After The Deluge

HAVE you ever tried living on top of a bund (embankment)? A nine-foot wide strip of land that juts out a hundred feet from the swirling, tepid waters of the still swollen Rapti river in the interiors of Gorakhpur. Quite like an iceberg, really. Except that this bund is a muddy knoll that stretches for a dozen kilometres rising out of the eastern extremities of the Indo-Gangetic plain. It is also home for Ram Karan, Raj Kumari and their six children. Has been for over a month now, in fact. And they have the entire population of their village—a Harijan basti called Khadputahra—to keep them company.

"It was a pitch dark, moonless night when our village went under. We had time only to grab our children and make for the higher ground on top of the bund. The little we had is all there," says Ram Karan, pointing to an ensemble of slushy, mud-brick ruins which were once houses. As if on cue, the wind changes direction and the odour of destruction comes wafting up from the hutments to the embankment. The stench is unbearable as the carcasses of the village cattle add to the pungency of fermenting grain.

"My children have nothing to eat, nothing to wear. The Rs 1,000 we received from the government is running out. How long can we stay in these straw and tarpaulin jhuggis which are perched so precariously on the bund that every time there is a gust, my children cling to me in fear?" Raj Kumari asks. There are no answers.

In the absence of any hope, they have had to take decisions. Hard decisions. "We are preparing to move back into our houses. My husband and many other villagers spend all day attempting to clean the slime and muck out of our homes and put up some sort of roof. But there is so much of slush and mud, mud everywhere...."

She points to Sushila, a neighbour, who is walking past with a snake dangling at the end of a stick. "Every house is full of snakes, scorpions, crabs and other crustacea," she adds. "Our house guests are quite annoyed that we want to move back," interrupts a teenaged boy before skipping away laughing. Laughing!

Sushila appears again. Bereft of the snake, but pushing a boy ahead of herself. His left leg is grotesquely deformed. "The problem began a couple of months ago with the onset of the rains and the subsequent floods made it worse," she says. The local quack thinks it may be filaria. The boy’s father, more in hope than with any certainty, insists that "Panne has twisted his leg" and advises his wife to continue massaging it. "That should cure it."

Ram Karan, Raj Kumari, Sushila and countless others complain of deteriorating vision ever since the waters submer

As we prepare to leave the bund, a group of young men arrive, panting with the exertion of having ridden two to a bicycle. They bring with them what passes for good news in these parts: "The water is now shallow enough to be forded at a point 8 km away."

In the neighbouring villages of Usri and Pali, the water levels have fallen. These villages now wallow in a sea of mud with only the pucca houses left standing. But the agricultural fields, the very backbone of rural Indian life—are still under four to five feet of standing water. "The kharif crop was ruined by the flood and by the look of things, the rabi crop (which should be sown in October) will go the same way unless the water dries up miraculously," says Shamsher Singh, sarpanch of Usri.

These are the victims of the floods in eastern UP. Then, there are the victims of flood relief. Like the boatmen commandeered by the government from all over the state at the peak of the floods a month ago, and pressed into rescue work. With the ebbing of the waters, they are not really needed anymore. But the trucks which carted them from Benares and Allahabad to the worst of the flood-affected areas have disappeared. So have the officials who handed out slips of official paper in lieu of payments or contracts. There is this surreal sight of hundreds of boatmen living in their boats on dry land on either side of National Highway 29 from Benares to Gorakhpur. Waiting for their money. And a ride back home.

 "We risked our lives and came no questions asked because we thought of those suffering. We cook our dry chapattis to fill our stomach and have to shit and bathe in the open. This is what we get in return for helping out," spits out Kumar Majhi, a boatman from Benares, who is marooned on dry land near the town of Kaudiram, his debasement complete. But then this is a country where the solutions often end up as fresh problems.

Last week, the chief minister reeled off the "flood statistics and action plan" in a "statement" released on the first anniversary of his government. The tours and aerial surveys over, there was a discernible ring of finality about the Statement. The "relief work will continue, of course", say his ministers but the administration seems to have wrapped it all up ever so neatly. Maybe there is a case for sending the leading members of the UP Cabinet to spend a day camping on a bund near Gorakhpur.

