A. Nicholas has come across more than a lakh corpses. Yet, the 69-year-old from Bengaluru is ready with his camera when the police call at any hour of the day. In the past 32 years, his crime scene photos have been used to reconstruct the sequence of events, assist in identifying suspects, and provide visual evidence during trials.
“I have gained extensive experience, and police officers trust that I will maintain confidentiality by not disclosing any information or images obtained from crime scenes or mortuaries,” he says. “Throughout the years, I have safeguarded numerous official secrets.”
Nicholas begins his day at 5:30am. He goes for a swim or works out before heading to church for daily mass. After breakfast, he bikes to his compact photo studio in Kalasipalya, one of the busiest areas in Bengaluru. Of course, this routine can at any moment be derailed by a policeman’s phone call.
Once at a crime scene, Nicholas has about 20 minutes to do his job. As changing lenses is time-consuming, he relies on a versatile Nikon 18-135mm lens that allows him to capture wide-angle as well as close-up shots. He carries an additional lens to mortuaries as he gets more time there.
On days without active cases, he typically winds up his studio work by 9pm. However, the phone is always by his side.
As part of this job, Nicholas is required to appear in court and give testimony in numerous cases, many of them being murder-related. Although this takes up a lot of time, he does it in the pursuit of justice for the victims, even if he has no personal connection to them.
One of his most challenging assignments, he says, was the fire in the Bangalore-Nanded Express near Puttaparthi on December 28, 2013, which took 26 lives. “For three days, I worked amid the charred bodies of those victims,” he says.
Though such scenes would make most people nauseous, Nicholas says he is mostly unaffected, except when it comes to bodies of children. “When I come across the lifeless body of an adult who has been murdered or hanged, I can convince myself that complex circumstances or decisions led to their demise,” he explains. “However, children, who are pure and innocent, do not die because of any mistakes they have made. Therefore, documenting their bodies is incredibly difficult for me.”
Nicholas’s first encounter with a murder scene took place when he was 22. “It was a woman who ran a dairy products shop,” he says. At the time, he was a clerk at Benny Mills Limited. He had wanted to join the armed forces, and had come close to being inducted into the Army’s signals corps. However, his father died while working at the mill, and his mother asked him to take up a job there and stay with her. He is the youngest of nine siblings. Nicholas joined the mill in 1972 and worked there for 15 years. It was during this time that his passion for photography began; he would cover weddings, and it was at one such assignment that he met his future wife.
He set up his own studio in 1991, which was when he got a call from the local police for an assignment. He got Rs200 and found his calling. So much so that, on several occasions, Nicholas has gone beyond his mandate to personally identify bodies and find family members of those the police had labelled ‘unidentified’. He recalls an instance of a close friend asking him to help locate his missing father, who was suffering from a mental illness. Through their own efforts, they discovered the body in one of the mortuaries.
Such is Nicholas’s sense of duty that even though his children are successful IT professionals, he feels compelled to continue this line of work. Like the others mentioned above, Nicholas, too, is driven by the pursuit of justice. “While I may receive a modest payment of around Rs500 from the deceased’s family or police officers in some cases, I do not demand money,” he says. “If the relatives of the deceased are financially disadvantaged, I do not accept any payment. Moreover, I provide my services free of charge for unclaimed or unidentified bodies, as I view it as a contribution to society.”
A CHANGE I WOULD LIKE TO SEE
“Compared with when I first entered this field in the 1990s, there has been a noticeable increase in suicide cases. This trend speaks volumes about the state of our society and the decline in our family values. It is crucial for us to contemplate the situation affecting our families. Genuine and concerted efforts need to be made to address these issues seriously.”