The life of a corpse handler

Vinu P was just 15 when he jumped into a river to retrieve a body. It was a friend, and they had studied together until Class 8. The boy had gone swimming in the Periyar, Kerala’s longest river, with two other children. A rescue team managed to pull the others out, but Vinu’s friend vanished in the swirling waters. Two days later, when his body surfaced, rescuers asked the crowd gathered on the riverbank to help bring it ashore. Only Vinu stepped forward.

Now 40, Vinu does not remember what compelled him to act that day, or what he felt when he saw his friend’s lifeless body. But the incident changed him. He stopped visiting temples, convinced he had seen “the truth of life”. He lost his childhood fear of the dark. He knew what he wanted to do for the rest of his life. He dropped out after Class 10.

Over the past 25 years, Vinu has recovered over 3,000 bodies and personally buried about 2,500 of them — at his own expense. He works closely with the police, handling unclaimed or unidentified bodies, many of them decomposed or badly disfigured, and a majority of them suicides. He is not on the police payroll, but the authorities reimburse the costs involved in recovery and burial.

The job is physically demanding. Sometimes, he has to climb trees and electric poles to bring the bodies down, and sometimes enter wells, pits and marshy lands.

To make ends meet, Vinu offers ambulance services, and cleans homes where deaths have occurred. He has tried other gigs, including working as a lorry driver and bus conductor, but never stayed long. “I keep coming back to handling corpses,” he says.

Aluva at a glance

Vinu lives on the outskirts of Kochi, in Aluva. The municipality is split by the
Periyar. It is the headquarters of a major bank, the northern terminus of the Kochi Metro, and home to industries as well as migrant workers. The devout travel from afar to immerse ashes and honour their ancestors at the Mahadeva temple on the river’s sandbanks. The town also houses an ashram founded by the anti-caste reformer Narayana Guru.

Police cite three reasons why unclaimed bodies are found in the region. The presence of many water bodies causes bodies from elsewhere to drift here. There is a growing population of migrants who are living away from families. Also, delayed recovery leaves bodies too decomposed to identify.

Finding Vinu’s home is easy. He is widely known in Aluva, and the ambulances parked outside his house leave little doubt. “An elderly NRI woman donated these after reading about my work,” he says, as we meet and start chatting. We move to the verandah for the interview, where he warns that he may have to leave any moment if the police call.

He picks up two or three bodies every week. The deaths are mostly caused by drowning, and train and road accidents. He has also handled poisoning deaths, and retrieved bodies found hanging, from inside homes or from trees.

For Vinu, giving a stranger a decent funeral is “great service”. He treats everybody with the same care he would give his family. Since burial space for the unclaimed is hard to come by, his life’s dream is to create a separate burial ground for them.

Stigma and support

In January 2001, Aluva was shaken by the brutal murder of six members of the Manjooran family, including an elderly woman and two children. Their house stood near Vinu’s school, and he watched the investigators carry the bodies out. It was the first time he had seen a corpse. His friend’s drowning followed roughly six months later. A month after that, a man died in a road accident near his school.

“No one dared to touch him, but I volunteered to shift the body into the ambulance. My uniform was stained with blood. One of my teachers gave me Rs 10 in appreciation,” he recalls.

Handling corpses in India is often seen as a caste-based occupation, but Vinu insists this is not the case in Aluva. The six corpse collectors who mentored him early on took up the work because they had no other options. But Vinu does it by choice.

His parents initially opposed his work, but over time they have made their peace with it. But it has come at a cost. They are sometimes insulted and labelled parents of a ‘shavam vari’ (corpse picker in Malayalam). They are rarely invited to social gatherings. Vinu has few friends and often eats alone, as people are averse to his work. But he says he “understands”. His first marriage ended because his wife was uncomfortable with his occupation.

However, his current wife, Bincy, finds his work noble, “something not everyone can do”. The two met while she was working as a nursing assistant with an ambulance service. But her family has
not warmed to the relationship.

Bincy blames films for portraying corpse handlers poorly, “as drunkards”. Vinu says they may have a point: “People who come to assist me first ask for liquor.” He smokes but does not drink.

The local police, however, view him as a partner in their work, and have given him the informal title of ‘Corpse Taker’ for his services. Manuraj G P, inspector at the Aluva East police station, praises Vinu for his expertise, his ready availability, and his willingness to handle the most morbid cases without greed.

To Vinu, the police are “good friends”. The local police, railway police, and fire and rescue department reimburse his expenses, and often support his family with groceries or clothes. The police have also helped him find homes more than once. The house he currently rents had been abandoned after two former tenants died by suicide there. The police spoke to the owner about Vinu’s good deeds, and that is how he came to live there.

Last rites

Vinu says the putrid smell of rotting bodies does not bother him. Oddly,
it is the perfume and incense sticks that investigators sometimes use to mask the stench that he finds unpleasant. The sight of dismembered, bleeding or swollen bodies does not unsettle him either. Vinu does not dwell on the meaning of life and death. Has constant exposure to death numbed his emotions? He dismisses the assumption: “I am a Class 10 dropout. I don’t have the ability to philosophise much.”

But does he ever think about the people behind the bodies he recovers — what they were like, what their aspirations were, what hardships they were facing? “I recover the body and hand it over to the police. I don’t ask about such things. They have placed a lot of faith in my work, and I don’t want to cross the boundary,” he says.

Vinu maintains a register of the bodies he buries.

Yet, with a little probing, he begins to outline some incidents that have stayed with him.

