and such things, take a long time to burn, I said.  And those that come from the mortuary take an eternity, I added.  When can a relative collect the ashes? He asked.  Anytime, I almost blurted out.  How could I tell him that we have readymade ashes for those in a hurry?”

Was that man in a hurry?  He is now a corpse under the safe custody of the Corpse Man. 

When Balan came out of the mortuary and picked up the newspaper for whiling away time he noticed something that had escaped his attention earlier.  “Businessman dies in accident,” said the headline.  Mohan Shankar, that was his name, died in his Mercedes-Benz Sprinter which had slipped off the road into a water-logged granite quarry last night.  It was raining heavily.  Mr Shankar might have misjudged...

The man had no reason to commit suicide, argued the report.  He was rich.  He was successful.  It had to be an error in judgment.

The Corpse Man knew better.  But what use is the knowledge of a keeper of corpses?



 
For copies click here

Comments

  1. Replies
    1. Terribly dark, I understand. Actually yesterday I read something about a man who worked in a mortuary and this is the result.

      Delete
  2. My parents are doctors,so I kind of know a thing or two about morgues and corpses and the people dealing with them.You are right,this is like a family business and they are very pragmatic about it,like butchers are while butchering birds and animals.I wonder how life is in their eyes.As usual,you incite me to think.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Certain attitudes are professional hazards. More than that, a morgue can also be a place that makes us contemplate the ironies of life.

      Delete
  3. "there was little difference between the two faces: the frozen one inside the drawer and that of the man standing beside it wearing the best branded dress." - The keeper of corpses was actually living while the man who visited was a walking dead. Excellent...!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks, Sunaina. I was eagerly waiting to hear something like this. In fact, as I wrote in a Twitter comment, I wrote this story with a lot of excitement. I didn't mean it to be a mere reflection of life's darkness. When I started telling my wife the story she didn't want to hear it. The very word corpse put her off. But I insisted on telling the story and she soon lost all the revulsion and became engrossed. I thought more readers would respond that way. You are the first one who actually did at least in this comments section.

      I must add that the story was born of an article I read in the 'Malayalam' weekly about mortuaries, cemeteries and crematoriums. The information about the different duration taken by corpses to burn up came from that article. The suicide is also real. A similar incident happened in Kerala a few months back. A man drove his car and entire family including two innocent children into a granite quarry! My story is in fact less bleak than reality!

      Delete
  4. Thought provoking, the walking dead man...
    May have been different while living, death is the ultimate leveller...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. There are a lot of walking dead men around! They don't walk, however. They ride luxury vehicles :)

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...

Two Nuns and two questions

The nuns kept in custody  Two Catholic nuns were arrested on 25 July 2025 at Durg railway station for allegedly trafficking tribal women from Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh to Agra in UP. Today’s newspapers in Kerala have expressed their contempt of the act more vehemently than I had expected. It seems secularism has hope yet in this country. For those who are not aware of the incident, two nuns were arrested because some criminals of a depraved organisation called Bajrang Dal in Chhattisgarh chose to conclude that the nuns were committing the crime of human-trafficking. Since that charge wouldn’t stick, because the women confessed that they were going voluntarily to take up jobs with the help of the nuns in order to raise their families from miserable poverty in a country that claims to be a $5-tillion-economy, another charge was fabricated that the nuns had indulged in religious conversion. Now let us look at certain facts. Though I keep questioning the Christian churches for...

Capital Punishment is not Revenge

Govindachamy when Kerala High Court confirmed his death sentence The Bible suggests that it is better for one man to die if that death helps others to live better [ John 11: 50 ]. Forgive me for applying that to a criminal today, though Jesus made that statement in a benign theological context. A notorious and hardcore criminal has escaped prison in Kerala. Fourteen years ago he assaulted a young girl who was travelling all alone in a late evening train, going back home from her workplace. The girl jumped out of the running train to save herself from this beast. But he jumped after her and raped her. The postmortem report suggested that he raped her twice, the second being when she had already fallen unconscious. And then he killed her hitting her head with a stone. Do you think that creature is human? I wrote about this back then: A Drop of Tear For You, Soumya . The people of Kerala demanded capital punishment for this creature, the brute called Govindachamy. He is inhu...

Gods, Guns and Missionaries

Book Review Title: Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity Author: Manu S Pillai Publisher: Penguin Random House India, 2024 Pages: 564 (about half of which consists of Notes) There never was any monolithic religion called Hinduism. Different parts of India practised Hinduism in its own ways, with its own gods and rituals and festivals. Some of these were even mutually opposed. For example, Vamana who is a revered incarnation of Vishnu in North India becomes a villain in Kerala’s Onam legends. What has become of this protean religion of infinite variety and diversity today in the hands of its ‘missionary’ political leaders? Manu S Pillai’s book ends with V D Savarkar’s contributions to the religion with a subtle hint that it is his legacy that is driving the present version of the religion in the name of Hindutva. The last lines of the book, leaving aside the Epilogue titled ‘What is Hinduism?’, are telltale. “Life did not give Savarkar all he...