ASSAM: WASHED OUT LIVELIHOODS

BALEN PEGU, a peasant who ekes out his living by cultivating a small patch of land in northeast Assam’s Dhemaji district, sits disconsolately in front of the heap of mud and straw which was once his house. As he casts his eye around him, he can see the paddy field that belongs to his family under knee-deep slush and sand. Pegu and his family of six may have barely survived the unprecedented flooding of the Brahmaputra, but the future looks bleak. And the struggle for survival, uphill.

 The waters of the rampaging Brahmaputra have receded, but that has brought about a flood of problems. Since miles of roads have disappeared and several bridges washed away, no vehicles can reach Pegu’s village. When the area was flooded, the boats at least could bring in the essentials. Now even that does not happen. "I do not know where my next meal is going to come from," Pegu says. And he is not alone. Several thousand families in Dhemaji and the adjoining Lakhimpur district are now on the verge of starvation since no land in the area is suitable for cultivation.

As if the problems brought about by the natural calamity are not enough, Dhemaji and North Lakhimpur are also faced with a callous administrative machinery. At least four junior-level officers have been arrested for selling rice meant for the flood-hit people and embezzling funds earmarked for flood control in the district. Across the state, a well-entrenched bureaucrat-trader-politician nexus has robbed the people of the little relief coming their way. Illustrated best by the goings-on at a relief camp in Dhemaji, where officials handling relief operations procured rice worth Rs 3 lakh while the bill for fuel to cook the rice was shown to be Rs 10 lakh!

With attitudes like these towards human suffering, it is no surprise that animals barely figure in the scheme of things. Which is why the Kaziranga National Park had been converted into a vast, stinking, still-water lake in which float the carcasses of over 500 animals including over 30 one-horned rhinos. The water-level in the park has receded from its high of 2.5 m but has left in its wake unusable roads, broken bridges, plenty of slush and hardly any vegetation. The park officials are a dedicated lot but say it is near-impossible to patrol the area. And for the time being, the sanctuary has reverted back to the law of the jungle.

GUJARAT: WATERS OF DESPAIR

AS Surat surfaces from the deep, a sense of disquiet has descended over the diamond city. Damned by water let loose from a dam. "Why did they release so much water from the Ukai dam on the night of September 16 when on the previous day the city was under water," asks Iswarbhai Lalbhai Rawadia, his eyes glazed over with fatigue. Long on excuses, short on explanations, the authorities are mum.

Hunched among the ruins of his home at Barvada, a fishing village off the Rander road, this 60-year-old rope seller recalls: "The water started gushing in from the front and we were making for the roofs when the rear walls of our houses which separate us from the Tapi river were breached. Nearly the entire village was washed away." Washing away many dreams as well. For though nobody has died in Barvada, the loss of livelihood has been crippling. Rawadia, who had never borrowed any money in his life, is now looking to the moneylenders for succour. His life savings were washed away along with his house in front of his eyes.

The stories are familiar. Haribhai Ranchchodbhai Bhankhan, only earning member in a family of six, Kamlesh Banabhai, only earning member in a family of eight...all struggling to piece together the rubble of their lives. "We have sent our families away to live off the charity of relatives," says Kamlesh. "We haven’t eaten properly for three days, there is no electricity and armed thieves have been taking advantage of the darkness. This is no place for women and children."

In the muck-laced settlement of Dhirunibhagat in Utaran, its inhabitants say they were forced to seek refuge in railway wagons. "Over 200 of us crammed into three wagons," says an angry Meena Bhupeshbhai. "No relief has come from the authorities. Not only is there nothing to go home to, there is nothing to look forward to either." In the day some of the more optimistic of the villagers head homewards to scrape the mud off the roofs of their houses, averting their gaze from the stagnant water which seems to mock them from still only two inches short of the ceiling.

