Some students are sniffing perfume. Many cover their noses with handkerchiefs. A group is listening to K-pop, in an attempt to tune out of what they are witnessing. Others dash in and out to stop the retching. Later in the day, a few skip lunch, others eat light, and one leaves for the hostel.
These are 50 students from an Ayurveda college, and they are visiting a mortuary for the first time. It is the oldest in Karnataka, running since the 1960s. Located on Victoria Hospital premises, it is attached to the forensic medicine and toxicology department of Bangalore Medical College and Research Institute.
Over six hours, the students watch seven postmortem examinations — ‘brought dead’ cases, death by hanging, a peadiatric case, etc. Sometimes two bodies go under the knife at once.
The students are uneasy, but the seasoned staff there tells them things will get better.
How is a postmortem done?
First, the clothes are removed from the corpse, laid on a stone slab. The bone joints are straightened to measure the body. Using a scalpel from a choice of many, the experts split open bodies, from chin down to the pubic bone, revealing the squishy organs inside. Sometimes, a saw is used to cut open the skull, other times, a fine tool to unscrew earrings.
Many conclusions are made with naked-eye observation. When necessary, a few organs are removed for tests to determine the cause of death.
After the work is done, mortuary workers stuff the bodies with the cloth they are brought in so that they can restore the natural shape.
They stitch them up with curved needles, bathe them – blood and water draining away from a hole, tightly wrap them in a plastic sheet and a white shroud, and secure them with jute strings. They wheel the bodies into the corridor on stretchers for the final rites.
The students had seen dissected bodies before but this was different. A girl says, “We have dissected cadavers. They are preserved bodies. But people brought in here for the postmortem were alive just a few hours ago. That thought is very unsettling.”
A 16-year-old girl had ended her life by jumping from a building that day. “She was about our age,” says a boy, shaking his head in disbelief. Or, the baby, all of five days. “There were no signs of stress on him — he could well be sleeping, one would think. Many of us gasped for air as post-graduate doctors bent forward to photograph him, make an incision, and then tell us how to look for clues. The umbilical cord can point to how the delivery was done, at home or in hospital, by a trained or an untrained person, one said,” a student recounts.
‘We help solve mysteries’
Women are rare in forensics. Dr Sumangala C N was the first female professor to join the department in 2000. The times are changing: they have three male and three female post-graduate students working here, such as Dr Georgina George. She joined the department with encouragement from her mother.
Her batchmate Dr Kumar Mukund grew up in Bihar’s Muzaffarpur, a city infamous for crimes, so he was inclined towards solving mysteries.
“The dead can’t speak to us. But we have the skill, the science, to speak to them and figure out what happened. Here, I can practise medicine but also do detective work and provide justice. Once a body was brought in as a natural death case, and I found it was a road accident case,” he says.
If doctors come here to blend medical science and investigation, mortuary workers come for a livelihood. “We start by working in emergency rooms, giving first-aid, wheeling the patients around, transferring the bodies to the mortuary. This gets us comfortable with blood, and hospital smells. Then it becomes easier to move to the mortuary ward,” says Abidulla, 48. He is one of seven mortuary workers on duty here. The workers are school drop-outs and they learnt their skills on the job. They are much appreciated.
“They know all organs by their medical names,” a student says, impressed. “Mortuary workers are as important to us as nurses are to doctors,” Dr Georgina says.
We meet many police personnel and not once are mortuary workers intimidated around them. “On the contrary, the police fear us. Some say they will develop a fever if they see a postmortem,” says Abidulla, ‘the funny man of the group’.
First day on the job, and later...
N Radhakrishna was 23 when he started working at the mortuary in 1990, taking up the work from his father.
His first day was particularly bad. It was the only mortuary in Bengaluru back then, so it had more corpses coming in than the doctors could examine. The hospital did not have the cold storage it does now — it can hold 48 bodies, so the stench was a given.
“The body had decomposed, the flesh was rotting, maggots were crawling on them. My hand was shaking when my senior thrust a scalpel and asked me to cut it,” he says, laughing at the memory.
At 54, Radhakrishna is now the senior-most mortuary worker. “I touch the feet of the body, take blessings and do my job. The mortuary is my temple,” he says.
