Faizabad¡¯s Shareef Chacha has spent more than 25 years of his lifeperforming last rites of unclaimed bodies, a work most would refuse to do. Inthis span of time, 82-year-old Mohammed Sharif has performed the last rites ofmore than 25,000 unclaimed bodies. He has now been conferred with the fourthhighest civilian honour, the Padma Shri.
?Shareef is a bicycle mechanic byprofession. Popularly known as Shareef Chacha, he started doing this communityservice after his 25-year-old son disappeared and was later found dead in 1992.
¡°He was my elder son Mohd Raes Khan and he had gone to Sultanpur to workas a chemist but went missing for a month.
¡°Later, Raes was found murdered, his decomposed body in a sack. It wasthen that I decided to not let any unclaimed body lying off the road to bedevoured by stray animals,¡± Shareef said in an older interview to The Times of India.
Shareef strongly believes that every human being deserves the dignity ofa funeral and performs rites of unclaimed bodies from different faiths.
Every day, he makes rounds of the mortuary, nearby hospitals, railwaystations and police station for any unclaimed bodies. The authorities contacthim only if no one comes to claim a body for 72 hours, says a report in TOI.
The Good Samaritan conducts the last rites in a small room located in acemetery in Rakabganj, Faizabad. ¡°LavarisMaiyyat/Matti ka ghuslkhana¡± (bath of destitute unclaimed bodies) reads aboard hung outside this room.?
While burial costs about Rs 5,000, cremation can cost him up to Rs 3,500.He has friends at the graveyard as well as the cremation ghat who help him with the last rites. ¡°Sometimes, they don¡¯t evencharge for their own labour, like for babies,¡± Shareef told TOI.
Shareef once saved the only survivor of an accident on Faizabad-Lucknowhighway. He extricated the survivor from an over-turned jeep and rushed him tohospital.