At last, an Onam devoid of floods is here. The flower carpets are back, so are the feasting and the fanfare. It has returned as the festival that touches every Malayali with fleeting moments of joy, as they welcome again their cultural hero, mythological King Mahabali.
Onam today stands in sharp contrast to how it all looked in the last three years. It was heavy with tears — back then, Edavappathy, the primary rains between June and August, came and went not before rivers rose to the level of the roads, earth crumbled at the sides of the hills and cataclysmic floods struck with a force that left behind a trail of death and destruction.
But this time, the monsoon has bid goodbye without profoundly altering the daily life in Kerala. The downpour has thinned into a drizzle without making tens of thousands of people hapless victims of its vagaries. COVID-19 has ushered in sweeping upheavals to the society and economy — but that’s another story.
So, who would be among the most immediate visits of the Bali, believed to be a generous and righteous ruler, as he arrives to his favourite land this year?
How about a shift of attention to people who are born with certain challenges that makes them increasingly vulnerable every monsoon before the Onam? They are rarely given attention in the mainstream press. Their stories are hardly devoted the same resources and legwork on the assumption that relatively few people read.
We went ahead and did it anyway.
Filmmaker Ajay Govind, cinematographer Tanweer Ahmed and I travelled the state and spoke to eight people to find out what persons with disabilities are experiencing in a year devoid of major monsoon calamities. All conversations — conducted over video interviews — were condensed and edited for clarity by Remya Sasindran and Sruthy Sukumaran.
The project represents a slice of flood-hit Kerala, one that hopes to give a better idea of what Kerala looks like through the vantage point of those who are blind, elderly and living with disability. Even amid a different reality now, one thing remains obvious: a sense of normalcy escapes many, especially among those who are still vulnerable to floods.
In this eight-part series, you will encounter people who survive against many odds, beyond what the nature throws at them.
The stories include that of a family of six people who heavily relied upon each other, and have to move out of their house every time the river around their block floods. Three among them are blind, one of them uses crutches to walk due to a physical disability, and another one is bedridden. Once, during the floods, the person who is bedridden spent the night on a hospital bed, and the rest, crammed for space, slept under it.
Another story is that of two brothers, both blind and worried about their flood-risk house — but not for the reasons you might think. It is a house that trembles slightly even when a train glides to the town on the railway track besides it. But their most immediate worry is not the floods – it is to make ends meet to keep the house and not be compelled to live on the streets. The 2019 floods destroyed their original home, which stood next to a canal, and they had to shift to the one next to the railway track because it was cheap. But the pandemic has stalled whatever little aid was coming in their way, and the rental dues are starting to look scary.
We learnt a lot on the road, from one interview to the next. Many of those we interviewed had an advice or two for the relief workers during floods. Some of them seemed quite obvious in retrospect, but only after it came from them. For instance, we learnt that we cannot automatically expect a blind person to discern the urgency of evacuation. They may not know how high the waters have gone up until they are told. Volunteers often forget this simple fact, one interviewee said; or worse, don’t speak to them at all.
The process of conducting these interviews came with challenges – not because meeting people at close quarters has become risky due to the virus, but because of the emotional weight of these conversations. People we spoke to generally felt very unheard. All of them said it had been a long time since a stranger asked about their wellbeing. People affected by physical and geographical vulnerabilities were also often astonishingly poor.
They were all on the brink of sustenance — no work, no proper food and confined indoors due to COVID-19. In a home of six people, we asked what they had for breakfast. Cooked green peas, the eldest in the family said. “What’s there for lunch?” “Rice and cooked green peas,” he repeated, and smiled. The stock of green peas and rice were provided for by the government’s free COVID-19 food kit. They had no vegetables. And come next Onam (and monsoon), they could be just a rain away from becoming homeless, again.
This documentary series was produced by Words Rhythms Images (WRI), along with Samadrushti Charitable Trust as an NGO Partner and The Newsminute and HappyAano as dissemination partners. It was made possible by the grants of Elrha’s Humanitarian Innovation Fund (HIF) in partnership with the Asia Disaster Reduction and Response Network Tokyo Innovation Hub (ATIH) and SEEDS.