HOD Dr Venkata Raghava recalls his initial days: “I got a throat infection while working on the first case. It was a decomposed body. That was 21 years ago. Now we are used to it.”
Nagesh K D, who counsels families on eye donations, had a tough time too. “I stopped eating meat for a few days,” he says. He has been at the mortuary for two months, and says eye donations are yet to catch on.
Sorry, no ghosts here!
The mortuary had no ghost stories though its vintage stone walls and towering trees can lend a great backdrop for fiction. No nauseating smell hung in the ward. No cries rent the air at the ambulance waiting area.
Teachers and doctors are busy but we find some mortuary workers drinking tea, doing video calls, and browsing online in their free time. Sometimes, they play a card game called teen patti (without stakes).
“We watch a murder mystery in the mortuary every day, why do we need TV or films for that?” Abidulla says. Mortuary staff prefer comedy to crime.
Do they believe in spirits? “There are only bodies, no souls,” Radhakrishna says flatly. The staff are also philosophical. “If a fit person like Puneeth Rajkumar can die, then who can predict what’s to come,” says Mahalinga, the watchman.
But that doesn’t mean they are immune to grief.
Prabhu did not come to work for a month after his four-year-old son died by consuming paint primer, mistaking it for water. The postmortem was done by an ex-worker. Today, Prabhu wears the initials of his son’s name on his forearm. There are more tattoos on him and on others.
If there’s any death that upsets the doctors and workers, it is those of children. A female cop covers her mouth in shock as she sees the five-day-old baby on a stretcher. “Get your wife operated,” she tells the father when she learns the couple has three children.
How the world looks at them
Dr Georgina George says some people, and also medical practitioners, look down upon those working in mortuaries: “Something must be wrong with us to take up this morbid field, they think.”
The mortuary staff have no complaints, but don’t want their children to continue this line of work. “We want them to study and become officers,” says Prabhu, father of two.
Karthik, 26, says his in-laws want him to quit the job. He has little choice. “The moment we reveal our last place of employment, they ask us to leave,” he says, about the vicious circle. Radhakrishna’s wife reveals more: “A family cancelled a marriage proposal for our daughter after they learnt we stay on the mortuary premises.”
How bodies are identified
A forensic medicine and toxicology department does more than just postmortems, an aspect commonly overlooked.
For instance, identification of bodies from mass disasters. “While the DNA test is the ultimate identifier, we look for clues like kadas (bangles), deformities in teeth, six fingers….Tattoos can show an inclination towards a cult,” HOD Dr Venkata Raghava says. The department also examines those charged with sexual crimes, and runs paternity tests. It recently formulated guidelines for Covid corpse management. It is additionally required to appear in court to give evidence, and deliver lectures in colleges on topics like drug addiction.
Postmortem is done...
In case of accidents, murders, suicides (by hanging, poisoning, drowning, burns), and death caused by sexual assault.
When unknown bodies are brought in.
When families suspect medical negligence.
Myths about mortuaries
They steal organs.
“No organ is useful after a person dies, so what will we do with those organs?” Dr Venkata Raghava asks. Organs are useful only when extracted from a brain dead person (i.e. when the heart is still beating), he says.
Workers drink all day.
It was a problem earlier but now drinking is banned during working hours. A worker says: “We used to drink a lot to cope. We’ve cut down drastically. It was affecting our health.”
They are haunted.
Not at all, say staffers.
Suicide on rise
Two decades ago, the department would mostly see murder, road accident and burns cases. Now, suicide and medical negligence cases are on the rise. Accidents caused by gas geysers and people dying on railway tracks are also going up.
‘Dead House Gate’
The mortuary is a short drive from City Market and also the main hospital gate. “Take the Dead House Gate instead,” is what staff tell you. This is just a few steps from Mysore Road. The coinage ‘dead house’ for mortuary is attributed to people living in the vicinity of Victoria Hospital.
Big cases
IAS officer D K Ravi’s suicide (2015); Journalist Gauri Lankesh’s murder (2017); Bangalore-Nanded train fire accident (2013); Hooch tragedy (2008); Bomb blast on Church Street (2014); naturally mummified body of a man in his 40s (2021).