Amidst the hustle and bustle at Chennai’s MGR Central Railway Station, a man in his 50s sits quietly, absorbed in his phone. On this humid afternoon, he is wearing a yellow T-shirt and khaki shorts, a sandalwood tilak smeared across his forehead, with kumkum at the centre. Behind this unassuming exterior lies a lifetime of confronting the unimaginable.
N. Selvaraj, known to all at Central railway station as “Central Body Murugan”, has been retrieving bodies from the railway tracks for 36 years. For more than three decades, this station has been his place of work, his refuge, and in many ways, his home. His job is as grim as it is underappreciated, demanding a fortitude most would recoil from. Yet Murugan speaks of it with quiet pride, regarding it as his solemn duty.
“I ran away from home when I was 15,” he recalls. “I have been here ever since.” Drawn into the company of older men who performed this daunting task, Murugan gradually became part of a world where death was a constant companion. His earliest days were far from easy. “The body parts would be scattered, I would not even feel like going near it,” he admits. Senior hands advised him to drink before attending to a body, a habit he took up to dull his senses.
