Tragedy has proved a great leveller in landslide-wracked Wayanad.

The Juma Mazjid in Meppadi, the town nearest the disaster ground zero, has helped bury 80-odd dead in the past few days.

For the nearby Holy Emmanuel CSI Church, the figure is about a half-dozen.

The Seva Bharathi, a Hindu social organisation, had helped cremate about 60 bodies till Saturday evening at a ground close to the Mariamman Temple, hardly 500 metres from the Juma Mazjid.

And with the bodies often smashed beyond recognition by falling rocks “the size of trucks” — a seasoned doctor said he couldn’t bear looking at some of them despite years of seeing corpses — some 30-odd could not be identified even by their religion.

Eight of them were buried together on Sunday evening at an open ground at the Harrisons Malayalam Ltd tea estate in Puthumala near Meppadi, with religious leaders from all faiths chanting prayers for their souls.

Many people whose loved ones are missing and presumed dead gathered at the site at least three hours in advance.

Revenue minister K. Rajan, who is monitoring relief and rescue, said the decision for the all-faith prayers was taken at a meeting of Hindu, Muslim and Christian religious leaders on Saturday.

More than 30 graves have been dug over a 0.64-acre area in the tea garden for more unidentified bodies.

With an improvement in the weather triggering an intensified search for the about 200 missing people, including many children, along the banks of the Chaliyar, the toll is expected to rise.

For now, Tuesday’s pre-dawn landslides have killed 350 people in the Chooralmala and Mundakkai villages and left 10,000 homeless.

“I had never before come across anything remotely resembling the scenes I have been witnessing since Tuesday,” A.K. Ali Master, secretary of the Juma Mazjid, told The Telegraph. “We have been burying bodies since Tuesday without rest.”

While the Juma Mazjid has buried 43 dead, the committee has coordinated with five other mosques in Meppadi’s neighbourhood for the burial of another 39.

“As a small help to the grieving families, all the mosques wrote off the Rs 3,000 they usually charge for each burial,” Ali said. “We have prepared several graves as we expect more burials.”

Dr Ranjith Hari, state president of the Seva Bharathi, echoed Ali. “I have never seen anything like this and, hopefully, never will again,” he told this newspaper.

A gastroenterological surgeon in Thiruvananthapuram, Hari recalled his horror at receiving severely decomposed bodies, some of them badly mutilated, for cremation.

“I have got used to seeing bodies since medical school. But this is something even I find difficult to look at, not to forget the emotions of the families of the victims,” he said.

Hari said things were very different from the 2018 floods when most of the victims had died by drowning.

“Most of the victims now have been battered by falling rocks the size of trucks. So you can imagine how their remains would look,” he said.

“Some of the dead could be identified only by their religion, like the man with a ring on which the image of Lord Murugan had remained intact.”

Those buried at the tea garden on Sunday were bereft of any identity markers, personal or religious.

Four Christian victims have been buried in the cemetery near the Holy Emmanuel CSI Church, while two or three bodies have been taken to other churches nearby.

Some of the bereaved families have conducted the funerals on their own initiative.

The Seva Bharathi has deployed 15 portable crematoriums in Meppadi free of charge.