An RAF jawan patrols a street in Ayodhya on Sunday. (PTI)

Ayodhya, Dec. 5: As armed police swarmed over Ayodhya on the eve of the demolition anniversary, a 70-year-old man with a thick white beard was doing his best with a shovel to bury the communal stigma on the town.

That’s what Mohammad Sharif Khan, a rickshaw repairer by profession, has been doing almost every day for the past five years — ever since he took it upon himself to serve his hometown by cremating or burying every unclaimed body, Hindu’s or Muslim’s. He performs all the rites according to the religion of the deceased.

“So far, I have disposed of 1,800 unclaimed bodies, of which about 1,000 belonged to Hindus. Whether Hindu or Muslim, all the dead are my sons and I take care of them,” Khan said after stepping out of the Tar Ki Takia graveyard around 7pm.

The man whom everyone in Ayodhya and Faizabad now knows as “Sharif Chacha” has performed an average of one funeral a day since 2005. Nobody ever asked him to: he just decided it was his duty to give the naked, nameless dead a dignified farewell when he saw how summarily the police disposed of them.

The fame his work has brought hasn’t touched him: India’s richest man came up to shake his hands at an event in Mumbai last year, but Khan hadn’t even heard of Mukesh Ambani.

Even some of the key players in the temple agitation that led to the destruction of the Babri Masjid and its bloody aftermath acknowledge that Khan has built a bridge between communities in Ayodhya. The Ramjanmabhoomi Nyas felicitated him a few months ago. “He is like an angel for us,” one sadhu said.

“Chacha has convinced us that the ordinary Muslims of Ayodhya are not fighting any war against us. He is the one who bears the true legacy of Ayodhya,” said Mahant Gyan Das, chief priest of the Hanuman Garhi temple and former head of the Akhara Parishad.

The 1992 tragedy that set Khan off on his path, though, wasn’t the demolition. In March that year, his 22-year-old son Mohammad Rais Khan, a homoeopath, went missing while travelling to Lucknow. Two years later, Khan came to know that Sultanpur police had found the body by the tracks and disposed of it since there was no claimant. He identified his son from his clothes.

After a decade spent struggling to cope with the pain, Khan found a way to honour the memory of his son. Even now, he carries a photograph of Rais as he moves around the city.

The Ambani encounter happened by chance. “In 2009, a car-truck collision in Faizabad killed four people, all from Mumbai. A young executive from Mukesh Ambani’s company was in the car but survived. I helped him take care of the dead and he invited me to his wedding in Mumbai. That’s where I met Ambani,” Khan recalled. “Later, some officials of Ambani’s company told me who he was.”

District officials say that before Khan took over, the bodies used to be thrown into the river or sold to private medical colleges.

Khan says a funeral costs between Rs 2,000 and Rs 3,000. First, he has to buy clothes for the naked, unclaimed body. If it’s a Muslim’s, Khan has to pay for the coffin and meet the transport and graveyard charges. For a Hindu, he has to buy ghee and other stuff and pay the priest.

He has never received government aid. “The ordinary people of Ayodhya help me with small donations. I write down the name of every donor in a diary that I always carry,” he said.

“Sometimes the relatives of the dead, if they are identified later, give me some money in gratitude. When I started out, some police officers — even nurses of the hospitals where the bodies were kept — chipped in. Often I had to pay out of my own pocket.”

Khan tries to keep the memories of the dead alive too. He has their photographs taken and preserves them with copies of all the papers that the police find on them — in case a relative or friend comes calling in future, like he had done 16 years ago at Sultanpur police station.

How can he carry on at his age? “Early in the morning every day, I take a bath and pray to Allah before stepping out of home,” Khan said. “And I don’t return home until my work of taking care of the dead is over for the day.”

On days there are no calls from the hospitals or the police, Khan repairs rickshaws at Khidki Alibag area of Faizabad, where he lives with his daughter and wife, a mental patient.

Khan never studied beyond Class V, and the repair jobs are how the man who shook Mukesh Ambani’s hand still earns his living.