BIHAR: LIFE ON THE ROAD

IT is time for Palti Devi, a bidi-puffing mother of seven, to engage in what is an annual ritual. To move with her family to the Darbhanga-Samastipur road because her tiny thatched-roof hut has been swallowed up by the waters of the Kareh river which has flooded Bishanpur village. On the roadside, she puts up a tattered tarpaulin shanty. Her pencil-thin daughters are growing up, she says, so she blocks the gaping holes in her "house" with rags. And waits for the handouts of kind "relief babus". For 15 days each year she and her children become refugees searching for crumbs.

This year, though, Palti Devi is very angry. She has been living on the road far too long—since July 23, to be precise, when floodwaters inundated 28 districts of north and central Bihar and simply refused to subside. This year, she also doesn’t have any money to even think of rebuilding her hut. So she has decided to make the road to Samastipur her home. Sort of permanently. There’s a high court fiat against encroachment, and she has heard about it. But remind her of that and she snaps: "Let the police come and use their lathis. I am not going to move."

 Life on the road is tough. But it is better than hanging on to snake-infested trees or sailing aimlessly in overcrowded country boats looking for higher land. Some distance away from dusty Darbhanga—a town of 18-hour power cuts, fading porn-film posters, dug-up roads, tatty transistor shops called Ken-Star Electronics and generator-powered satellite television—the road to Samastipur is now an unending shantytown of flood victims. Cars, lorries and buses somehow, miraculously, manage to zigzag their way out of this putrid ghetto without running anybody over. As yet. The homeless demarcate their shanties with twigs, branches and boulders. Inside the shack, man and animal live and sleep together after feasting on puffed rice and soggy fodder. When night falls, hungry couples mate and defecate on the road.

They also burn their dead on the road these days. The cremation grounds have been under water for two months now, and villagers, anyway, are too poor to burn their dead in town. So, when Dinanath Ram died of a "bad attack of cold" last week, his family wrapped him in a soiled white sheet, made a makeshift pier with twigs, and dumped him on the roadside. Then they went look -ing for firewood. Not finding any, they slapped some dung into cakes and heaped them in a cart. But the buffalo which pulled the cart had drowned. So man turned beast of burden, pulled the cowdung laden cart, and returned to the roadside where Dinanath lay. Then they dug a hole in the ground, lined it with a few bricks, plastered the body with the cakes, and set it on fire. "It’s a slow burn," said his son, Ram Deol. "But we have no option."

If you are born poor in Bihar, you can belong to the most wretched of the earth. If you are born poor in Darbhanga, it can be worse. The dehumanisation of Bihar takes on uglier forms during times like this. Like when the Lions Club of Darbhanga told the office of the civil surgeon that it would like to donate 58 cases of anti-diarrhoea drugs for flood victims, the surgeon insisted on mebendazol tablets, used in treatment in worms. Why? Apparently, 10,000 mebendazol tablets had "vanished" from the civil surgeon’s office, so what better way to cover up the loss than getting it gratis as relief. And when some young boys from town brought bread for the people on the road and ended up teasing and molesting the half-starved women. "They show us the loaves and say they want to give us relief," says Mohammed Jamal of Taralahi village, a road dweller. "Then they peep inside the shack and ogle at the women."

What does it take to inspire the babus from Patna and Delhi to move fast? Basic relief still remains scanty: till last week, 60 per cent of the 2.85 lakh quintals of wheat needed for the state government-fixed food relief just hadn’t arrived. So people on the road complain they have no food, no water, no medicines, no nothing. Then there are the goons looking for easy pickings in this season of suffering. That is why Ram Bilas Kamit and his wife Sonamukhi Devi were among the first ones to move out of their shanty on the road and get back to their muddy home in Taralahi, still under a couple of feet of water. "We’ll prop up the charpoy on bricks and somehow manage," he says, pulling his rickshaw stacked with bricks, fodder and a rug. "Otherwise the goondas will come to steal the bamboo and take away my home." The floods over, fear is now the key.