On
a dewy morning in early May, a man named Jogi finished his taxi round dropping
off children to schools in Ranikhet. He came home at about eight and resumed a
quarrel he had been having with his parents. In minutes, the fight became
uglier and louder. Nobody is clear when it took a disastrous turn, but all at
once, Jogi dashed into the house, pulled out a sari belonging to his wife, and
declared that he would hang himself from the nearby deodar tree. Go ahead, his
parents said sarcastically, what are you waiting for.
Deodars,
a variety of cedar, are massive. Their branches start high up on pillar-like
trunks and grow parallel to the earth. They are extremely difficult to climb,
but most people in the hills are used to cutting fodder from the upper reaches
of trees. Jogi was thirty years old, a tall, athletic man. He clambered up the
tree, fashioned a noose from the sari, and hanged himself even as neighbours
and parents stared on. It was over in minutes. His parents swore to the police they
had no idea he would take them at their word. Gossips observed that they did
not shed a tear. His wife had left him a fortnight before, fed-up with his
savage beatings. She refused to come for his cremation.
Jogi’s
family is one of several that live in rooms they rent in a once-grand colonial
bungalow that has become a set of tenements. The bungalow is located in the dip
of a hillside next to a ravine and overlooks an arc of Himalayan snow peaks. On
that absurdly beautiful day, as a man’s body hung from a deodar, the sky was a
gaudy blue and the usual morning symphony of thrushes and barbets was on.
The
news reached us minutes after the police arrived and people gathered. We are on
the other side of the ravine and I often came across Jogi and his dark blue
van. My last conversation with him was about his dog, a shaggy creature who
came loping out from behind the van, barking at me. Jogi, who was cleaning the
van, told his dog to lay off “Aunty” and assured me the dog’s bark was more
sound than bite. We chatted for a few minutes before I walked on.
Most
people later reported the same pleasantness from him – that is, when he was
himself. But all hell broke loose when he went “crazy-type”, as the hill
folk say, or “half-mind”. At such
times, he ordered his dog to attack people and hurtled about in his car, almost
driving into rockfaces. The day before he killed himself, he had crashed his
car and broken its rear windscreen. After his wife left him, he began beating
up his parents and threatened the neighbours. He picked fights with drivers in his
taxi rank.
Jogi
studied at a small Hindi-medium school called Sarasvati Vidya Mandir, which is
perched above our one-street market. He did not progress beyond class eight. (This
is how it is for most of Ranikhet’s boys; girls
do better at school.) After this, like his friends, he did daily-wage
labour at times, or played alley-cricket. He built up a reputation for being
helpful, but this was also when he started going “half-mind”. His parents bought him the van secondhand to drive as a
taxi – an occupation -- and an income perhaps. They got him married. A wife
would be a calming influence.
This
is the template for most young men’s lives in the lower Himalayas, including
Ranikhet, a densely forested cantonment town set up in the nineteenth century
and dominated since then by army regiments. Army personnel live in their own
boxes here, all needs catered for. The grand bungalows are owned by wealthy plains-people
who come up for a few days of the year. The rest of the population is
semi-rural, with no prospect of worthwhile employment. The area is free of
industry. Businesses are a non-starter in a place so cut off. Rocky hillsides are
interspersed with meagre terraced plots, good only for bare subsistence. People
grow greens and tubers around their homes and have a couple of cows, goats, and
a few hens: basic food and a little income. Women cut grass and collect
deadwood for fuel and fodder. There is no severe poverty, but it is a
relentless grind to overcome shortages of every kind.
My
husband and I, running an independent publishing house from here, are an
anomaly. In the early days we had job-seekers at our door because we were
thought of as industrialists. It was hard to explain the economics of small
publishing, to turn away from their crestfallen faces. The Indian finance
minister recently brushed away economists’ gloom over “jobless growth”, but the
relevant fact is that growth in employment nationally is close to zero and India’s
impressive GDP growth figure is meaningless to people in the hinterland.
Every
street corner in Ranikhet has knots of lounging men shooting the breeze because
there is nothing else to do. Most haven’t finished school. They stare at mobile
phone screens and dream of escape to Delhi, even to nearby towns like Rudrapur
and Haldwani. A few find ill-paid odd-jobs locally as waiters and handymen. Those
who make it to a city soon return defeated. They cadge money off relatives, buy
a bottle or two, choose a lonely hillside, make a bonfire, drink. The empties
they shatter against rocks, strewing forest stretches with broken glass. A way
of screaming into the nothingness. The mountains are vast and free and stunning.
But they can seem part of a cosmic rat trap.
Many
drive taxis as Jogi used to, for want of other work. But tourism has dwindled. This
is the idyllic town where Edmund Hillary and Frank Smythe started off on climbs.
Small mountaineering companies, mostly branch offices of outfits in the West,
have managed to retain something like a foothold. But they too report a drop in
bookings and have laid off staff. It seems foreign hikers are no longer coming
to India because it is considered unsafe for women. The pilgrim routes are
beset by landslides, while the popularity of middle-class driving holidays
means Indian tourists travel in their own cars. Taxi drivers idle in long,
seething ranks, nowhere to go.
With
such hopeless desperation, the impulse to violence is a hair’s breadth away. When
he committed suicide, Jogi would have known of the tourist couple robbed and
murdered by their taxi driver, Raju Das, in Dehradun during the Diwali holiday
of 2014. Both Jogi and Raju Das were in the news for a few days. Many like them,
suicidal or murderous, remain unnoticed.
Jogi’s taxi-van is still parked outside the house. The white shroud draped over its missing back windshield gives it a creepy air. The dog has disappeared. Jogi’s mother has taken to showing every visitor his wedding album. Obsessively. He towers over his tiny red-gold bride in the pictures, smiling and handsome and ready for life.
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