The Indian Express (Delhi Edition)
Haroon and his valley of grief
World is a place far removed for this nomadic family. Demonetisation made it unreachable for a 9-yr-old
STEPPING AWAY from the cluster of huts where he lives, Mohd Haroon, 32, lights a beedi. He never smoked earlier, he sighs. Since his son’s death, this is the only way he knows to deaden the pain. “Gham ke karan shuru kar diya (I started in grief),” Haroon says, adding thathehasmadesurehiswifeandthreeother children don’t know about his new addiction.
Haroon’s son Muneer died on November 19, after he had carried the nine-year-old for more than 30 km through the forests seeking medical attention. Precious time was lost as Haroon couldn’t exchange the Rs 29,000 he had at the time for new currency, in the rush and confusion that followed the November 8 demonetisation announcement.
Haroon says that’s what he can’t live with — that he had the means to save Muneer but couldn’t. Calling the scrapping of notes an “atrocity”, he adds, “If we had money, Muneer wouldn’t have died. And if he had died, that too would have been while receiving treatment, for 10 days, 15 days... That wouldn’t have hurt so much... people die all the time. But the government destroyed us by announcing old notes useless the same day.”
News travels slowly to where Haroon and his extended nomadic Bakerwal family stay. Their hamlet is called Doonga, so named for lying in a deep gorge amidst dense forests, in Samba district. Drinking water is fetched on foot from a spring 2 km away, while the closest medical facility is in Mansar, nearly 20 km from the nearest motorable road at Darsuiyan Morh. The nearest Jammu & Kashmir Bank branches, at Ramkote and Khoon, are 25-35 km away. There is no ATM around.
With no electricity supply, the day ends for the Bakerwals by 6-6.30 pm, long before the radio would have brought the news of the demonetisation announcement that night.
Haroon stays in Doonga with wife Rafiqa and their three children, besides his younger brother Pervez and two cousins and their families. For a living, they rear livestock.
Given that even the nearest road is a hilly 15-km trek away, they only travel out of Doonga once a fortnight, to stock up on ration or for urgent purchases like medicines.
Twice a year, they migrate. At the onset of winter, sometime in October, the Bakerwals along with their cattle come down to the plains of Jammu such as these from the higher reaches. The reverse journey is undertaken in March-april. The land each family occupies, in the higher reaches or the plains, has been clearly defined since generations.
For a decade now, Haroon has been taking his livestock up to Khunmoh near Pulwama in the Valley, in the summer. It’s a 15-day walk along with the cattle for the family from Doonga to Khunmoh, covered mostly at night on the Jammu-srinagar national highway.
This year, Haroon came down to Samba from Kashmir in end-october. From the sale of two of his sheep in the Valley, and from working as a labourer for Rs 300-350 a day, he had collectedaroundrs30,000.giventhedistance to the nearest bank branches, Haroon kept the cash at home. He still had Rs 29,000 in old currencynotesofrs500andrs1,000onthenight of the demonetisation announcement — enough to get them through the winter.
Around mid-november, Muneer caught a cold. For two-three days, Haroon and Rafiqa fed him tea with herbs, like the Gujjars and Bakerwals have been doing for generations to treat minor ailments. Panic only set in late on November 16 evening, when the nine-yearold complained of difficulty in breathing.
Next morning, Haroon rushed to Darsuiyan Morh to get medicines, and came to know of the demonetisation. He rushed to the Jammu & Kashmir Bank branch at Khoon to get his old currency notes exchanged. Illiterate, he asked around for someone to fill up his form but couldn’t find anyone. Besides, there was a long queue at the branch, and he returned home without any luck.
On November 18, with Muneer’s condition deteriorating, he went to the Jammu & Kashmir Bank at Ramkot, but again the queue and the form defeated him.
“As the chances of getting old notes immediatelyexchangedseemedremote,ipicked up Muneer and left the same evening for a private clinic at Mansar along with Rafiqa. We knew the doctor,” he says.
“We walked through the forests and reached Loonka Pani village around 12.30 am, where we came across a van,” he says. The driver reportedly refused to give them a lift as they could only offer him old currency notes. “We started walking again, and walked for nearly 30 km before reaching the private clinic around 4.30 am on November 20. By then Muneer had died,” Haroon says. He adds that the doctor didn’t tell him what his boy had died of, only that he was no more.
Once the news spread, Congress leaders met Haroon and gave him Rs 50,000. Deputy Commissioner, Samba, Sheetal Nanda also gave him a cheque of Rs 5,000 besides a tent.
The irony that they thought money could numb his pain doesn’t escape him. “I could have spent money too for Muneer,” he says.
They had high hopes of Muneer, Haroon adds. Both of them unable to read and write, Haroon and his wife have ensured all their children, including Tanzila Bano, 12, and Kabir, 6, go to school. The youngest, Hafeeza, is 2. Tanzila and Kabir attend the Government Mobile Primary School at Bagoon, 7 km away, set up by the government for the children of nomadic tribes, like Muneer before them.
Muneer was the brightest of the lot, Haroon says, and wanted to become a teacher. “He could easily answer questions of 4th and 5th standard despite being in second class.”
Pointing to a battery-operated transistor, which is the family’s only mode of entertainment as well as information, Haroon says he often tuned into the Prime Minister’s Mann ki Baat. The last time he did so was on October 30, before his son died.