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Home 18
Nalanda, Bihar
Nalanda location map

Government housing schemes hadn’t yet reached K’s village, and neither had the government employment scheme NREGA. The family lives in a village called Kusahpur, which neighbours Mehrwan. K lived with his son, N, N’s wife and his five children: S, H, V, K and R. K is married to J and they have a baby girl, S. N’s son, S, (around 13 years old) was in Bombay for work, and H and V sold the fruit of taad trees (a type of palm tree). Most of the villagers worked on someone else’s land, and someone’s else’s orchards. K’s family does majduri (daily labor) on other people’s fields. H and V sold fruit picked from trees owned by someone else. In the morning, villagers collected fruit in big metal pots and by noon H and V left their house to go around the neighbourhood villages to sell fruit. One piece of fruit sells for Rs. 1.

It was summer, and all the children were home from school. R was the youngest child and looked about 5 years old. K worked in Andhra Pradesh but was home on vacation. K’s house was old, and its mud walls crumbled towards the earth. The roof was thatched and courtyards opened inside and outside the home. When I went to interview J, K’s granddaughter, she sat on an iron bed in a cool and dark room. J smiled and asked me to come in, it seems like she doesn’t like leaving her room.

Outside, where a young buffalo was tied to a post, people sat talking on a chaarpai (woven bed). There was no plumbing and water had to be fetched from any available water source nearby, which kept changing. Sometimes, it was a tube-well watering the nearby field, sometimes the hand-pump in a neighbour’s house. N’s wife, M, has wild, wide eyes and a sunny smile. Upon being told that her son would be interviewed she appeared alarmed and said, “kachhe dimag ka hai” (he is of an immature mind), don’t interview him.