OWING to his happy, amusing personality, Prame Anand Badri is a delight to converse with. He’s serious when speaking on matters of importance to him, yet he’d crack a joke in the middle of a sentence or be sure to include some wit or sarcasm.

At first glance, though, jokes may be the last thing you’d expect from him, especially as he builds coffins for a living — or “boxes” as he prefers to call them.

The 62-year-old lived with his wife and children in Suriname before coming back to Guyana about 10 years ago, “to spend my last few days here” in David James Scheme, aback Charity in Region Two (Pomeroon-Supenaam).

Badri, a carpenter and joiner, has been making good use of the land passed down to him through generations to make and store his “boxes.”

Not many people build coffins and store them; you’d more find people taking in an order when someone dies. Badri, though, will store as many as 12 boxes at a time. He has them in different sizes to suit. No wonder people in the community would often joke, “Yuh got my size Badri?”

But many others detest the work that Badri does on account of superstition and fear of the dead. Badri couldn’t care less. Nothing disturbs his sleep, and he’d even help some of his customers to get the dead into the box.

“People are kind of skeptical of the boxes and would say they are scared when they’re passing,” Badri shared in an interview with Pepperpot Magazine, shortly after finalising the sale of one of his boxes for someone who drowned in a nearby community.

The situation got so bad that someone lit a fire on his boxes, destroying seven at one time. There were other instances when people stole his tools to prevent him from continuing his work.

Although having to constantly deal with such reactions, Badri continues. He knows that he is performing a useful service to the community. After all, who would they need to contact if they had a dead to bury?

“I am the only person in Guyana where you can come and find a ready-made box. I always have boxes. Sometimes I would give away boxes. Sometimes people would take it and don’t pay. It’s not something that I can’t take back if they don’t pay, so sometimes I just have to say ‘forget about it,’” Badri shared. On average, he’d sell about two boxes per month.

Explaining how he got into the business in the first place, he said as a carpenter, people would often come to him for help with a coffin. “Then, you would have to leave whatever you’re doing to go and do that. So I said to myself, ‘it doesn’t make sense; let me make a few and keep them.’ It’s a strange profession, I know,” he admitted.

He would especially appreciate it if the authorities could look into providing some assistance to him. “The state never assisted me even though I am doing a very good thing for the public. It’s difficult to find someone to work with me because people are skeptical. If they can come and say let’s give this guy a grant to buy more modern tools for his work; I don’t need land or advertising; just tools to make my work easier.”

Dealing with Death
Owing to his line of work, Badri was asked if thoughts of death often consume him. “I experienced a lot of death in my life so far, but I am not fearful of dying; I am not traumatised by death. I can even sleep in the boxes,” he said.

Being a Hindu, he believes that death is just about changing worlds. “You leave this material world and go to the supernatural world, and then come back, and the cycle goes on like that,” he explained.

Badri is baffled about why people would be scared of the boxes he makes. “They don’t realise that when you’re travelling on the road, you pass many burial grounds. Each tomb has a dead in it, yet they would not be afraid of that, but would be of my empty boxes.”

But he doesn’t allow them to bother him. “I have so much freedom at the back here. I don’t have much stress. I don’t pay light bills. I got solar energy, water tank, my own house. I don’t have competition for miles on end.”

Cremation vs Burial
Badri feels strongly that more cremation sites should be created. “We have plenty burial grounds, yet cremation is better than burial. You have one spot and cremate thousands of bodies for years, and it remains there. To make a tomb is so much work and so much more costly, and it remains there for 40 or 60 years. The land remains occupied and filled.”