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STATES:
GUJARAT
RATIBEN
GOVINDA, VONDH
Mother Courage
With five
children to look after, the widow of a dirt-poor cotton farmer talks of
rebuilding life without government dole
Every
day, for the past three weeks, Ratiben Govinda has conducted a ritual.
Awakening in the darkness of dawn in a shelter made of tattered plastic
sheets and jute, she wakes her five children and washes them. Then they
all trot off, clothes flapping in the chilly breeze, past cows and buffaloes
scavenging fodder and grain from meagre stores in broken homes, to where
their tiny, two-room, stone-and-mud house once stood. It's rubble.
All of Vondh
is. On the highway to hell that is Bhachau and Anjar, this little sideshow
of destruction-600 dead, all houses destroyed in a village that once housed
10,000 people-is largely ignored. Since the quake, a group of volunteers
from Gondal, a small town near Rajkot, has come to help clear pathways
of rubble, extract the dead, conduct last rites and provide some food
and water. Four days ago they ran out of food, so they left with some
words of encouragement. That was that.
Ratiben
stands in front of her house, where she was buried for three hours with
her six-year-old son Vijesh and little Devika, three, give or take a few
weeks. Her older girls, Sushila and Geeta, eight and 13, were away with
brother Haresh at school. Neighbours pulled them out, but it took eight
days before the mangled remains of her husband, Govinda Patel, caught
in the act of strapping on a watch, were extricated. Ratiben looks at
a scrap of paper Haresh, a wired seven-year-old, pulls out from under
some bricks, screaming "ganit, ganit". Maths, maths. It says
(x+3y) (3x-2), followed by something unclear and then
(4-xy) (x-3). "All I know is we were once seven," says Ratiben,
past tears, ruffling her son's hair, "and now we are six."
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"We
are alive," says Ratiben, chin set. "And that is a good
place to begin."
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Pilgrimage
over, she heads back. She tried clearing the debris off her home but gave
up; the neighbours are too busy clearing up their lives, so her home can
wait. Ratiben, at a half-life of 35, has other ideas. She sits with her
mother and brother-he helps out with a small stock of bajra-in their wretched
house where Vondh ends and scrubland begins, to plan out the remains of
her life. There's no hesitation in her mind that the children must resume
school whenever one comes up, if not in Vondh, then in the nearest village.
There's also the acre and half of land where she along with her husband
dry-farmed a single crop of kapaas, or cotton. That has to be readied
for the monsoons for sowing. There are no seeds, and there is no money,
so Ratiben is readying herself to work as a daily-wage labourer to get
some money to buy seeds for her land and food for her children. "I've
heard the Government has promised Rs 1 lakh to every bereaved family.
But I can't live in that hope. Even if I earn Rs 20 a day, I know I can
manage somehow."
She knows
what it's like to be stretched. They never had enough money even when
her husband was alive. Her children never saw toys like the ones children
in the shattered house across the dirt track from her shack had, a six-engined
plastic jet that has SQS Airlines emblazoned across the tail. It now lies
broken in half and the people in the house are dead or gone.
"We
are alive," says Ratiben, chin set. "And that is a good place
to begin."
By
Sudeep Chakravarti
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