They sold off Hema...

One bright morning in Bolangir District...

‘Munia, Munia where are you? Munia’s elderly husband Raj Prasad shouts out loudly.

‘Coming, coming’ echoes Munia adjusting her palu over her head.

‘What’s up?’

Raj Prasad reading the local daily ‘Munia do you remember that Dalit woman Lalita... We used to give her work, cutting firewood, carrying soil...’

‘Yes, yes, arrê baba yes. Munia is distracted, her paramour Anil is pulling faces at her, ‘she used to come with that skinny husband of hers Shyamlal... So?’

‘Arrê baba, they sold their daughter Hema for a few thousand rupees’

‘Hai Ram, Hai Ram what were they thinking, that child, terribly skinny but cute...’

At the communal well, Laxmi and Parvati discussing Munia’s latest paramour Anil, giggling and sniggering in glee... 

A sudden screaming of sirens, a convoy of white Ambassador Cars, red beacons flashing arrives at their remote hamlet of Kundaputula, moving straight to where the Tandis live.

Important personages jostling for space in that tiny one room mud house, everyone talking, tripping on their words to make themselves heard, babel of outrage, hurling vile accusations at the couple.

Shyamlal sitting on his haunches, worn-out, speechless allowing the accusations to wash all over his emaciated body much like dirty rain.

Lalita trying her best to explain but no one was listening...

‘We did it because we loved her...We sold her so that she could live...So that we could all live. She wept all the while repeating we had no choice...’

‘No choice, no choice, what do you mean, just because you are poor, does not mean you sell your child’

Lalita shouts amidst fresh tears, ‘Do you not understand? We sold her because we loved her’

But no one understood...

Life hadn’t always been as impossible.  The Tandis owned a little less than half an acre of un-irrigated upland farm where they grew a type of coarse millet, gurji. This tiny amount of grain fed the family for a few months.

But as drought would have it, even this tiny bit of land could not produce anything; it was drier than any bone.

No regular work in their village, so the Tandis migrated to Bhillai in Chhattisgarh for work in construction sites.

Piled up bricks, plastic sheet stretched over as a roof, was their shanty.

 For seven years, husband and wife worked, laboring side by side earning enough to feed their three children.

Life wasn’t so bad...

Amidst the back breaking labor were moments of Joy too, a trip to a local fair, flowers for Lalita, balloons for the boys, a rattler for Hema, and most important even a tiny bit of savings, life wasn’t so bad, or so they thought...

And then as is sometimes the case, their son Harendra’s head began swelling alarmingly.

Lalita wept, ‘what’s happening Chottu? She asked repeatedly, ‘are you in pain?’

They were so scared, ‘what to do? The hospitals in the Bhillai Steel Plant did not admit migrant workers.

Private Doctors were of course out of question. All they could do was return to their village.

Sadly and to their utter horror, the doctors at the Government Hospital in the town of Titlagarh demanded such extortionist bribes to operate on the boy that they had no choice but to settle for the Primary Health Centre in Tukla village.

Little Harendra would never hear again and they had already spent five thousand rupees of their precious savings.

With nothing to go for them, Shyamlal decided to go back to Bhillai but this time without his family. How he hated leaving them behind, he missed them terribly, their chatter, their little tantrums and most of all theirs and Lalita’s laughter.

Maybe he yearned for them too much, maybe he never ate properly but he contracted pneumonia and returned to his village.

Sadly there were secondary complications too, infections and sores in the mouth probably due to malnourishment. He had a very high fever and had turned into a bag of bones.

Lalita was terribly alarmed, this time they would go to the Government Hospital in the town of Titlagarh, of course they had experienced their demands but could not do much about it.

Every day the doctors said, ‘your husband will need a number of injections, these will cost you, one hundred rupees each’

‘Please, please wept Lalita, we cannot afford such a large amount of money, please’ she wept.

After much haggling and much reluctance, the doctors agreed to charge rupees sixty for each injection.

Although the illness and its complications ravaged Shyamlal’s health, he survived but with chronic back pain and a debilitated body. He could never work as a manual laborer. The savings gathered during the seven years had vanished...

That’s when Ram Prasad came in. He was Lalita’s relative, a Dalit, who was fortunate to hold a Government job. In desperation Lalita rushed to him for a loan to pay off the doctors. Ram Prasad did give them a loan.

Time went by in a flash, Lalita and Shyamlal try as they might, were unable to pay Ram Prasad’s loan. He never pressurized them, never threatened them, in fact he was kind to them, but a loan is a loan and somewhere down the line it has to be repaid. Discussions were going on about the repayment of the loan.

All of a sudden, Ram Prasad says,

‘I don’t have a daughter, why don’t I adopt your baby Hema?’

Lalita hesitated just for a second. ‘Yes’ she said. Yes, yes, she murmured. She as a Mother thinks of the food Hema would get, milk, fruits, good rice, dhal, foods they could not afford, foods they had not seen in a long, long time...

Ram Prasad realizes the sacrifice Lalita and Shyamal are making, the pain, the frustration of not being able to provide for your only baby daughter.

‘You can come and visit her anytime’ he says. I and my wife would be only too happy to see you.

Of course please do not pay the money you owe me, just don’t bother I know how difficult it is for you and Shyamlal.

So Hema left her home. There was a transaction recorded on stamp paper. They did not know what was written; they pressed their inked thumbs onto it.

In a village, nothing remains hidden for long...

And this is what happened in Kundaputula, a journalist interviewed the couple, that was the beginning of their troubles cascading one after another...

The authorities interviewed Lalita and Shyamal.

Although Lalita tried and tried to explain why they had sold off their daughter, although Lalita insisted tearfully, ‘she would have died if Ram Prasad had not taken her’ ‘we would have died, all of us would have died.

No one listened. Everyone was full of the spirit of rectitude, a holier-than thou attitude. How could you was all that everyone said.

They charged Ram Prasad for human trafficking.

He was jailed for fifteen days.

On his return from jail, a group of village elders forced Shyamal to go to Ram Prasad’s house and get Hema back.

Shyamal refused, they threatened him, they called them heartless parents, selling their daughter to shirk off their responsibilities...

When they collected Hema from Ram Prasad’s house, she was a plumpy, happy toddler who did not want to leave Ram Prasad’s house.

She wept and clung to Ram Prasad and his wife, who wept copiously. They cried, ‘our daughter, daughter, don’t go...’

Some months down the line, when Lalita and Shyamlal were visited and were asked where Hema was, they were informed by the couple in a listless, tired voice that Hema had died...

On her return from Ram Prasad’s house, she had contracted jaundice, no food; malnutrition had resulted in her death.

Lalita intoned listlessly, ‘we had no money, Ram Prasad had the money to feed her. If only she had been left with Ram Prasad, she would have been alive today’.

But of course nobody listened to her...

Adapted from Harsh Mander’s  'Fatal Accidents of Birth: Stories of Suffering, Oppression and Resistance' (New Delhi, Speaking Tiger)