The Mortician

Depending on where you live in the world, the first episode of HBO’s new true crime series, The Mortician, will either be scandalous or sloppy. In the 1980s, a man named David Sconce took over his family’s respectable funeral home business, and took it in an altogether macabre direction, all in the name of aggressive expansion. But the sort of shenanigans that he got up to would hardly draw a second glance in India. A lot of what he was convicted of doing would be brushed off as ‘jugaad’ here. In the United States, however — especially the wealthy Pasadena neighbourhood where Sconce conducted his activities — a scandal erupted. It was discovered that Sconce was mass-cremating bodies and essentially scooping out ashes from large barrels, and presenting them to the families of the deceased. They had no idea that the urn being given to them contained the remains of several dead people mixed together, and not just their loved one. Sconce said that this was a common practice in funeral homes, and that most businesses would be lying if they pretend that it wasn’t. You could imagine white people getting all hot and bothered about something like this, but in India, where the cost of human life is negligible, it would be more surprising if there was no skullduggery going on.