KARACHI: This year, it will be over four decades since Muhammad Jameel, 52, first began digging graves as a nine-year-old.
Earlier this month, Jameel used his rusty shovel to break the soil for a new grave, looking forward to the $5 he will take home to his family of eight from Karachi’s Yasinabad Graveyard, one of over 250 cemeteries in the southern port city. The cemetery is officially closed, having run out of space, but the funerals keep coming.
Indeed, hundreds of graveyards have filled to capacity and become prime real estate in the city of over 20 million people. Yet, people like Jameel, who have been involved in the profession of gravedigging through generations, struggle to make ends meet.
“I have been working here since I was 9 years old,” Jameel, a third-generation undertaker, told Arab News as he wiped sweat from his brow and began to dig. “I used to pour water [on the graves]. My maternal grandfather used to be here. With him I would dig graves.”
Today, Jameel’s responsibilities involve digging new graves, lowering the dead into the ground, and washing and repairing graves and tombstones for little reward in terms of both money and respect.
“If a funeral or body comes, we work on it as if it were a member of our own family, it feels as if someone in our home has died, we work like that,” the gravedigger said.
“But people don’t think much of us … Making ends meet is very difficult for us. The children also bring in some income from various sources and that’s how we manage to get by.”
Younus Khan Niazi, a 40-year-old second-generation gravedigger at Karachi’s Mewa Shah Graveyard, said there were days when he went home empty-handed.
“A laborer who goes to work in the morning earns a daily wage and brings some money home, but in our cemetery, there’s a chance to earn something only if a body arrives,” he said.
Despite the small pay-off, the nature of the work of death means gravediggers often have to stop all of their life’s activities in the lime of duty.
Jameel recalled one such instance when he missed the birth of his child:
“The delivery was happening there [at hospital], I was digging a grave here.”
And while Jameel said his family was likely to quit the profession due to a lack of respect and money, Niazi, who has four sons, said he intended to pass on the tradition to his children.
“Just as I took over after my father, my son will take over after me. Skill is wealth, and this cemetery work, grave digging and laying blocks, is a skill.”
Niazi acknowledged that his line of work meant he often had to miss out on important family occasions but said he could not be ungrateful that other people’s grief was putting food on his table.
“When someone passes away, they will come to me to dig the grave,” Niazi said. “I will dig the grave and it will provide livelihood for my children.”
GRAVE BUSINESS
Of the over 250 graveyards in Karachi, only 38 are managed by the state Karachi Municipal Corporation (KMC), and of these, six have reached capacity and are officially closed, namely Yasinabad, Paposh Nagar, Society, Model Colony, Qur’angi and Mehmoodabad.
And while many of the cemeteries like Yasinabad and Society no longer have space for new graves, locals and experts say this has created opportunities for both officials and gravediggers to make money by overcharging grieving families and asking for bribes.
One mourner, Owais Ali, an electronics trader, said he had wanted to bury his mother in the Society graveyard near his house but was asked by the supervisor of the graveyard and on-duty gravediggers to pay over $300 for a spot, instead of the KMC fee of around $35. Ali managed to negotiate the amount down to Rs35,000 ($126) “by using a contact,” he said.
Those who don’t have such contacts end up paying as much as Rs200,000 ($719) for “prime locations,” said Zahid Farooq, a joint director at the nonprofit Urban Resource Center.
“People are forced to bury their loved ones in existing graves due to a lack of space. They are also forced to buy graves at exorbitant prices,” Farooq said, calling the graveyard business a “mafia.”
But he commiserated with gravediggers who he said received little in return for their hard work while cemetery supervisors enjoyed a “good lifestyle.” He said everyone from police to municipal and district administration authorities shared in the profits.
“They all together share in the expensive graves and the excessive costs,” Farooq added.
KMC spokesperson Ali Hasan Sajid admitted that graves were regularly sold at rates higher than the KMC fee but blamed gravediggers and families of the deceased for the corruption.
People often wanted burials in graveyards where their relatives were already buried, he said: “They strongly insist on being accommodated, often tempting the gravediggers with money.”
Low paid gravediggers accepted bribes and assigned graves without the approval of KMC authorities, Sajid insisted.
“When we investigate and ask the gravediggers if they made such a demand [for higher fee], they deny it,” the KMC spokesman said, admitting that burials were still taking place at the six officially closed graveyards in the city.
“People insist that they need a grave [at this place] in any case and at any cost.”
Gravediggers say they aren’t involved in either the politics or business of the trade.
Muhammad Abid, a 38-year-old gravedigger, said his community barely made ends meet and had no say in the allocation of graves or how much they cost.
“Our job,” he said, “is only to dig graves.”
