Three Deaths And A Song

For a good part of last week I was engaged in assessing drought conditions in Andhra Pradesh. And in the Telugu country the biggest barometer of drought has been farmers suicide. The Telugu Desam Party (TDP) led by Chandrababu Naidu has diligently prepared a list of 70 deaths across the state since July, apparently due to deficit rainfall, and has placed it in the Assembly. The list in tabular columns has names of those who committed suicide, the date on which they ended their lives, the name of their village, mandal and district. Now they are pressing the Congress government to acknowledge this list, which they of course continue to update on a weekly basis. The ruling party has been dodgy about this and, after much hangama in the legislature hall, has conceded that there have been deaths due to drought, but has put the number at a conservative eight -- the 'genuine' drought deaths.

For political parties, the impact of drought is in the death statistics. Death puts a face to the enormity of the problem that otherwise remains amorphous and hidden in the peculiar data collected by the revenue, agriculture and meteorology departments. Just in case people are a little more resilient and stop short of ending their lives, drought wouldn't create the necessary drama. 

A couple of years ago, when a similar situation of suicides prevailed in Karnataka, the state government kept their focus only on districts from where news of deaths were coming in. A young legislator from Vemgal in the arid area of Kolar, Krishna Byre Gowda, had then stood up and said the ground situation and statistics proved that drought was worst in his district, but the government didn't seem to bother. The minister's response was revealing: 'But there aren't any suicides reported from your district.' The young MLA riposted: 'So are you waiting for people to end their lives before you can rush in relief?' If people turn out to be a little more brave in the face of tremendous odds then it is at their own peril.

Anyway, I'll narrate here stories of three families that saw deaths of dear ones in the last fortnight. But the surprise for you may be in the fourth element that I end this essay with.

ONE

The family of Toka Venkatesa Gouda (around 28) in Ullela village of Chevalla mandal in Rangareddy district did not appear surprised that we were visiting them. The father, the brothers and some relatives were sitting on the cemented lane that led to their house. It was the fourth day since Venkatesa had died. They pulled out plastic chairs from the courtyard and put them against the compound wall for us to sit. It did not require much effort to get them to talk and within minutes they were giving out all the relevant information. 

Permaiah Goud (around 65), the father, began by saying that he owned six acres of land and had five sons and one daughter. The share in the family property, of the son who committed suicide, was one acre and every square inch of that land carried the burden of loan. They grew maize, cotton and astral flowers. The loan that his son had made for his one acre was about 50,000 and all of it came from private moneylenders. Since the rains failed this loan piled up on his earlier borrowings and it tipped the balance, perhaps. 

"How much had he borrowed earlier?" I asked and the answer was astonishing. He had borrowed to the tune of Rs. eight lakh. When asked who would give him that kind of money and why would he need that large sum to cultivate just an acre? The elder brother of Venkatesa took over. "He was into dealings," he said. What he meant was that his brother had indulged in speculation on land. The context of the 'dealings' became clearer as we spoke.

Since this village is about an hour's drive from Hyderabad, around 60 km on the Bangalore highway, its real estate value is very high. The mandal has also apparently been a 'lucky location' for the Congress dispensation to launch its mega projects, so it has the attention of politicians and in fact union minister Jaipal Reddy represents it in Parliament. As the city started expanding, Chevalla was being slowly consumed by land sharks. As some villagers testified they had sold portions of their land at different points in the recent past at Rs. 15 or 20 lakh an acre. Everybody hoped to be rich and instead of speculating on rain they all wanted to bet on land and make millions quickly. 

Venkatesa was also caught in this familiar trap. Perhaps he would have succeeded had not the government announced the Pranahita-Chevella lift irrigation project that would presumably submerge entire or most of Ullela. He had gone berserk with his loans and real estate activity hoping that in the worst case scenario he would at least have his one acre plot to pay off his loans and still be left with something for the future. But unfortunately that was not to be. The government estimate for the land, the villagers knew, would any day be conservative compared to the market price. The villagers realised that their land may not fetch more than Rs. five lakh an acre and this is where all the discontent and depression began.

