Life in the Relief Camp
Unlike many years in the past, the downpour this year, 1987, was cold-bloodedly incessant, causing floods in many parts of the country and even in the city. It had started to rain cats and dogs since July 14 and until today August 18, it is raining at the same pace.
The room occupied by Dev's family was unexpectedly quiet with deafening silence. It was after ninety long days of torturous nights in the nearby forest they had a fearless, but transitory sleep at the arrival of their son.
"Aye Ganesh.....! Ganesh.....! Wake up! It's time to collect the food from the langar ((Hindi) a common kitchen that provides food to many at a time), and many have already stood in the queue." Said one of the victims of the ethnic deportation campaign who was sharing the same shelter. For Ganesh and his family that morning Dev's arrival had healed all the raw scars of the tragedy and its aftermath.
Mina woke up and went to collect the food from the langar. The menu was boiled rice, some lentil soup, and chokha (mashed potato, chopped onion, green chilli with salt and lemon juice). The meal today was ever more relishing and satisfying for all in the family.
There were 1973 people including children in the relief camp with only one langar and nine toilets. A tanker would bring around 24 thousand liters of water each day for these people to meet their daily consumption-cooking, drinking, washing, and flushing. The sanitation of the camp was incredibly pitiable and deplorable. There were rampant cases of waterborne communicable diseases like diarrhoea, dysentery, and typhoid. The heart-rending thing was the death of young children every three-four days of the week for the entire rainy season.
An old Italian lady doctor from Nazareth hospital had recently started to visit and attend to the needy in the camp. Her voluntary initiative was like a universal panacea to many there. She provided these poor incredulous with daily supplies like soap, toothpaste, baby lotions, and even books for the young children, presuming the kids went to school. She didn't know that these kids had never seen the school door before this incident.
This was the time when the need for leadership was direly felt by the inmates of the relief camp. They needed someone to listen to their heartrending stories and address their existing problems but all in vain. The only leaders who had evolved out of the necessity there were the cook, some food servers, and an old literate man who kept the record of the families in the camp.
Days became weeks, weeks months, and months years. Dev was now a boy of 10 years. For the last two years, he had neither seen nor been to school, let alone the rest in the relief camp. The victims of the politically roasted had to spend over two long and the most productive years (July 1987 until November 1989) of their life in the camp.
After the February elections of 1988, the new government in want of sympathies across the states and international communities eventually made a decision to compensate the families in the relief camp for IRs 50,000.00 each for the largest size and IRs 20,000 each for the smallest. The most hurtful and painful thing was that these families never got the compensation packages as committed by the state government. The District Magistrate and his team in the bureaucracy manipulated and embezzled the fund thereby handing the poor incredulous only IRs 5000.00 and IRs 2000 each to the largest and the smallest size families respectively.
Having spent or wasted over two long productive years of their lives, most families left the state for good and went to their ancestral homeland. However, some incredulous still insisted on going back to the country and restart everything afresh. Among them was Dev's family too. Mina, his mother was not at all willing to go to the same hinterland and allow her little kids to suffer the way she and many others had. A powerful instinct smote her somewhere in her heart to do something about it to avert her husband's decision and rethink a new settlement area. Mina, having no knowledge about life in the town, yet told her husband to talk to their relative and find a way to safety and a better life for her kids. Eventually, Mina was triumphant in her proposal when Ganesh agreed to go the town and make a request to his elder brother to help him find a house for rent and a startup which they readily agreed.
For the first few days, they stayed at Mohan's home in the town and soon they shifted to Lusai's home at IRs 750.00 a month on rent. The house had three rooms and an open kitchen adjacent to their backyard. Lusai was in the police department and he lived with his family in the department quarter. He was a young man in his early thirties and did not care or question more about the rules for Ganesh's tenancy.
Mina soon started the job of a dishwasher for a Bengali family who was in the same neighborhood, and Ganesh a porter for a grocery store in Barabazar. The collective income from the couple was just enough to survive and pay the rent. Ganesh's income was not more than half of what his wife was making a month by washing dishes. The fast-approaching cold winter was intimidating them as they needed warm clothes for their children. Having learned some sales tips while working at the grocery, Ganesh left his job and started a pan dukan (small stall/shop meant to sell betel nut and cigarettes). Due to Ganesh's honesty and humility in business, he started gaining more customers and the income he made from this pan dukan was enough to meet the daily needs of the family. The cold winter could not affect them as much as they had worried.
After the cold months, the schools would start in the first week of March. The long wait for Mina and Ganesh was over when they went to the nearest public school to admit all their children-Madhu, Naina, Vasant and Dev, the youngest of all. Dev had some experience of being at school for a period of five months when he was eight, but the rest of the kids in their early teens were going to school for the first time to have basic literacy and numeracy skills.
At school, the teachers themselves would not feel comfortable seeing the vast age gap of these children study with the normal age children. Madhu and Naina before completing a semester left school, not knowing what would come of them in the offing or in the distant future. This shattered the dreams Ganesh and Mina had for them. Vasant and Dev albeit, were growing interest in school activities which was like a small light at the end of the tunnel for the parents. Read here the previous part of this story.
Read the next part of this story to know what happens to the Bharti family and especially the young boy Dev and his siblings.
