Meet Ashraf, A Mechanic In UAE Who Cleared Formalities To Make Sure That Sridevi’s Mortal Remains Reaches India Safely
India’s one and only female Superstars Sridevi is no more now and people across the country are rushing to see their favorite heroine one last time. On February 25, the country woke up to the shocking news of one of a legendary actress of Bollywood Sridevi’s death. Indian cinema lost the versatile actress and gems Sridevi who breathe her last in a family function in Dubai.
She was only 54 and cause of her death was a major cardiac arrest.
Sridevi’s untimely death has left a void in the entire film fraternity in India. Many celebrities and politicians took Twitter to share their grief but her demise is perhaps the biggest loss to her family. It was just five months before her elder daughter Jhanvi Kapoor’s Bollywood debut, Sridevi died in Dubai.
She was in Dubai to attend her nephew Mohit Marwah’s wedding when she suffered a cardiac arrest on Saturday night, leaving her family, fans, and Bollywood in shock. While her husband Boney Kapoor and younger daughter Khushi Kapoor accompanied Sridevi to the wedding in Dubai, Jhanvi decided to stay behind in Mumbai to shoot for her debut film Dhadak.
There are rumors that say there went something wrong between the husband and wife and it led to her death. The entire case took a U-Turn when the forensic report said that the cause of her death was “Accidental drowning” and not cardiac arrest. After more than two days of investigation, the Dubai Police have cleared the release of Bollywood icon Sridevi’s body.
Away from the cameras’ flash and the eyes of her millions of fans in India, Sridevi’s body made its way to a simple mortuary in the United Arab Emirates, where one man helped sign out her remains to return home. Listed as Ashraf officially, Ashraf Sherry Thamarassery, an Indian from Kerala is ferryman of sorts for those who die in UAE.
From indebted laborers to the moneyed elite, Thamarassery has helped repatriate 4,700 bodies to 38 countries across the world. He works as a mechanic but does this for blessings. He believes in helping those who don’t know the repatriation formalities. He views it as a noble responsibility in the desert sheikhdom that draws so many far from their homes, chief among them his compatriots.
“For them, you or me, it’s all the same and everyone is equal. If someone dies in their room, they will take them to the hospital and then be checked at the police mortuary. It’s the same process, whether Dubai or Sharjah or any emirate. Whether you’re poor or rich, it doesn’t matter,” Thamarassery told.
Sherry offered shrugs when talking about Sridevi, saying he helped repatriate five other bodies Tuesday including the famed Bollywood star. But it’s hard to overstate the power Sridevi had over the imagination of many in India. The 54-year-old Sridevi, only known by one name, which means “Goddess” in Hindi, died Feb. 24 in Dubai while in the UAE for a wedding.
Police and prosecutors say she drowned in a hotel bathtub after losing consciousness, calling her death accidental. Police officials also have said the actress had alcohol in her system at the time of her drowning. News of her death dominated India’s newspapers and many television networks, ranging from the restrained to the lurid.
While Indian officials quickly canceled her passport and prepared the other documents, Thamarassery said a needed police clearance slowed Sridevi’s repatriation. He received hundreds of calls from journalists, officials and others in the interim. When the clearance came, he traveled to a simple government-run mortuary in a dusty neighborhood of squat.
There, officials embalmed her corpse as Thamarassery handled paperwork for her and three others. Curious Indian laborers spoke softly among themselves about the actress while standing outside of the mortuary. An ambulance then carried her body to a private jet reportedly sent by an Indian billionaire to take her home to Mumbai to be cremated.
By Tuesday night, Thamarassery returned home to the apartment he shares with his wife and daughter in Ajman, a small, dusty emirate in the UAE that serves as a bedroom community to skyscraper-studded Dubai some 35 kilometers (20 miles) to the southwest. There, Thamarassery runs a mechanics shop but focuses largely on his philanthropic efforts.