As more villagers surround us to tell us their stories, we realise that in their assessment nearly 15 elderly people have died of fear-induced heart attack in the last couple of months, ever since the government surveyors started frequenting the village. Here, we should make a distinction between the predicament of Venkatesa in his late 20s and the elders who have died. For the elders the loss of land, which they had associated with all their lives and had inherited from their ancestors, was a dissolution of their very being. It was the fear of being displaced into an unfamiliar setting. It was about the uncertainty of beginning life afresh. But for Venkatesa it was plain lucre.

When our photographer pulled out his camera to shoot, the men in the Goud family were even more cooperative. "Will you help us get some compensation?" They asked. The father instructed the mother and the widow to bring the laminated picture of the dead from inside the house. They sent the two-year-old toddler, Venkatesa's daughter, wandering in the courtyard to her mother's arms. The young widow lifted her up and posed for the camera. There were no tears, no drama, just empty looks. The picture was planted in between the mother and daughter. The toddler gripped the picture and tried to pluck it away from the mother. She wanted it all for herself, it was like not wanting to share a toy or a sugar candy. The men asked Renuka (yes she had a name!) to look into the camera. They asked her to move around to offer a variety to the shots being taken. She did it with a stoicism which only death can bring. She must be all of 18 years. I thought the camera was a very cruel instrument in that setting. Its utilitarian quest disturbed everything - solemnity and its accompanying silences. The flashlight threw false crumbs of hope.

Even as this exercise happened, I wondered what would happen to the one acre of land that belongs to Venkatesa? Will the family transfer it to Renuka and her daughter? Or will they retain it for themselves in the guise of repaying the loans? Assuming that the government considers this a 'genuine' drought-related death (technically the Rs. 50,000 that Venkatesa had borrowed was for seeds and fertilisers) and offers a compensation of over a lakh of rupees, will the men of the family allow that money to reach the young, illiterate widow and her daughter? Would they take that away to repay the loan? What would be her future in a feudal set up? Is the family appearing to be united only after Venkatesa's death? Was there no difference among the brothers? Venkatesa had apparently been talking to all the family members a few hours before he had hung himself from the ceiling. Did the fact that they lived in a joint family give him the confidence that his wife and child would be cared for after his death? Didn't he know that there would be a huge cost for such care giving in the course of time? Do our family structures still retain such humanity?

As these questions were spinning in my head, the villagers forced a tour of the farms to show us stunted crops, slowly acquiring a golden hue from green. But they were distracted for a while. At a distance they showed us some 50 acres of land that belonged to the local MP's son-in-law. They are almost certain that the alignment of the irrigation project wouldn't gobble up that piece of land. With deep cynicism, a villager said: "The rich and influential can change alignments, what can we do?" The village has 3500 acres of cultivable land and how fair was it to take away all of it for the project, they ask. If the government is hell-bent on taking away our land then they should consider giving us land at a place called Nudimala Kancha, they insisted. It is 5000 acres of government land with rich black soil, they informed. I was surprised at the alternatives they had worked out. The anxiety was palpable.

They also revealed that most people were taking up NREGS work as there were no rains. In the same breath they complain that NREGS had made farm labourers a difficult commodity to access. They showed dried up horticultural tracts of chrysanthemums, astral and marigold flowers and said that if they usually sowed in June-July, the flowers were ready for harvest for the Dasara and the Deepavali festivals. "Each farmer makes a clean sum of Rs. 40,000 to 60,000 per acre from this during the festival season, but this time there is no hope of such bounty," said a voice in the crowd. 

The impression you gather is that the low-end landless agricultural labourer, who either migrates to the city or finds NREGS work, and the rich farmer are somehow able to escape the severity of drought, but the one who faces the maximum heat appears to be the middle farmer with about three to six acres of land. It is he who ends up taking his life. In Ullela, as we walk around, we find many from this middle category reclining, sleeping or playing a game of cards under a huge neem tree. Who knows, bitterness may soon catch up with them.

TWO

In Himambad village of Siddipet mandal in Medak district, we went looking for the house of Pappula Prabhakara Reddy (32). Siddipet is a place where the Telengana sentiment runs high and it is the bastion of the Telengana Rashtriya Samithi president, K Chandrashekara Rao. His son-in-law is the local MLA.

We stopped in front of 'Yesu Nilayam.' A tractor blocked the main gate by half. There was a leashed Pomeranian in the compound -- an unlikely breed to be found in a village, we thought. There were crosses and pictures of Christ on the wall. The Reddys appeared to be new converts to Christianity. The plastic chairs arrived and we sat down for a chat.

