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STATES:
GUJARAT
GITA, HARDIK
& CHANDNI, BHUJ
Three
Good Reasons
Orphans
who don't know it trigger grandparents to postpone retirement and plan
for their lives
Prabhulal
and Rukmanibai Panchal live in double dread. One, having to lie to their
three grandchildren that their parents are alive, that they have "gone
to Una to buy medicines". The other, coming to terms with the realisation
that retirement will have to wait a few years now; they have the children
to bring up.
Prabhulal,
a 59-year-old ironsmith, takes the easy way out of dealing with the emotional
trauma. Pleading work, he leaves the tent in Anjar that he shares with
Rukmanibai, their son and the three children. He leaves it to Rukmanibai
every morning to handle the queries of the older children, Gita, 8, and
Hardik, 7, about their parents. It happens again every evening, when the
siblings return from scouring the tent city and playing gharghotla, making
stone-and-mud houses. The irony doesn't escape Rukmanibai. The children
were on the top floor of a three-storey building in Bhuj, playing with
Chandni, at 20 months the darling of the family, when the quake struck.
Their parents, father Nitin, a 34-year-old grocer, mother Urmila, 39,
Nitin's brother and widowed mother were below. As it turned out, the house
sank two floors, and the children, totally shaken but without a scratch,
simply walked out. The rest died-and the Panchals inherited a renewed
commitment to the family at a time when they thought their duty was done.
The good
news is that the small Panchal home in Anjar is only slightly damaged
and once the aftershocks cease they will move back in. Meanwhile, Rukmanibai,
aged beyond her 56 years, has
to lie each day, thinking up a new excuse as to why her
daughter and son-in-law need to be at Una just a little longer. "I
hate it," she wails, out of earshot of the children-Gita and Hardik
have taken little Chandni out for a stroll. "I have to lie to children,
to children, God help me, to prevent them from being traumatised,
for the sake of their future. But I don't know how long I can continue."
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"I
have to lie to the children. But I do it for the sake of their future."
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To prepare
for that day, the old couple, and their son, have plans which range from
giving the three up for adoption to borrowing money from the wealthy in
the ironsmith community to send the older children to boarding school
in Rajkot or Ahmedabad as the ones in Bhuj and Anjar have been destroyed.
The first option is negated as soon as it's raised. "If we do that,
society will malign us," says Rukmanibai. She is equally hesitant
about sending them away. "I would like to be close to them even if
we put them in a hostel." It's easy to see why. Chandni mostly manages
to sleep soundly through the night. But Gita and Hardik have frequent
nightmares, screaming that an earthquake has struck-and sometimes the
tremors are for real.
The die
is cast, and Rukmanibai knows it. So does Prabhulal. They will simply
have to work a little harder to make sure that when Gita, Hardik and Chandni
wake up to the nightmare of their parents never returning from Una, they
have their grandparents to fall back on.
-Uday
Mahurkar
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