COLACHEL (TAMIL NADU), JANUARY 7 Few people look twice at the nameless, dingy office next to Kasim Kalyana Mandapam down the road from the St Mary’s School relief camp at Colachel. There are a handful of people gathered outside, but a passerby would think they just want to escape the clutter and claustrophobia of a camp that houses 4,000 people in an area the size of a football ground.

Yet, it is here that a group of volunteers, 12 days after the disaster, direct the painful and, in most cases, futile endeavour of trying to put names to what is left of the dozen or more people still missing.

‘‘People want to see their loved ones returned to them even if it is not in one piece,’’ says Abdul Karim. Karim and his team trawl a three km-long mud embankment—Colachel’s Ground Zero—that is set back 100 metres from the beach or pick their way through the landfill at the fag end of Samba Sivam Road where debris is being dumped.

When body parts are found, a volunteer puts them into a plastic bag and takes it to an ambulance which transports the remains to the dingy office’s refrigerated room.

There’s a particular pain to mourning without a body or a grave.

Shanmugham, recently married, waits outside the office. He prays silently that he will get to see something of his wife Shanthi, even if it is only her ring finger. ‘‘My heart stops whenever the ambulance comes back here with whatever they have got,’’ he says.

The recovery of a body-fragment can often, albeit mildly, help with the grieving. The reason why Karim, Anwar, Rajendran and others still hunt for human remains is to allow the families of victims to cremate or bury at least a body part. Even a fragmentary funeral is an important therapeutic rite though it doesn’t necessarily usher in closure: after burial, the bereaved still have disbelief, rage and anguish to face. Identifying the dead works like this: something unmentionable is pulled out from the rubble, which is closely scrutinised for any telltale signs by family members or friends. ‘‘As it is, a leg or arm is no good unless a relative can positively identify a distinguishing mark. This is not as difficult as one might think even though the body part is rotting. But more often relatives go by a rough guess, looking at the shape and size of the particular limb,’’ says Anwar, who is now in a dispensary, an IV drip stuck into his arm, having collapsed from fatigue earlier in the day. At the refrigerated room, volunteers guide victims’ families, talking to them all the time to calm them, making them look closely at each body part. Once somebody identifies a relative or friend, they are asked to bring someone else to corroborate it. ‘‘Everybody wants to get over with it fast but it shouldn’t mean disrespecting the memory of a dead person,’’ says Anwar. These young men look around for bodies with surgical gloves made of latex, which are no protection against potentially gangrenous cuts and bruises. Often, what they pull out is a limb, more often just sloughed off parts of it from underneath the slime.

‘‘It is very rarely that we get a whole body or even a torso. It doesn’t make a difference any way because all their features are gone. Some of the skulls are completely bleached. All their hair has come out,’’ says Karim.

It is exhausting work that physically, mentally and emotionally drains those involved. ‘‘If I sit back and try to think about it I will never be able to do this work again,’’ says Fernandes, another volunteer.