Several years ago, he handled the corpse of a heavily pregnant woman who had been run over by a train. The impact was so severe that the foetus was flung out of her womb. “It haunts me even now. Maybe because I love kids,” he says, caressing his three-year-old son, Varshit.

Vinu has buried around 2,500 unclaimed bodies, and only once has a
body been exhumed. The case involved a young woman from Goa. Six months after her burial, her relatives arrived searching for her. A DNA test later, the mortal remains were handed over, and the family collapsed in grief.

More recently, he handled a highly decomposed body found in a marshland. It is believed to be that of a 59-year-old man from Bengaluru who had gone missing after being deported from Kuwait. The remains are still in the mortuary, awaiting DNA confirmation.

Vinu says if a body remains unclaimed for five days, it is buried. But how is the religion of the deceased determined, and the last rites chosen? Vinu says burial is the standard procedure because it allows for exhumation if needed.

This brings to his mind the case of a Muslim migrant worker from West Bengal who had drowned near Munambam in Kochi. His family requested that he be laid to rest according to their religious customs. With little money, they struggled to find a burial space. So Vinu approached mosques on their behalf. Some refused, others demanded money. Eventually, a post on social media detailing the plight of the family turned things around. A mosque agreed to conduct the burial, and even those who had earlier declined offered to help. “The family was very grateful,” he says.

Rs 6,000 for a life

On a few occasions, Vinu has arrived in time and saved lives. Once, while retrieving a corpse floating in the Periyar, he realised the body was still warm. He alerted the police, and the person was rushed to hospital. “It was a miracle that the man survived. He had been in the water overnight,” he recalls. 

The story did not end there. The man was later billed Rs 6,000 by the hospital. But he had no money on him; he even tried to escape to avoid paying. Hospital staff eventually called Vinu, asking him to settle the bill. “The man told me he had tried to end his life because he was penniless, and asked me to pay because I was the one who saved him,” he shares. Vinu borrowed and paid up.

Most suicide cases he has handled involve men in their 40s and 50s, or
people dejected in relationships. He has also noticed how public action varies by circumstance. “In road accidents, people are less hesitant to approach the body. But with train or drowning cases, they assume suicide and keep their distance,” he says.

On one occasion, late at night, railway officials called him to search for a body reportedly hit by a train. When he reached the tracks, he found a man lying there alive. Vinu asked if he had seen anyone struck by the train. “He said it was him and asked me to look at his left side. The man was bleeding heavily. His left hand had been severed,” he recalls. His life was saved, but not his limb.

Named in a note

Vinu’s pride in his work has come from unexpected places. Once his name appeared on a suicide note. A bus conductor was found hanging in his home, his body already decomposing. At the end of the note, he had written: ‘I know Vinu will take my body.’ The man was among the few colleagues from his bus conductor days who respected his work.

Another time, when he recovered the body of an influential man, someone in the crowd remarked that “dirty people” like Vinu should not touch such bodies. But the man’s son defended him, saying only Vinu was willing to retrieve his father from the filthy canal. For Vinu, however, the greatest pride is that he is allowed to enter restricted areas like crime scenes to assist the police and forensic teams.

His expertise is sought after well beyond Aluva. Over a decade ago, he travelled nearly 110 km to Munnar to recover the bodies of two couples who had fallen into a gorge. The cold weather made the task especially exhausting. And during the devastating 2018 Kerala floods, he was called in to clear the carcasses of cattle that had drowned.

In 2024, Vinu co-authored his autobiography in Malayalam, ‘Maranakkoott: Oru Savamvariyude Athmakatha’, with journalist Niyas Kareem. The book was recently translated into English by Ministhy S as ‘The Corpse Collector’ (Juggernaut Books).

Nothing to hide

Vinu scrolls through his phone gallery, showing me videos of corpses he has recovered. “These serve as proof that no damage was done to the body and that nothing on it was taken away,” he explains. His son climbs onto a chair to see what we are watching. I suggest that he hide such images from the child. Vinu shakes his head and says, “Every child should know what their parents do.”

An ambulance siren interrupts our conversation. It is his phone ringtone,
his wife tells me. Vinu steps into an adjoining room, where “no one else is allowed”. This is where he stores body bags, gloves, masks, ropes, and bundles of notebooks. He records unclaimed cases in these books — who reported the incident, where the body was found, identification marks, and details about the burial site. 

There seems to be an emergency at the railway station and Vinu is now issuing instructions to one of his ambulance drivers to get there. He returns for the interview and tells me that a few days before my visit, he had brought down the body of a man found hanging from a tall tree. His job is physically demanding, and involves constant risk. At times, he jumps into cold water in the dead of the night to recover bodies. “On some occasions, I have lost my balance in the water and nearly drowned, but others helped me in time,” he recalls. At other times, he climbs electric poles and towers, enters wells and pits, or wades into marshy land where broken glass and other sharp debris often lie hidden beneath the slush. The most dangerous operation he recalls took place many years ago in Thiruvananthapuram, when he entered a large metal pipe to retrieve the body of a worker who had died after getting trapped inside. Before crawling inside, an ointment was applied to his body to protect his skin from cuts and abrasions, and oxygen tubes were arranged in case he struggled to breathe. “But I handle every corpse with my hands. I don’t pull or drag them with ropes or sticks. I find that disrespectful,” he says.

His phone rings again and this time, he returns to tell me that he is leaving for Varappuzha, 16 km away. The police have called him to a mortuary to assist with the decomposed body of a man he had recovered from a river the previous day. The 60-year-old was estranged from his wife and lived alone.

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