Unforgettable Lesson

TRUE STORIES of the KOSI FLOOD

It is seven thirty in the morning as we turn into the iron gates of the BDVS [ Bihar Dalit Vikas Samiti] compound in Saharsa.

It is Vishwakarma Puja day, when Hindus pay homage to the Divine Architect, and the neighbouring temple has religious chants on at full blast, so we have to shout above the din. Thankfully, the rituals stop after a few minutes and the temple turns off its public address system.
Preparations for the relief distribution are under way.

Father Jose, who is sipping his morning tea while going through a sheaf of papers in a makeshift shelter in the yard, informs us that a relief truck is due to arrive in a few hours.

In the tent, younger men are working on a couple of laptops, checking data, writing reports and generally being busy. On a couple of camp cots, some volunteers are still sleeping. They have been working throughout the night.

Sheela Devi, BDVS district in-charge, extends us hospitality – a simple breakfast of buns and ‘ghugni’ – a spicy chickpea preparation – and black tea.

She will arrange for our camera team to accompany BDVS personnel on a survey of some villages in a cut-off area. These villages are marooned and have to be reached by boat.

“We are very particular to ensure that the relief supplies reach the genuine people,” explains Jose. “Many villages are still cut off and it takes a couple of hours to reach them by boat. Relief reaches the people along the roadside easily, but our aim is to make sure that we are able to reach much needed food to those who are far away and who may be in starving conditions.”
Volunteers thus accompany local Panchayat members to the source villages, verifying the Panchayat lists at the location and ensuring that they note down all the details of the families. “This is a very useful process and helps us identify the genuine families, because powerful people sometimes snatch away the coupons and send in their own men to misappropriate relief materials,” says Sheela Devi.

At the verification point, a man may be asked the name of his mother-in-law, or how many children he has, thus making it difficult for imposters to take benefit of materials meant for the dispossessed communities.

It is an important religious festival today, one that will kick-start rituals that lead up to the mammoth Durga Puja.

Vishwakarma Puja is a time when most workers show respect to their tools, honour them and generally give them a holiday. I wonder whether we would be able to actually avail of a boat. We are to visit the Pattarghat block.

The organisational skills of the BDVS team soon come into play, when, after a few phone calls, it was clear that a Mukhiya from one of the Panchayats will be accompanying us and the verification team to a couple of marooned villages.

The cooperation of the local self government functionaries is a valuable asset.
Generous Hearts

By eleven o’clock we are near Purvi Kamp, a Panchayat with several inundated villages. We wait for a while and spot two boats coming towards the road from a distance. They take about ten minutes to arrive.

These are old wooden boats with leaky bottoms, which need constant bailing.

The Mukhiya, it turned out, is terrified of deep water, but this had not deterred him from going out to the villages, even though he was in trepidation every time he boarded a boat.

This fear works to our advantage, because he insists that not more than six people should get on a boat, so scared is he of its capsizing!

The boat journey over windy water is no joy ride.

There is fear visible on the face of the Mukhiya, but one cannot but admire the sense of purpose this man has, even though he has a sharp tongue and belongs to a ‘dominant’ caste, his genuineness and generosity shines through.

There are undercurrents, and the boatman has to be alert or the craft may get entangled in bamboo thickets, dash against tree tops, or overturn.

We come dangerously close to a clump of submerged bamboo...

We draw alongside a half submerged village, the atmosphere is humid, emanating an odour which is a strange mix of the fetid and the fresh.

A couple of men wade through the waist deep water to grab our boat and bring it alongside, so we can disembark in relative comfort.
We trek through a cluster of about thirty houses, mainly Dalit hutments, that are a couple of feet above the water level.

Towards the north, the fields and most of the pucca houses of the higher castes are in over six feet of water. These huts are empty.

There are a few men and boys in the village, and some older women who have stayed behind to keep watch over their homes. The men say that looters roam about entering deserted villages and taking away whatever they find.

There is not much food.

A family has a sack of maize which they are subsisting on. Fortunately there is a single hand-pump which is working, three feet above the water.

The BDVS team gets down to work, surveying the village, taking down information. The people say that ours is the first team to have arrived at the village....

As we take our leave and get into the boats for the next destination, a man wades out to us, his hand holding aloft a steel dish over the water.

In the dish is roasted corn from the precious stock of maize. “You are our visitors, he says, we cannot let you go without offering you hospitality.”

I am reminded of the Gospels, of a woman giving all from whatever little she has, and am deeply humbled. This lesson in generosity is something that will remain with me as long as I live.