Padma Shri: 82-Year-Old Sharif Chacha, Has Performed Last Rites Of Over 25,000 Unclaimed Bodies In Over 25 Years. This Is His Story
Faizabad¡¯s Shareef Chacha has spent more than 25 years of his life performing last rites of unclaimed bodies, a work most would refuse to do. In this span of time, 82-year-old Mohammad Sharif has performed the last rites of more than 25,000 unclaimed bodies. He has now been conferred with the fourth highest civilian honour, the Padma Shri.
Faizabad¡¯s Shareef Chacha has spent more than 25 years of his life performing last rites of unclaimed bodies, a work most would refuse to do. In this span of time, 82-year-old Mohammed Sharif has performed the last rites of more than 25,000 unclaimed bodies. He has now been conferred with the fourth highest civilian honour, the Padma Shri.
Shareef is a bicycle mechanic by profession. Popularly known as Shareef Chacha, he started doing this community service after his 25-year-old son disappeared and was later found dead in 1992.
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¡°He was my elder son Mohd Raes Khan and he had gone to Sultanpur to work as a chemist but went missing for a month.
¡°Later, Raes was found murdered, his decomposed body in a sack. It was then that I decided to not let any unclaimed body lying off the road to be devoured by stray animals,¡± Shareef said in an older interview to The Times of India.
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Shareef strongly believes that every human being deserves the dignity of a funeral and performs rites of unclaimed bodies from different faiths.
Every day, he makes rounds of the mortuary, nearby hospitals, railway stations and police station for any unclaimed bodies. The authorities contact him only if no one comes to claim a body for 72 hours, says a report in TOI.
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The Good Samaritan conducts the last rites in a small room located in a cemetery in Rakabganj, Faizabad. ¡°Lavaris Maiyyat/Matti ka ghuslkhana¡± (bath of destitute unclaimed bodies) reads a board 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 even charge for their own labour, like for babies,¡± Shareef told TOI.
Shareef once saved the only survivor of an accident on Faizabad-Lucknow highway. He extricated the survivor from an over-turned jeep and rushed him to hospital.
