The team at David Undertakers has seen tragedy often, having worked through the serial blasts in 1993 and also in 2006. “We had to walk over limbs, and bodies in heaps inside the gates of J J Hospital,” D’Souza recalls 1993. “Those days, there was only one coroner office in the whole of Mumbai and that day of March will be never forgotten.” In 2006, they took bedsheets to pick up the injured and send them to hospitals.

In the last five years, the duo — among the oldest in the business with over 20 years of experience — agrees that the number of casualties has called for a proportional increase in the number of undertakers in the city. D’Souza says the figures of road and rail casualties last year in the western suburbs alone comes to over 300, with most of them listed as unidentified bodies. The job can be very “emotionally draining” stresses the duo.

Last year, in a road accident at Mira Road, three call centre executives riding one bike met with a fatal accident. Their head injuries were so bad that they could not be identified. “The doctors called us frantically and I had to spend an entire night redoing the face so that the three families could at least have a decent burial,” says D’Souza. Sequeira will never forget a house in Bandra where the skeleton of a senior citizen was found a few years ago with the skeleton of his dog beside the dead man’s bed. “His relatives had failed to call him in over a year and the body had decomposed to a skeleton. His dog, which died much later, never left him. We gave both of them a decent burial,” he says. Vouching for their repute is the fact that the state government’s first call after the postmortem of Pramod Mahajan was to David. “We had to ensure that his body was kept in the mobile freezer at his living room as many political and state dignitaries flew down for the funeral.” Among other high profile cases, the Mumbai Police also sought David after the recent controversial death of Rahul Raj. “The controversy was yet to die down when we got a call to clean his body and send it home with all due respect. He died young.” In their profession, D’souza says, they see life from close quarters just as they see death, when they get to see the final respects paid to a man or woman. “Sometimes, it moves you to tears, and sometimes you wish you were not human,” says D’Souza.