Somehow, as human beings, we have cultivated a dread of death. We don’t talk about it, and we live as though it does not exist, although it is probably the only certainty in life. That is why those who live in its hinterlands—intimately familiar with death’s topography—have a clearer perspective on life. Like corpse collector Vinu P. He has handled countless corpses, helping the police with inquests and post-mortems, burying the bodies that no one comes forward to claim and, in the process, turning into a social pariah.
Although his job is indispensable, he himself remains dispensable, shunned to the margins with no one to call his own except the police officials who treat him as one of their own and outcasts like himself who make their home on railway tracks and underneath overbridges. One only thinks of people like him as they are, not as they used to be—with home and hearth, families and dreams. That’s why The Corpse Collector by Vinu and Niyas Kareem, translated from Malayalam by Ministhy S., is such an important book. It lends him an identity and a humanity apart from, or perhaps because of, his work, an inherent dignity that no one should be denied.
He was born in a colony in Aluva, Kerala, which used to be rife with thugs. His father’s family had been the washermen of the Aluva royal palace for almost eight generations. His father co-owned an ironing business. He wasn’t good at studies and failed in the fifth and seventh standards, and finally gave up after his tenth. One day, he heard a shocking news: that his best friend had drowned in the Periyar river. When the men who were searching the river found his body, they could not pull it out without assistance. No one volunteered, so Vinu dove into the water. If your destiny is written before you are born, then this was the prologue to Vinu’s story—his first experience of collecting a corpse. Soon, it would become his life and livelihood.
Slowly, he started getting ostracised. Restaurant owners would refuse to serve him, and autorickshaw drivers and shopkeepers would shoo him away. Everyone called him shavamvari (corpse collector). “I did not understand what my crime was or why everyone loathed me,” writes Vinu. “It was later that the realisation dawned on me: society is a cat that pretends to be tame but cruelly plays with its victims, like a cat with a mouse. It shall not kill at a single go, but relishes the torture, cut by cut.”
Despite the despair and disillusionment, the book is suffused with hope. The cracks in his life only let in more light. As Kahlil Gibran once wrote, “Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.” Vinu writes about how he used to be a coward who was afraid of darkness. He would avoid stepping on cow manure and get nauseated by a vehement sneeze. Now, nothing repels him. “That young boy grew up to become me....,” he writes. “Time shall not transform someone so drastically without reason—that belief guides me onwards.” Today, Vinu has a wife and a child. He dreams of building a graveyard for the dead. After all, it is death that truly sets him free to live.
Title: The Corpse Collector
Authors: Vinu P and Niyas Kareem (Translated from Malayalam by Ministhy S.)
Publisher: Juggernaut
Pages: 232
Price: Rs 699