Author: Ratiben Govinda & Sudeep
Chakravarti
Publication: India Today
Date: February 26, 2001
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."
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."