Papulla Raghupathy Reddy, the father, initially spoke like someone who had been woken up from a deep sleep. He was incoherent and his wife intervened to fill in the gaps. But, slowly, he moved to show clippings with the news of his son's death in local Telugu newspapers. It was 13 days since he committed suicide. He had three sons and eight acres of land. While Prabhakara looked after the family land, his brothers were working in the city. "I had recently given three acres of land to him as his share. I had given it to him in writing on a piece of white paper," the father recalled. The well on the farm had apparently dried up and Prabhakara had borrowed nearly Rs 65,000 to sink a borewell. They had tried at four different spots to strike water and they were unsuccessful. That was unbearable for him. 

We ask if he was married. They point to two children aged two and four playing in the compound. The widow of Prabhakara had gone to her mother's place to attend another death in the family. When we suggest they collect the kids for a photograph, the grandmother hands over the picture of their father to the older child, laminated and stuck on board, exactly like that of Venkatesa. In no time, the children fight among themselves to take full control of the picture, again like Venkatesa's child, leaving you wondering about the common template of reaction in the children.

Once the picture-ritual is over, the family does not know what to do. They wear blank looks. There were no neighbours peeping in, no relatives to fill in. Just the grandparents, the grandchildren and the Pomeranian that wouldn't bark. We find it hard to continue the conversation and quickly leave. The whole village appeared to be sleeping. The lanes were empty. A total contrast to the crowd and talkativeness of Ulella.

THREE 

We encountered silence of an entirely different order when we went to meet the family of Bhumaiah Gari Venkata Reddy (59) in the neighbouring Chinna Gunda Velli village. 

We found the village to be spartanly maintained with clean cemented roads and houses having a soothing pastel feel with fresh green distemper on the walls. Even a couple of dilapidated structures with mud walls and buried grain urns threw up a sepia charm. School children dressed in clean uniforms chatting at the entrance got into our car after initial hesitation to show the house of the recently deceased.

It was a beautiful house with a courtyard in the middle and filled with women. We didn't count but there must have been at least 20. None of them would talk and all of them were doing their own thing: Some resting against the pillars that held the roof; a few facing the wall and sleeping; a few more sleeping with their backs to the wall; some lying supine and a couple of them moving from kitchen to courtyard. The overall stillness of the house was baffling. For the 20 minutes that we spent in the house, only one woman spoke just about four-and-a-half sentences. I kept wondering if I had seen a gloomy canvas like this before.

Among the women were Venkata Reddy's four daughters and their grown up girls. Two of Reddy's daughters were apparently widowed and had come to live with the parents. That was an input from the neighbour. He had about five acres of land and a loan of Rs. two lakh. Maize and paddy was fast drying up on his fields. What apparently drove him to suicide was again, like Prabhakara Reddy, not hitting water when they sunk a borewell. He hung himself. Surprisingly, there was no laminated picture of the man in the house. It was a postcard picture that we had to make do with. 

The photo ritual in this house was far more embarrassing because our photographer unleashed his sophisticated gadgetry to catch natural light falling in one corner of the house and bounce it into the dark corners of the courtyard. He took out his foldable reflector and summoned a boy from the neighbourhood to hold it for him. The bounced light did not cheer up the women. The suicide never got discussed.

FOUR

When we were driving back from Siddipet, we saw a patch of lush green paddy fields. Women stood in the middle like storks. The green was incompatible with the drought that we were chasing. We stopped to enquire. The middle-aged women started giggling. They told us that they were daily wage labourers and were trying to save the paddy crop, while the maize had gone bad. It had rained the previous day and there was, luckily, still some water left in the farm well, so they were de-weeding the field. They were paid Rs. 70-a-day for their literally back-bending work. 

Suddenly, Gouravva and Balavva asked us: "Will you take us to the city? We can do all your household work and sing songs for you." 

The photographer and I didn't know how to respond but promised to get back to them after consulting our wives. 

In the meanwhile, they couldn't wait to sing us their song. It is a song sung to a newly-wed wife, with a refrain 'Dont be disheartened':

"...Your husband will get you a saree this month,
Don't be disheartened.
Your husband will take you to a movie tonight,
Don't be disheartened..."

We did not know what to make of this experience. Can there be a happy picture of drought?