Pooja Sharma
performs the last rites
nobody else will
For years she has cremated unclaimed bodies in Delhi — people with no family left to do it, or none who came.
She does the work that most people would rather not know about. When a body goes unclaimed in Delhi, the paperwork moves slowly and the person at the centre of it stops being a person. Pooja Sharma turns up, completes the formalities, and performs the last rites herself.
She has been doing this for years, on her own terms, without an organisation behind her. In the reel she talks about it plainly: the practical steps, the cost, the smell of the ground in summer, and the reason she keeps going back.
The Savage Humans filmed her without a script. The reverence rule applies here: we write smaller about real people than we do about ourselves.
Pull quote from the interview goes here — her words, verbatim, no tidying up.
