the banks of the River Ganga when it flooded. Ganga-kateves, people called them, those whose lands the Ganga has consumed. Having lost their homes and virtually everything they owned, they lived in hovels held up with bamboo sticks. They went barefoot. Their babies were naked. On hot days they slept out in the open, by the side of the road.
But because they were Yadavs, some Katra villagers didn’t feel safe around them, especially after dark. ‘If they come with guns,’ someone said, ‘what will we do?’
One of the Jati men, Veerpal Yadav, had a fearsome reputation.
Veerpal, who was known as Veere, had moved to Jati four years earlier when his childhood home in the sandy hamlet of Badam Nagla was swept away, and with it the land on which he had grown corn, maize and taro root for five decades. He was left with a handful of watermelons salvaged from the alluvial soil of the riverbank.
Badam Nagla was not a place to be missed. It was so isolated that when a notorious bandit, who stood accused of murdering eleven policemen, needed someplace to hide this was where he took cover. There wasn’t even a drainage system. When it rained heavily, the men stepped out without trousers, carrying their clothes in polythene bags that they balanced on their heads. They slipped them on again only once they were indoors. One former resident described living in Badam Nagla as ‘living like an animal’.
Jati crouched at the mouth of Katra village, which had shops and two schools, with the closest town only twenty minutes away. And just as Katra was dominated by Shakyas, Jati, by some similar unspoken rule, was for Yadavs. Almost all the 187 families living in Jati were Yadav; some were related to Veere.
One of them was Veere’s brother.
To start with, this brother, a single man, was around constantly. Then, suddenly, he wasn’t. In next-door Katra a horrific rumour took root. Veere had shot dead his brother, people said. He had then burned the body and dug a hole in the nearby jungle to bury the remains, so he could snatch control of his brother’s property – which he did, they said, by moving in his family.
Who knew where the story came from? No one claimed responsibility and no one informed the police. No one said they had witnessed the alleged killing or even that they had spoken to someone who did. But almost everyone in Katra heard the rumour. Soon, it was a part of the frightening mythology that dogged the Yadavs next door.
They were unspeakable things, people said, who sucked the blood of even kith and kin.
6 clothes, cooking pots and even cash: dnaindia.com/india/report-mulayam-caught-bribing-voters-1238446
7 World Bank report: http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/187721467995647501/pdf/105884-BRI-P157572-ADD-SERIES-India-state-briefs-PUBLIC-UttarPradesh-Proverty.pdf
8 people ate grass to survive: ndtv.com/india-news/in-drought-hit-uttar-pradesh-the-poor-are-eating-rotis-made-of-grass-1252317
9 statues of herself: bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-17254658
10 ‘That’s why … young generation leading the party’: caravanmagazine.in/reportage/everybodys-brother-akhilesh-yadav
11 a third of the politicians … had a criminal record: adrindia.org/content/lok-sabha-elections-2014-analysis-criminal-background-financial-education-gender-and-other
12 this figure amounted to over half: rediff.com/news/report/fifty-four-pc-of-akhilesh-yadavs-cabinet-has-a-criminal-record/20120413.htm
13 the rule of criminals: blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2012/03/20/samajwadi-partys-goonda-raj-appears-alive-and-well/
The Naughty Boy
In fact, Veere’s brother had died of complications from diabetes. Veere built the house he lived in from scratch, on land he had purchased years earlier. Even if he knew what the people in the neighbouring village were saying, what could he do.
Every morning Veere and his three sons, Avdesh, Urvesh and Pappu, crossed the road and walked through the rice fields towards the Ganga River. Rolling up their trouser bottoms, they waded into the cold, fast-moving water. On that side of the bank, they grew watermelons and cucumbers on public land. But they also worked the land of better-off men in exchange for a portion of the harvest. In a good year the Yadav men brought home about 2 lakh rupees from their share of the wheat, garlic and tobacco that they sold in nearby market towns. To this they added the rent from a shop they had built alongside their house.
Every rupee that wasn’t spent on food or treats like tobacco was kept aside to finish construction on the house. So far it had a sturdy entrance door, three rooms and a terrace roof. The men installed a handpump in the courtyard, stretched out a piece of rope for a clothes line and painted a bright green swastika for good luck. Veere’s wife Jhalla Devi would have liked a kitchen, but her husband asked what was wrong with cooking outdoors. There wasn’t even paint on the walls, he scolded.
In the evenings, Veere planted himself on the charpoy just outside the house, rolling beedis and sipping chai. The thick milk cream sometimes stuck to his moustache, which he wore long and curved like a door handle.
‘Jai Ram ji ki,’ he called out to strolling Yadav men, taking in the evening air. All hail Sri Ram. ‘Come, come, sit,’ he nodded his grizzled head towards a second charpoy.
The men set down their umbrellas. They pulled out beedis. Veere handed over a box.
‘And?’ he said, as they plucked out a match.
Affairs in Lucknow were always discussed at length – of how so-and-so was only a puppet in the hands of that other so-and-so, then the sale price of the fruits and vegetables they grew, and then invariably someone would look up at the broad sheet of cloudless sky and complain that the monsoon was like a woman. She couldn’t be relied on to keep time. When would she arrive?
Sometimes Veere remembered his sons.
‘Arre!’ he shouted.
He
