Outlook English - Print Subscribers Copy Outlook English, 06 August 2018 | Page 12

LIVING DEAD
Society of Zombies
Legally dead due to clerical error or greedy relatives, thousands live in limbo
Text: Ushinor Majumdar
in Azamgarh, UP
Photographs: Tribhuvan Tiwari
B
AIJNATH grins broadly when
you ask him if he’s still alive. You
must be saving a lot on food bills?
The grin nearly stretches from
ear to ear. Even in legal death, he
cannot fail to see the humour in
his situation. In Azamgarh, paying res­
pects to the dead will elicit a pleasant
thank you in response—from the dead.
12 OUTLOOK 6 August 2018
No, not from the beyond. And no, Phan­
tom, the Ghost Who Walks, hasn’t relo­
cated from Africa. Nor is it a script for a
B-grade flick. But of course, legal death
means you’re in for a life of horror.
Wait…legal death? Yes. On paper, it’s a
kind of limbo—a trishanku state between
those still breathing and those who have
attained nirvana. De facto, you’re alive—so,
sorry, no, not much savings on the over-
heads. But de jure, you’re dead meat. And
the sheer effort it takes to get yourself
dec­lared alive is anything but funny. Not
to speak of the implications of failing.
But how are living, breathing people
leg­ally bumped off? Well, as it happens,
some time before computers took over
lives, human existence and its cessation
was certified on paper. The fact that peo-
ple were born and lived was recorded in
various registers. And title deeds certify-
ing their ownership of properties were
locked into apparently sacrosanct vaults
of hardbound paper. These entries could
be erased by the scratch of a pen by a
powerful man called the ‘lekhpal’. He was