In the bustling heart of Delhi, among honking traffic and the ever-churning rhythm of urban life, a quiet act of defiance and compassion unfolds each day. Pooja Sharma, a 26-year-old woman, walks into mortuaries not to mourn her loved ones, but to claim those who have been forgotten. The bodies she lifts onto bamboo stretchers are unknown to her—men and women who have died alone, unclaimed, and unseen.
Yet, through her hands, they are given one final gesture of dignity.
Pooja Sharma has cremated nearly 4,000 unclaimed bodies since she began her extraordinary journey two years ago. Often handling two to ten corpses a day, she has dedicated herself to ensuring that even the most invisible among us are not discarded like refuse. For her, the final rites are not just religious obligations but affirmations of human worth.
Her journey began with personal tragedy. In 2019, Sharma was preparing for a conventional life of marriage and family when her mother suddenly passed away due to a brain haemorrhage. The grief was soon compounded by her brother’s brutal murder in 2022. With her father paralyzed by sorrow and tradition barring women from performing funeral rites, Sharma stepped into the role herself.
“The day I cremated my brother, I was overwhelmed. I smeared his ashes on my face and in my hair,” she recalls. That intimate moment changed her life forever.
She left her job as an HIV counselor and embraced a new vocation: to offer a final farewell to those who would otherwise vanish into anonymity. Despite the mental and financial toll, Sharma presses on. Her family—her father, a metro driver, and her grandmother, a soldier’s widow—pitch in to cover the 120,000 rupees she needs each month for ambulance rentals and funeral expenses.
But her commitment comes at a steep personal cost. When her engagement was broken off, the groom’s family cited her work as too morbid. “We don’t want a daughter-in-law who roams around cremation grounds with dead bodies,” they told her.
Sharma sold the jewellery her late mother had bought for her wedding to continue financing the funerals. Friends and relatives now shun her, branding her the “companion of ghosts.”
“No one comes to our house anymore,” she says, a wistful look crossing her young face. But her voice is steady: “This work gives me sukoon—tranquility.”
The unclaimed bodies are often those of migrant workers, far from their homes, their identities lost in the shuffle of urban hardship. Delhi police data from 2018 to 2022 records over 11,000 unidentified bodies, with less than 1,500 ever named.
When police protocols allow, Sharma is called to collect the dead. She personally shrouds them, carries them into the crematorium, and recites prayers. No task is too menial; she insists on carrying one end of the stretcher, as if to shoulder some of their untold stories.
She has since founded the Bright the Soul Foundation, a nonprofit aimed at expanding her mission. The foundation helps low-income families afford transport to take their dead home or pay for their cremation.
Still, the resources are scarce. On a recent call, she told a donor that an ambulance was her most pressing need—a vehicle to reduce her dependency on costly rentals.
After the flames consume the bodies, her service continues. Each month, Sharma collects the ashes from crematoriums across the city and undertakes a 120-mile journey to Haridwar, one of Hinduism’s holiest cities. There, she performs the final immersion in the Ganges River—the sacred conclusion to the journey of the soul.
“When they were born, there must have been such joy,” she reflects during these solemn pilgrimages. “Now their lives end alone, zipped in a bag, with no one even knowing they are gone. Just me, and the river.”
In a world often indifferent to the poor and the dead, Pooja Sharma is a reminder of what humanity can look like when it is quiet, unflinching, and resolute. Her story is not just about death, but about the dignity of life—even in its final moments.