New Delhi: Esther Anita Brown, 45, lives her life tending to the dead.
She is the only woman undertaker in India, having mastered the skills of making coffins, digging up graves, fixing gleaming granite slabs, and engraving epitaphs on tombstones at the Nicholson cemetery in Delhi.
With coffins and chisels her tools of choice, she settled on the cemetery as her workplace in her mid-20s.
“I joined because it was a family profession and never knew that it would give me the distinction of being the only woman undertaker in the country,” she says.
People visit her for personalised coffins, in line with their customs and the last wishes of the deceased. Having learnt the nuances of the job, she has proved that a daughter can be as good as a son in taking up the family business.
Her father, Herbert Browne started the business of making coffins in 1935. He helped bury British soldiers at the Nicholson cemetery, the oldest cemetery in the city.
The company, Browne Undertakers, ran its operations from Brown’s ancestral house, built in 1937, in the congested Christian Colony in Karol Bagh, New Delhi, where she lives to this day.
Entering the house through a huge wooden gate, one sees a place in dire need of maintenance, as brick walls and wooden pillars stand exposed.
“We had rented out the premises and now a large portion is under dispute,” she says.
Brown’s earliest memories are of playing hide and seek in coffins when her father would be busy giving instructions to his workers.
She recalls: “As a child, I would play around the coffins that were kept in the courtyard of the house. My mother would dissuade me, as I would often hide inside the coffins!”
Seeing her father working on coffins, Brown began to get interested and one day told her mother that she would follow her father’s footsteps.
“My mother became very angry and said women never take up such professions,” Brown remembers.
“Even though my father too never showed keenness that I work with him, he was left with no choice when my only brother died in a road accident in 1979.”
A broken man after his son’s death, Herbert suffered business loss and could never recover from it. As fate would have it, Brown took over the reins.
“Even though people wondered how a woman could take up a profession meant supposedly only for men, I successfully began to run the workshop and even employed men trained in woodwork and miniature art,” she says.
“The first time I made a coffin, I lay inside it to check how it felt to lie inside!”
She came out injured, due to some nails left inside the coffin.
When asked to recall a moment when she was shaken to see death, Brown responded, “I remember the day when two international aeroplanes, Saudi Arabian Airlines flight 763 and Kazakhstan Airlines flight 1907 collided mid-air in Charkhi Dadri, a town in Rewari district of Haryana, near Delhi, in 1996.
“The crash killed all 349 people on board both planes, making it the world’s deadliest mid-air collision. I was called to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) to embalm the over 25 bodies that were to be sent to their families abroad.”
Brown has come a long way. “Having seen death almost everyday, I have learnt to value life and believe it is too precious to be wasted on negativity and mundane matters,” she says.
(This appeared in Gulf News on April 9, 2015)