WITH thick clouds above and the winds blowing wild and free, Khair Muhammad Baloch puts in maximum effort to keep the 16 wooden pieces he is handling in order. Each piece carries a number and is set to be placed over 16 new graves in Edhi Foundation’s Mowachh Goth graveyard — home to some 250,000 unclaimed bodies.

“People are survived by families, loved ones, friends and even assets, but here there are only numbers by which they are remembered,” he says, pointing to hundreds of graves around. “I don’t know who is inside. Man or a woman, Muslim, Hindu or Christian, I don’t know anything. For me, it’s just a number.”

As he pauses to take a gulp of water, I stroll around and find his son a few yards away. The 35-year-old Nadeem Baloch is preparing to lead funeral prayers. Clad in a worn-out shalwar kameez, the younger Baloch repeats this exercise at least once a week for the unknown dead of this beleaguered city, who have found their final abode in this 10-acre piece of land owned and managed by the country’s largest charity.

From the Foundation’s cold storage in Sohrab Goth, a specially-designed vehicle brings in 16 unclaimed — hence unknown — cadavers on average in a week. Shrouded bodies are laid out before the open graves for the final short prayers to be said by three faithful men. The younger Baloch, being a second-generation gravedigger at the Mowachh Goth graveyard, is joined by the vehicle’s driver and his assistant to offer the final prayers for the most unfortunate of people who have died without leaving behind a trace of their identity.

“You can say it is mandatory for us,” replies the gutka-chewing Nadeem when I ask him the logic behind final prayers when one doesn’t know the religion of the dead. “I can’t explain how much sympathy I feel for these people. God knows who they were and how they met their end, while their loved ones would have been searching desperately for them. Prayers are the only service I can offer before burying them forever.”

The Balochs’ workplace is fast running short of space as the number of unidentified bodies buried by the Edhi Foundation has touched the 250,000 mark while the police and other relevant authorities have failed to devise a system to identify unclaimed corpses despite advanced technological facilities.

“We started the job in 1984-85,” says Anwar Kazmi, the key man behind the Edhi Foundation and close aide of its founder, Abdul Sattar Edhi. “The then Karachi mayor, Abdul Sattar Afghani, provided Edhi sahib a 10-acre piece in the Mowachh Goth area. The need grew, and the authorities gave us two more pieces of land of 10 acres each.”

Since no other system exists, he says, the Edhi Foundation buries an unclaimed body after keeping it for up to a week at the morgue in Sohrab Goth. Prior to burial, a photograph is taken to be shown to people visiting the facility in search of their relatives, he says.

“After that, we bury the body in the Mowachh Goth graveyard,” says Kazmi. “I should say that not many are fortunate enough to achieve a sense of closure regarding the disappearance or death of family members after leafing through the albums of the dead we have. Only a few are lucky, whose exhausting search comes to an end here.”

As he points out, only a few graves here carry gravestones. The two Baloch men are busy adding another 16 to this burial ground.

“I have buried even 30 bodies a day here,” says the elder one while supervising his son. In his mid-60s now, he is no longer an active gravedigger. He handed over his job and trained his son “at least a decade ago”. As Nadeem finishes with the burial of all the 16 bodies, one after another, Khair Muhammad steps forward for the final ritual.

“I have buried bodies that are mutilated, charred, torn apart, cut and bruised beyond recognition,” he says, affixing a number on the last grave. “It’s definitely a tough job and an under-appreciated one. But someone has to do it. So I did it for 35 years and now my son is doing it. Just think for a minute: what if there were no Edhi sahib, no Mowachh Goth graveyard. What would happen to these dead?”

Published in Dawn, August 29th, 2014